Since Indonesian independence, its Chinese minority has been a victim of violent outbreaks, but also of restrictive policies arising from politics and administrative measures. From about 1957, with the closure of Chinese-language schools and subsequent regulations about expression of Chinese culture, many speak of the “erasure” of that culture through such restrictions. Violent anti-Chinese outbreaks have proceeded from the Indonesian Revolution and the presidency of Soekarno (especially the so-called “PP-10” measures against Chinese rural traders) to the era of Suharto, which began with the 1965-1967 anti-Communist massacres and their effects on ehtnic Chinese and came to an end with the provocation of violence against ethnic Chinese in major Indonesian cities. This paper also discusses the reactions to these waves of anti-Chinese measures: rejection, flight, but also countermeasures in the form of political activity. In the years since Reformasi, as attacks on them have subsided, many Chinese Indonesians have chosen to emphasize their participation in Indonesian history and their positive contributions to Indonesian culture.

/pdf/violent-political-and-administrative-repression-of-the-4m29ejfkgw.pdf

Violent, Political, and Administrative Repression of the Chinese Minority in Indonesia, 1945-1998

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ABSTRACT In this article, I as researcher and my mother as collaborator present small stories about our own and my late grandmother’s lived experiences during the New Order and Reformasi eras in Indonesia. Both perform a collaborative witnessing, which is a form of “relational autoethnography” that enables researchers to focus on and evocatively tell the lives of others through conversation and shared storytelling as a source that informs my life writing practice. Collaborating with my mother, this article is a reflection on how I, as a young Chinese Indonesian woman writer, capture and negotiate my family’s hybrid identities as double minorities through writing an autobiographical novel on my late grandmother’s and my mother’s lived experiences as well as my own.

Joining bits and pieces: a Chinese Indonesian mother–daughter collaborative witnessing as a resource for writing an autobiographical novel

Since 2013 I have been living and teaching in Jakarta. During my time here I have encountered, through friends, colleagues, students, and family, fragmentary descriptions of life under Suharto in the latter half of the twentieth century and the riots in the late 1990s. A relative, for example, recently apologised when she could not sustain a conversation in Mandarin, explaining that when she was young the language was not allowed; a friend reported that as a teenager he was not permitted to attend a state university because he was officially classified as Chinese; at the age of 12 my wife was sent from her family home to be educated in Singapore because Jakarta was no longer safe. These and other stories trace the shape of a long history of violence and mass expulsion to which Chinese Indonesians have been subjected. Anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia spans multiple generations and amount to, potentially, more than a million lives lost, with many more individuals displaced, traumatised, and financially ruined. I am motivated to write this article because I hear in these fragments a yearning for acknowledgement; attendant to the act of mourning is the need for public recognition of what has occurred and efforts toward emotional reparation. While, as shall be discussed below, certain scholarly and investigative work has attempted to address this need, and the Indonesian government has facilitated a (perhaps superficial) revival of Chinese language and culture, such gestures toward public recognition have not been generally forthcoming. The visual artist FX Harsono represents one of very few individuals I have encountered who has been able to collect some of the fragments of Chinese Indonesian history and assemble from them a means toward mourning and recognition of what took place. This essay will begin with a brief overview of the political and historical circumstances of Chinese Indonesians, particularly in terms of the rhetoric that has informed their relationship with their non-Chinese neighbours. It shall then examine the process of mourning in the work of Indonesian artist FX Harsono, specifically the ways in which his recent work explores both the relationship between language and identity and the gaps in Chinese Indonesian history, and attests to the anti-narrative effect of trauma. The central argument is that Harsono's work attests to the inadequacy of the superficial celebration of Chinese culture in modern Indonesian society. A history of violence Whilst post-1998 Indonesia is being heralded as a model of transition from dictatorship to democracy, beneath that success lies a still-palpable rhetoric of religious, political, and ethnic intolerance. Filomeno V. Aguilar contends that 'the segment of the Indonesian population composed of "Chinese" is often excluded from the moral community of the nation because of their supposed absence of "roots" on Indonesian soil [...] Chinese are [... ] ideologically constructed as aliens and often used as scapegoats'. (1) Communities of diasporic Chinese (Orang Tionghoa, or more crudely, Orang Cina) have existed in Indonesia since at least the seventeenth century. (2) Various Chinese Indonesians have been involved in many of the key moments in the country's history such as resistance against the Dutch and the reading of the Youth Pledge in 1928. (3) While Chinese Indonesians themselves have often been divided internally by religion or degree of assimilation, they have typically been regarded as a single group by their neighbours. Despite their long-standing place in Indonesian history (longer, indeed, than can be covered here), and the major contribution made by many Chinese Indonesians to the national economy (as much as 70 per cent of private economic activity), as a group they have been typically viewed as outsiders by other Indonesians. (4) When Indonesia was under colonial rule the Dutch government operated a policy of divide and rule motivated mainly by their fear that the Chinese and the indigenous population might unify against colonial rule. …

/pdf/writing-in-the-rain-erasure-trauma-and-chinese-indonesian-3e0grvagzy.pdf

Writing in the rain: Erasure, trauma, and Chinese Indonesian identity in the recent work of FX Harsono

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Writing in the rain: Erasure, trauma, and Chinese Indonesian identity in the recent work of FX Harsono