Despite what it's called, West Jakarta's Jalan Kamboja (Cambodia Street when translated into English) does not seem to have much to do with Cambodia. So naturally we had to find out how it got the name.
The street runs in a gentle curve for about one kilometer south from Jalan Tomang Raya to Jalan Kota Bambu (Bamboo City). It is shaded by tall palms, deciduous trees and large flowering bushes. Like many of the older streets in Indonesia’s capital, it is lined by walls that hide courtyards, single-family homes, multi-storey rooming houses and the occasional vacant lot. Along the way are various shophouses – tiny warteg (restaurants), warung (grocery stores), motorcycle mechanics, cell phone kiosks and, along one expanse of sidewalk, a number of hawkers who lay out secondhand goods every day.
Not far from this curbside flea market is a laundromat with the same name as the street, which happens to be the connection to Cambodia.
“Why is this called the Kamboja Laundry?” echoes the manager, a young man named Iqbal. “Because this street is called Kamboja and that makes the laundry name easy to remember.”
Iqbal added that he did not know how Cambodia Street got its name, since he was only hired by the laundry a year ago. Nor had he ever been told the reason by anyone else.
“I’ve never heard because I’m a migrant,” he said. “I’m not from here.”
A short way south of the laundry is a small restaurant run by a woman who, unlike Iqbal, has always lived and worked on Jalan Kamboja. Ibu Sunarti said she took over the family business, the Warteg Lancar Jaya, 10 years ago, but she had lived in the shophouse since she was born in 1974. However, she added that her family originated from outside of Jakarta.
“A very long time ago,” she said. “My father was not from here. He came from Java.” (Although the Indonesian capital of Jakarta and its satellite cities are also located on Java, in local parlance they are considered separate from the rest of the island.)
Despite having lived on Jalan Kamboja all her life, Sunarti said she had never wondered how it got its name.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought about that.”
However, the question, once raised, seemed to spark her curiosity. Taking time away from her work in her tiny, dark kitchen, she led the way farther up the street to the local neighbourhood unit (RT) office – which was actually a home that doubled as an administrative office. There, Sunarti went into the back and spoke with the RT head for some minutes, eventually emerging with bad news: He did not know the origins of the street name, either. However, the warteg owner had not given up. The RT head had reminded her of another who might know the answer: Lasminingsih, one of the oldest residents of the area.
As it turned out, Lasminingsih’s house was not beside Jalan Kamboja, but on a narrow alleyway that started beside Sunarti’s warteg and wound around behind it. There, in a large house Lasminingsih lives with her daughter Komariah and her daughter’s family. Visitors are received in the courtyard, where we were seated beside a low table and served iced water and small, sweet biscuits.
“I was born here,” Komariah said. “My mother is 78 years old now. She was born in 1941, before Indonesian independence.”
Lasminingsih, unlike her daughter, had not come into the world near Jalan Kamboja, but was born in another part of the city: Jembatan Lima in Kota Tua (the old city). However, she moved at a young age to marry Komariah’s father, whose family was native to the area. The older woman knew the street when it was far different than it is today, before more people moved into the neighbourhood.
“Previously, in front of my house was a spacious garden before it became a road,” Lasminingsih recalled. “But we gave it up for the construction of a road that could be used by many people. The road here was not good and it was muddy.”
Lasminingsih, according to her daughter, was in the vanguard of a wave of outsiders.
“The migrants made a lot of changes to the environment here,” Komariah said. “The government had a road program, so some of the native people were displaced and had to move.”
Before all the new houses were built, before much of the open land was taken over for streets and even before Jalan Kamboja was named, they said, many local indigenous Betawi families cultivated ornamental plants.
“First there were plantations for things like flowers,” Lasminingsih explained. “The Betawi people used to sell flowers like orchids and kamboja flowers.”
That’s how the street got its name – not from Indonesia’s Southeast Asian neighbor, but from the flower known in English as the frangipani. It has always been much beloved by Indonesians and can be seen in many paintings and photographs, old and new, adorning the hair of many a girl and woman. Although it is no longer cultivated for sale around Jalan Kamboja, it still grows in many courtyards.
“Like Kota Bambu,” Komariah said. “That’s where there used to be bamboo groves.”
The flowers still grow beside Jalan Kamboja, but otherwise the coincidence of sharing a name with a country has so far made little impact on the people of the street, or attracted the attention of the Khmer people. Laundry manager Iqbal said he had never had any customers from Cambodia.
“Not yet,” he said, “but always Westerners.”
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