A Search for the Secret Sauce I Hoped Would Connect Me to My Heritage

I sought a cherished symbol from my own childhood, not a standardized emblem of all Indonesian culture, which I can’t and shouldn’t pretend is all mine to take.

The bottle lived on top of the fridge, a constant sentry over the kitchen in my childhood home. It was stamped with its distinctive disembodied three-legged symbol, with the red, blue, and green pattern against the yellow label. I thought it was mysterious and beautiful back then. It had strange name too: ketjap medja.

But it was simply a bottle of sweet soy sauce that my dad kept in his house. The sticky liquid gets its caramel consistency and rich brown color from either palm sugar or molasses, but smells slightly bitter and tastes sweet with just a hint of salt, like a piece of black licorice.

My dad is admittedly not much of a cook; I ate a lot of salmon, bagged brussel sprouts, and French fries as a kid. The only Indonesian dish he made for me was babi kecap, pork prepared in the wok with ketjap medja, alongside rice, which we also doused in the soy sauce until it turned brown. (He’d make for himself gado-gado, peanut sauce over cucumbers and tofu.) These mixtures of sweet and salty are the defining flavors of my childhood—and my dad’s too.

It was a staple in his childhood home, in Leiden, a bustling university town in southern Holland. His parents brought him there, to a house near a tulip field, along with the ketjap, when they were forced to leave his birthplace of Java, Indonesia, after the country gained its independence from the Dutch. Ketjap medja is my Indonesian heritage distilled into a bottle.

I only ever saw that bottle when I stayed with my dad, who is half Indonesian-half Dutch, though his last name, denHartog, only reflects the Dutch half. My mother, who is a white American of German and Irish origin (I get the last name Sherman from her), never stocked it in the kitchen in her apartment, just a ten-minute drive from my dad’s house, in the Wedgewood neighborhood of Seattle. I couldn’t find it in the nearby Safeway and certainly not in the homes of my schoolmates, who were almost exclusively white. So the ketjap’s mysterious nature seemed warranted at the time. Its presence made me feel as though our home was special, and that I was the keeper of some secret about our family.

My father sold the home where that fridge, and the ketjap medja, lived about a decade ago. Since then, as an ingredient, the ketjap has disappeared from my life. As a memory, it lingers. That white bottle is my only material connection to my Indonesian heritage, and I let it easily slip away. I wish I had a more substantial connection to my Indonesian side, like language or old family recipes. I wish I could see it more clearly when I look in the mirror.

But even though I visited my dad’s sister once when I was seventeen, in Erie, Pennsylvania (where their family settled, after leaving Holland, and all stayed, except for my dad), I don’t keep up with his side of the family. I never showed any interest in learning Dutch, and my dad never offered to teach me. I’ve vacationed in Bali (twice), but never took a detour to Java—we have no remaining family there anyway. Maintaining a connection to your family and its accompanying history is hard work, work that I certainly did not put in.

I can’t say for sure why, out of the blue, I wanted to explore that side of myself; perhaps now that I’m thinking about having children of my own, I want something more substantial to pass onto them besides a DNA test. With that in mind, when my dad decided he’d come stay with me and my partner this past Christmas, I decided to track down a bottle of ketjap medja to help him feel more at home, and to reconnect with a part of my family’s culture I rarely acknowledged in my day-to-day life.

Now that I’m thinking about having children of my own, I want something more substantial to pass onto them besides a DNA test.

I looked online first. A couple of Dutch-themed artisanal shops stocked it. But ordering it online felt like a cop-out. If I stumbled upon it clandestinely out in the world, I reasoned, that would make the journey toward reconnecting with my heritage more legitimate. All that connects me to my Indonesian side are memories and DNA, so I felt desperate for outside confirmation of that inner truth—a sign that I don’t just believe I’m part Indonesian, but that it is objectively true because there is evidence of it out in the world.

A quick Google search turned up Asia Market Corporation, a Thai and Indonesian grocery store in Manhattan. I stopped by, full of confidence. ‘What a considerate present for my dad,’ I thought, congratulating myself. But when I got there, I found only clear glass bottles of soy sauce labeled “kecap manis,” the Indonesian translation of the Dutch “ketjap medja.”

I didn’t feel comfortable buying any of those brands. Neither my father nor I are full Indonesian and buying kecap manis felt like a type of cultural appropriation. I had to buy ketjap medja, even if it tastes the same as kecap manis, because I sought a cherished symbol from my own childhood, not a standardized emblem of all Indonesian culture, which I can’t and shouldn’t pretend is all mine to take.

That night, I went home empty-handed and deflated. Listlessly, I revisited the online shop, vacillating between adding a few bottles to my virtual cart and then removing them after a few seconds. But my resolve only hardened, and I became fixated on finding a bottle myself. I began to feel that if I couldn’t find the only piece of Indonesian culture passed down to me from my father, I didn’t deserve to call myself Indonesian.

In his advice column for Them, John Paul Brammer writes that “You can search and search and search for some sort of biological essential truth to your identity,” but that “performance is a lot of what identity is.” I have the biology, but I couldn’t figure out how to properly perform it, and in that moment the performance felt like the only thing that mattered.

