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where ‘weird cartoons’ of Disney characters are painted on the walls, this dwarf is a caricature
of Billy Kwan, ‘a genuine midget, with close-cropped hair like a black cat’s fur, and wide-set,
clever dark eyes’ (YLD, 90). Koch’s Wonderland descriptions continue with ‘fantastically
abbreviated brown legs and stubby bare feet’ which ‘peeped’ from under the dwarf’s sarong,
the arms which were ‘like flippers’, and the ‘tiny infant hands whose fingers were strangely
splayed’. Cookie says, ‘Compared to him, Billy Kwan (at whom I dared not look), was a
normal man’ (YLD, 90), but apparently only compared to this dwarf, with whom Billy has far
more in common than he has with anyone else. Around the dwarf’s neck hangs a tin cup for
money, and this reflects the beggar in Billy Kwan, who is desperate, as Cookie recognises
later, for love and acceptance. Kwan is even capable, in spite of his serious intellectualism, to
resemble the freakish dwarf who, at the instigation of Sloan and Curtis, ‘began instantly to
dance on his little legs, breaking at the same time into a droning song’, causing Wally to belch
forth ‘deep chuckles which had in them a protesting, appalled sound, as though he were being
forcibly tickled’ (YLD, 91). Later, at the house-warming party for Wally and his new
bungalow, Kwan will don the pitji cap made famous by Sukarno, and will dance and sing for
the other drunken guests as he reaches the heights of his popularity and acceptance. He
imagines it to resemble Sukarno, but mostly only recalls the café dwarf (YLD, 100).
The other site which is fashioned directly after Alice’s rabbit hole is the hotel where
Hamilton takes a holiday with his assistant Kumar. The weekend outing brings Hamilton for
the first time out of the bustling mad world of Jakarta up into the highlands of Java, which is
itself an almost unreal world of fantastic beauty and wonder. In a prologue to the episode,
Koch makes a point to write of Indonesia as a sort of mirror through which worlds change,
citing its sacred name, ‘the Gate of the World’, the passage between the ‘real’ world and the
‘Otherworld’.
No kingdom on earth can equal this one, which is the Gate of the World. Its
countless islands, from the Moluccas to northern Sumatra, balanced in an arc
between Asia and Australia, shield it from the storms of the Indian Ocean and
the South China Sea. Active volcanoes form its spine, and Vishnu, its
guardian god (who sometimes takes the guise of a dwarf), protects it from all
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