INDONESIANS IN FOCUS: GOLA GONG

by Oyos Suroso

If you wish to be a writer, go far away or move to another country. Then write about your experiences. The words of W. Somerset Maugham became a mantra for Heri Hendrayana Harris, 42 when he was still a senior high school student in the early 1980s. Following Maugham’s advice, he devoured books, particularly those on adventures.  Hendrayana began to read world-famous classic literature when he was still an elementary school pupil. He avidly read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, Gulliver’s Travels, Moby Dick, Don Quixote and many others.Not surprisingly, therefore, he began to write a play even then. When a student at Padjajaran University in Bandung, he was greatly influenced by Jules Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days. He became obsessed with a burning desire to see with his own eyes the wonders of the modern world: Borobudur temple, Magelang, Central Java; the Eiffel Tower; the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the Great Wall of China; Niagara Falls; the Pyramids and Sphinx, and the Taj Mahal. In his fifth semester at university, Hendrayana, later better known under his pen name, Gola Gong, decided to stop taking lectures and visit the wonders by bike. Eventually, he saw them all and also went to the pagodas in Thailand; the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India; the Himalayas and the Nile in Egypt. His travel experiences greatly contributed to his serialized fiction in teenage magazines, which were later published as novels. One of these, Balada si Roy (Ballad of Roy) became a best-selling series with teenagers in the 1990s. Some 100,000 copies of the book were sold. Although he is now busy as a member of the creative team at TV station RCTI, Hendrayana never stopped writing novels and film scripts, producing 40 of the former and dozens of the later. Now aged 42, Gola Gong no longer travels to faraway lands. He has a house in Ciloang village, Banten, and works in Jakarta. He has created his own world of adventure now in his novels of adventures and film scripts. His name is now considered an icon for teenage novels. In the last four years, he has been teaching writing skills to students and street children in Pustaka Rumah Dunia (World Home Library) in Ciloang. Every Sunday afternoon, after a six days’ work as a member of the RCTI creative team, he teaches some 50 students who wish to be able to write news and features for the mass media, fiction, short stories, novels and TV scripts. On Friday mornings he teaches writing at Cahaya Madani Banten boarding school. A father of four, he said active members of Pustaka Rumah Dunia were also provided with non-writing skills such as how to use the Internet or produce a brochure, a newspaper or run a radio station, so that they will be skilled in expressing their ideas both orally as well as in writing. “Pustaka Rumah Dunia is a cultural project. I’m responsible for the character development of our members. It’s a center of learning. “I don’t teach them how to make a proposal but share my experience with them about how to overcome our fear and get out of trouble,” said Gola Gong, who has refused an award from the Indonesian Reform National Committee (KNPI), Banten chapter. “I want to move away from the old paradigm that a library is a place where you only read. A library is a place where you read and write,” he added. Thanks to his expertise in teaching writing skills through his library, the Kompas Gramedia Group has recruited him for a campaign on the significance of library management. At Gramedia’s invitation, he recently traveled to several cities in Indonesia as a speaker in a seminar titled “Fast Reading and the Art of Library Management.” For those studying at Pustaka Rumah Dunia, Gola Gong is an inspiring instructor because he serves as a living example of how to be a good writer. He greatly inspires and motivates students to be a successful, partly because he has only one hand. (He lost his left forearm.) “I always tell my students the importance of preparation before you start to write. I tell them not to sit in front of the computer with nothing in your head because that will simply be a waste of time. “Before you write, get things ready, like the materials and the synopsis. Better still, if more ingredients are well-prepared — the plot, conflict, the setting and fleshing out of the characters,” said Gola Gong, formerly a 1990s one-armed badminton champion in the Fespic Games, an event for handicapped people in Asia and the Pacific. Writing, he said, is not just a hobby; it is a process of production. “When writing, I’m producing something. For me, writing a short story or a novel has economic value because it is part of an industry,” he said. Although he considers writing a production process, Gola Gong has not turned himself into a machine. That’s why he has set aside part of the income he has earned from RCTI and from his novels to build Pustaka Rumah Dunia. He established a multipurpose library, he said, to help fight illiteracy in Banten and, at the same time, counter the strong rush toward modernization that has almost resulted in the abandonment of traditional culture. “Many historical buildings in Banten have been demolished to make way for modern shopping centers. Meanwhile, the image of Banten as the home of fighters still remains. This must be changed. “One of the ways to do this is to encourage the youngsters of Banten to study writing seriously. You cannot hold the world in your hand unless you read and write,” said Gola Gong, one of whose books is titled Menggenggam Dunia (Holding the World).

Boim Lebon, a writer and producer at RCTI, who once shared lodgings with him, said Gola Gong had outstanding stamina when working. “Once, he spent two days and nights typing, with one hand, at a single sitting. “When he was at work, the sound of his typewriter was our lullaby. At that time he inspired all of us boarders, who all worked in the print media,” Boim said.***

*) By Oyos Suroso