My next stop was H-Mart, but the busy Midtown supermarket yielded nothing, just the red and green-capped bottles of kecap manis and Japanese soy sauce that I had seen before. I took the subway to New Kam Man in Chinatown. I paced the aisles under a dim yellow light, feeling like an imposter, a lost little white girl out of her depth. I wanted to climb onto one of metal shelves and I shout, “I’m a quarter-Indonesian! I belong here, I promise!” But it wouldn’t have helped. The ketjap wasn’t there either.

I struggled against the feeling that the universe was speaking to me, telling me to quit this ridiculous quest. Yet, I couldn’t shake my single-minded focus even as I felt success slipping away. Despite my failures in Manhattan, I headed into Queens.

At the first stop, Ok Indo, I found myself in a tiny space where an older woman was methodically making meals and putting them in plastic to-go containers. There were a few boxes of soy sauce crammed in a corner, but there was no ketjap medja, no white bottle with a yellow label. The beacon signaling that my quest for self-discovery was at an end—as though it could have some kind of easy conclusion—simply didn’t exist.

Dejected once again and shivering in the New York winter, I walked over to Indo Java grocery store, a few blocks away. I showed the friendly woman behind the counter a picture of the bottle. She smiled and shook her head.

“Medja,” she said. “That’s the Dutch brand, so Indonesian stores won’t carry it. Are you Dutch?”

“Just a quarter, on my father’s side,” I answered.

She guided me toward a back corner of the store. Rice folded into banana leaves, Munik fried chicken spice packets, Bamboe curry seasoning, and plastic boxes of rice and vegetable dishes clouded by steam (from the adjoining, one-table-only restaurant Warang Selasa, which has a cult-like following) filled the shelves. I only recognized the clear bags of fried fish crackers. The food was all Javanese.

As a half-Dutch person, my dad didn’t speak Javanese, he went to Catholic church, and he ate the Dutch version of kecap manis. His childhood didn’t include much Javanese culture, so mine didn’t either. I walked into that store hoping to bond with other Indonesian people—people like me—but I am not Indonesian. I am Dutch-Indonesian and there is a stark difference.

In the back, the woman pointed to a box of Bango soy sauce. She explained that it’s identical to the brand I wanted to find. I grabbed a couple of bottles and hurried to the register, eager to get home and stew in my embarrassment. I should have known I wouldn’t find ketjap medja in any Asian grocery stores. Worse still, I realized it was naive of me to assume I could simply visit a couple grocery stores and all of a sudden I would be able to understand and reconnect with my Indonesian side after years of neglect.

Standing awkwardly in that little store something clicked: The Dutch part of me is tied to the Indonesian part in a knot that cannot be undone. By trying to separate them, embracing only the Indonesian parts of myself while trying to push out the Dutch colonialist side, I revealed just how ignorant of my own heritage I truly am.

Before I left, the woman handed me a small cake wrapped in plastic. All her Indonesian customers, she explained, come in looking for this cake, as a reminder of home. She told me to give it to my dad.

When I got home, I placed the cake in the freezer, and stored the soy sauce in the pantry. I was crestfallen; my obsession had fizzled out into nothing. Sure, I had the soy sauce I knew my dad would love, even if it was in the wrong bottle, but I didn’t feel like I understood myself any better.

What was it that I had been looking for? Maybe a way to bring those memories into the present so that what is encoded in my DNA could take on a more concrete meaning in my life, one that I could see, and feel, and taste.

But looking back I realize that I was also too wrapped up in trying to feel like an authentic Indonesian person, instead of just being the Indonesian person that I am: one with Dutch blood too, who, for better or for worse, has lived without her Indonesian background having much of an impact on her daily life. There is just nothing to signal my background to the average American. And that fact has probably resulted in life advantages I wouldn’t have if I actually looked the part, but has also cut me off from a concrete sense of belonging. It’s now time for me to more openly and habitually do the work of preserving my identity. I went on that manic search for ketjap medja because I do want to reclaim that girl who drowned her dinner in soy sauce all those years ago.

I went on that manic search for ketjap medja because I do want to reclaim that girl who drowned her dinner in soy sauce all those years ago.

I’m still working on that, and part of that process was going on this journey. I needed to see what I was missing to understand how important it is. Next, I’d like learn how to re-create my father’s recipe for Indonesian peanut sauce. For now, all I have are the memories, and that will have to be enough to bolster my connection to my Dutch-Indonesian heritage. The half-empty soy sauce bottles are still in my pantry. They were a big hit with my dad during his visit. He said it didn’t matter that I couldn’t find the ketjap medja, because it all tastes the same.

As for the cake, when I showed it to him, he didn’t recognize it from his childhood in Java, and he never got around to eating it. It ended up meaning far more to me than it did to him, and it’s still in my freezer.

My soy sauce quest didn’t leave me empty-handed. It showed me that my identity doesn’t need external validation. But there aren’t going to be any magical or serendipitous moments where the universe confirms what I am learning to accept every day: Material objects like soy sauce don’t make me Indonesian. That is just part of who I am inherently, and that is inherently valuable.