Page 38 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

homeland, in the late 1800s. According to Lea Williams (1960), Overseas Chinese
Nationalism was the only possible way for Chinese at that time to better their
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collective conditions as a minority population in the Netherlands Indies. However,
animosities and cultural differences continued to divide totoks and peranakans. The
peranakans only partly responded to calls for their resinification, predominantly
in the form of education in Chinese language, values and customs. This made
the totoks regard the peranakan Chinese as ‘unpatriotic’ and their behaviour as
‘non-Chinese’ (Suryadinata 1975: 94).
Peranakan identity then is a thoroughly hybrid identity. In the period before
World War Two Chinese Malay (bahasa Melayu Tionghoa) was Malay in its basic
structure, but Hokkien and Dutch terms were extensively used. My grandmother
was sent to a Dutch-Chinese school in Batavia, but her diary, while mainly written
in Dutch, is interspersed with Malay words and Chinese characters I can’t read.
In the late 1920s, encouraged by the Chinese nationalist mood of the day, my
grandfather decided to go ‘back’ to the homeland and set up shop there, only
to realize that the mainland Chinese no longer saw him as ‘one of them’. Upon
his return to Indonesia, he sent his daughters (my mother and her sister) to study
in the Netherlands. At the same time other peranakans were of the opinion that
‘it was in the interests of peranakan Chinese to side with Indonesians rather than
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with the Dutch’ (Suryadinata 1975: 57). It is not uncommon for observers to
describe the peranakan Chinese situation in the pre-World War Two period as one
caught ‘between three worlds’. Some more wealthy peranakan families invested in
the uncertain future by sending one child to a Dutch school, another to a Chinese
one, and a third to a Malay school (Blussé 1989: 172).
However, all this changed when Dutch colonialism was finally defeated after
World War Two. Those who were previously the ruled in the power structure, the
indigenous Indonesians, were now the rulers. Under these new circumstances,
most peranakans, including my parents, chose to become Indonesian citizens,
although they remained ethnic Chinese. But it was a Chineseness which for political
reasons was not allowed to be cultivated. Indonesian nationalism has always tended
to define the Indonesian nation as comprising only the indigenous peoples of
the archipelago, excluding the Chinese – and other ‘non-natives’ such as the Arabs
– who were considered an ‘alien minority’. To this day, as I will discuss in greater
detail in Chapter 3, the pressure on the Chinese minority to assimilate, to erase
as many traces of Chineseness as possible, has been very strong in Indonesia. For
example, in the late 1960s my uncle, who had chosen to stay and live in Indonesia,
Indonesianized his surname into Angka.
It would be too easy, however, to condemn such assimilation policies simply
as the result of ordinary racism on the Indonesians’ part. This is a difficult point as
I am implicated in the politics of memory here. How can I know ‘what happened’
in the past except through the stories I hear and read? And the stories don’t cohere:
they are a mixture of stories of oppression and opportunism. I was told stories
about discrimination, about how the Indonesians didn’t like ‘us’ Chinese because
‘we’ were more well-off (and often by implication: because ‘we’ worked harder).

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