Chapter 5

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In a three-by-four-meter rented room in Cakung, East Jakarta, a nine-year-old narrator grows up with a father who earns a daily wage at a motorcycle repair shop and irons school uniforms on top of an empty noodle box. Packed economy trains, a rainy afternoon when ride after ride gets canceled, a high school enrollment fee, a flood and a Lebaran holiday bonus all test what the small family can afford. Looking back years later, the narrator slowly understands how much one quiet man gave up.

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