Page 39 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

But I also heard stories about how the Chinese exploited the indigenous
Indonesians: how, under the rule of the Dutch, the Chinese felt safe because the
Dutch would protect them from the ire of the ‘natives’. In retrospect, I am
not interested in reconstructing or fabricating a ‘truth’ which would necessarily put
the Chinese in an unambiguously favourable light – or in the position of victim
(see Ang 2001). But nor am I interested in accusations such as the one made by
a morally superior, self-declared anti-racist in the Netherlands a few years ago:
‘Your parents were collaborators.’ History, of course, is always ambiguous, always
messy, and people remember – and therefore construct – the past in ways that
reflect their present need for meaning. I am not exempt from this process. So,
burdened with my intellectual capital, I resort to Benedict Anderson’s (1991)
explanation of the origins of Indonesian nationalism: it was by the separating
out of the ‘foreign Orientals’ and the ‘natives’ in the colonial administration that
a space was opened up for the latter, treated as lowest of the low by the Dutch, to
develop a national consciousness which excluded the former.
My mother, who spent part of her youth in China (as a result of my grandfather’s
brief romance with the homeland) and speaks and writes Chinese fluently, carefully
avoided passing this knowledge on to me. So I was cut off from this immense
source of cultural capital; instead, I learned to express myself in bahasa Indonesia.
Still, it was in my early youth in Indonesia that I was first yelled at, ‘Why don’t you
go back to your own country?’ – a remark all too familiar to members of immigrant
minorities anywhere in the world. Trouble was, to my own best knowledge as a 10
year old Indonesia was my own country. In Sukarno’s Indonesia (1945–65) all
schoolchildren were heavily exposed to the discourses and rituals of Indonesian
nationalism – as is the case in all newly independent nations – and during that time
the singing of Indonesia Merdeka (the national anthem) did make me feel intensely
and proudly Indonesian. Therefore, to be told, mostly by local kids, that I actually
didn’t belong there but in a faraway, abstract, and somewhat frightening place
called China, was terribly confusing, disturbing, and utterly unacceptable. I silently
rebelled, I didn’t want to be Chinese. To be sure, this is the kind of denial which
is the inner drive underpinning the urge toward assimilation. That is to say, cultural
assimilation is not only and not always an official policy forced and imposed by
host countries upon their non-native minorities; there is also among many members
of minority populations themselves a certain desire to assimilate, a longing for fitting
in rather than standing out, even though this desire is often at the same time
contradicted by an incapability or refusal to adjust and adapt.
Chineseness then, at that time, to me was an imposed identity, one that I
desperately wanted to get rid of. It is therefore rather ironic that it was precisely
our Chinese ethnicity which made my parents decide to leave Indonesia for the
Netherlands in 1966, as a result of the rising ethnic tensions in the country. This
experience in itself then was a sign of the inescapability of my notional Chineseness,
inscribed as it was on the very surface of my body, much like what Frantz Fanon
(1970) has called the ‘corporeal malediction’ of the fact of his blackness. The
‘corporeal malediction’ of Chineseness, of course, relates to the ‘fact of yellowness’,

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