Seno Joko Suyono’s “A Forgotten Hotel” (2005)

Referencing The Color Curtain rather than the Indonesian accounts of Wright’s Indonesian travels, Seno’s 2005 commemorative article reminds Indonesian readers of Wright’s prominent presence among the band of international journalists who covered the Bandung Conference fifty years previously. In its description of the journalistic memorabilia held by Bandung’s Asian-African Conference Museum, the article erroneously reports that Wright’s daughter, named here as “Margaretha Julia Wright,” visited the museum in the 1990s and donated a bundle of her father’s newspaper clippings to the museum’s collection. This misunderstanding seems to stem from a confusion of the names Wright and Cartwright, as the museum visitor and source of the newspaper clippings appears to have been a relative of the African American reporter Marguerite Cartwright, who was also present at the Bandung Conference. The confusion ironically parallels the transcultural misrecognitions that took place between Wright and his Indonesian hosts in 1955.