FriendBurst Blog

They wouldn’t let me attend Public High School #70.  It was the closest high school to my home in Jakarta, but the family I was staying with wouldn’t

Joko in 1986

even send their own kids there, much less the 16 year-old American exchange student trusted to live with them.  See, SMA (Indonesian for high school) 70 was a bad school, notoriously so.  South Jakarta wasn’t a “bad” part of town, but the parents there had the freedom to send their kids to whatever high school, public or private, that they wanted.  Even public high school wasn’t free in Indonesia, and if you had a few extra thousand Rupiah to spend on your kids, you did.

No, I went to SMA 82, a smaller public high school a mile or two further away. I didn’t have much interaction with the SMA 70 kids. I did play on my high school’s basketball team, and when we played SMA 70, they kicked our ass quite handily.

I don’t have a lot of pictures from those days (this story takes place in 1986), but I did find with a little Googling that SMA 70 still exists and have their own website now! I took these pics from their official site. Yeah, nowadays, it looks like they actually teach you how to fight IN SCHOOL.

I don’t know about you, but these look like “bad girls” to me! That kid with the bandana over his face and the basketball… he must be part of the SMA 70 Mafia. Yes, they had their own mafia, which is sort of what this story is about.

I’ve got hundreds of stories I could tell about my two stints as an exchange student in Indonesia, but I got reminded of one today while reading a novel wherein a restaurant was negotiating with a local youth gang for protection. I heard a similar story in Jakarta involving a restaurant I frequented.

It was located in the Pasar (market) Blok M. I’m guessing most of my readers have never experienced an Asian open air market, and I could easily write an entire blog about how fascinating the markets in Jakarta were, suffice to say these weren’t “shopping centers”; they were square miles of everything from vegetable & textile vendors who were selling the same way they sold stuff hundreds of years ago to high-end department stores selling Gucci and Rolex (you could also buy Gucci & Rolex down in the seedier parts of the market, but they were knock offs). You could get hundreds of different kinds of food and drink at a Jakarta market: satay & nasi goreng prepared and sold out of push carts; Chinese; Indian; expensive restaurants and American fast food. The largest collection of American fast food was at Pasar Blok M.
Every now and then, my fellow exchange students and I got the craving for the fast food of home, and Blok M was the place to get it.

Perhaps our favorite restaurant barely exists anymore, but back in the 1980’s, was thriving to the point that they had several overseas franchises: Pioneer “California Fried Chicken”. Here in the State, it was just known as Pioneer Fried Chicken and was mostly a Southern California chain. Overseas, they added the “California” to the name to compete with Popeye’s Louisiana, Church’s Texas and of course, the Colonel’s Kentucky.

Damn. Writing this blog is making me hungry.

My buddy and I became friends with the manager of the Pioneer Chicken shop at Blok M, Benny. He had been brought in from nearby Singapore to manage to this crucial chicken-making operation. Like many Singaporeans, he spoke English fairly well, and whenever he learned that the American exchange students were visiting his shop, he would come bustling out of his office in the back to chat with us. We were not only an opportunity for him to practice his English, but were probably good for business. Over time, Benny started spilling some of the challenges he faced running one of the most important fried chicken joints in one of Asia’s largest cities. I’ll never forget his story about dealing with the SMA 70 Mafia.

“These kids, they come in and threaten us!” Benny complained. “They’re in their high school uniforms with the SMA 70 badge right on it, but they don’t care.”
We nodded in sympathy between bites of succulent chicken.

“They say they smash our windows if we don’t pay them!”

Damn.  They wanted actual payments!  I thought they might have been satisfied with free chicken.  This was weird.  This was pre-Sopranos. Gangs wanting protection money?  This is the kind of stuff that happened in movies, not at what was the equivalent of the local mall!

“But, we have a bit of a surprise for them,” Benny continued, leaning back and nodding his head. His eyes squinted and he smirked with self satisfaction. Apparently, you don’t mess with Pioneer Fried Chicken.

“See,” Benny leaned forward again and in a hushed, conspiratorial tone confessed, “We have our own mafia.”

My buddy and I stopped eating, looked at each other and then back at Benny.

“I called back to Singapore, and they’re sending some…. specialists… to help me with this.”

That’s right folks, THE CHICKEN MAFIA!

Shit. You do NOT want to cross THE CHICKEN MAFIA!!

Now, I wish I could tell you the rest of the details of the SMA 70 versus Pioneer Fried Chicken story. Maybe something punny like “the Chicken Mafia came in and batter-ed SMA 70 into submission,” or “the shady wing of the Pioneer Fried Chicken corporation decided not to bother with a small fry enemy like SMA 70,” but, alas, I do not know what happened next. We never noticed any broken windows there at Blok M nor any SMA 70 thugs terrorizing the patrons. Benny disappeared. The few times we went back there, no manager came running out to hang out with us. I hope nothing unfortunate happened to the young Singaporean. If they’re like any other mafia, you generally do not want to talk about their very existence. Perhaps they found out Benny told us about them. Soylent Green, anyone?

In the 25 years since those days, as noted, SMA 70 remains an operating high school. The USA has elected a president who also attended a Jakarta public school. Pioneer Chicken got bought out by Popeye’s in the 90’s who then converted almost all of the Pioneer locations to Popeye’s. There remain 3 Pioneer joints, all in Los Angeles.

I don’t know if they’re still running the Pioneers in Jakarta. Wikipedia told me that “California Fried Chicken” is still going strong in China, however. They did drop the name “Pioneer” though. Why?

“Today Pioneer Chicken operates in China under the name “California Chicken” because the Chinese there tend to pronounce “Pioneer” in a way which is socially undesirable in Chinese society. The pronunciation of “Pioneer Chicken” is similar to the word for prostitution. The chicken is still prepared with the original recipe.

Yeah, I know this was really long for a blog; maybe I’m warming up for writing my memoirs. My thanks to Robbie for the awesome Chicken Mafia picture! Anyone’s high school year book include a picture of the “Mafia Club”?