Page 37 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

Colonial entanglements

I was born in postcolonial Indonesia into a middle-class, peranakan Chinese family.
The peranakans are people of Chinese descent who are born and bred in South-
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East Asia, in contrast to the totok Chinese, who arrived from China much later
and generally had much closer personal and cultural ties with the ancestral
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homeland. The status of the peranakans as ‘Chinese’ has always been somewhat
ambiguous. Having settled as traders and craftsmen in South-East Asia long
before the Europeans did – specifically the Dutch in the case of the Indonesian
archipelago – they tended to have lost many of the cultural features usually
attributed to the Chinese, including everyday practices related to food, dress and
language. Most peranakans lost their command over the Chinese language a long
time ago and actually spoke their own brand of Malay, a sign of their intensive
mixing, at least partially, with the locals. This orientation toward the newly adopted
place of residence was partly induced by their exclusion from the homeland by an
Imperial Decree of China, dating from the early eighteenth century, which formally
prohibited Chinese from leaving and re-entering China: after 1726 Chinese subjects
who settled abroad would face the death penalty if they returned (FitzGerald
1975: 5; Suryadinata 1975: 86). This policy only changed with the weakening of
the Qing dynasty at the end of the nineteenth century, which prompted a mass
emigration from China, and signalled the arrival of the totoks in Indonesia.
However, so the history books tell me, even among the peranakans a sense
of separateness prevailed throughout the centuries. A sense of ‘ethnic naturalism’
seems to have been at work here, for which I have not found a satisfactory explana-
tion so far: why is it that these early Chinese traders and merchants still maintained
their sense of Chineseness? This is something that the history books do not tell me.
But it does seem clear that the construction of the peranakan Chinese as a separate
ethnic group was reinforced considerably by the divide-and-rule policies of Dutch
colonialism. Dubbed ‘foreign Orientals’ by the Dutch colonizers, Chinese people
in Indonesia – both peranakans and totoks – were subject to forms of surveillance
and control which set them apart from both the Europeans and Eurasians in
the colony, on the one hand, and from the indigenous locals, on the other. For
example, the Dutch enforced increasingly strict pass and zoning systems on the
Chinese in the last decades of the nineteenth century, requiring them to apply for
visas whenever they wanted to travel outside their neighbourhoods. At the same
time, those neighbourhoods could only be established in strict districts, separate
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residential areas for Chinese (Williams 1960: 27–33). Arguably, the widespread
resentment caused by such policies of apartheid accounted for the initial success of
the pan-Chinese nationalist movement which emerged in the early decades of the
twentieth century. In this period diverse and dispersed Chinese groups (Hokkiens,
Hakkas, Cantonese, as well as ethnic Chinese from different class and religious
backgrounds) were mobilized to transform their self-consciousness into one of
membership in the greater ‘imagined community’ of a unified pan-Chinese nation
– a politicization which was also a response to the imperialist assault on China, the

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