Page 63 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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INDONESIA ON MY MIND

Diaspora, the Internet and
the struggle for hybridity

I was twelve when my parents decided to relocate their family of seven from
Indonesia to the Netherlands. It was 1966. As soon as the plane touched down
at Amsterdam airport, my father said, ‘From now on I don’t want you to speak
Indonesian anymore. You must learn to speak Dutch as quickly as possible.’
Probably because I was a good Asian daughter, I did. As our family chose the
immigrant strategy of rapid assimilation into the ‘host society’, I stepped into a new
world – a Western Europe in ferment. In my desire to create a meaningful identity
for myself in this advanced white world, I embroiled myself in the new political and
intellectual movements that swept across the West in the ‘radical’ decades of the
1960s and 1970s and, for better or worse, became what I am today – a cultural
studies intellectual. Indonesia, the place we left behind, gradually disappeared from
my dreams and worries, although never completely: my childhood years spent in
the heat and dust of Surabaya have always remained somewhere in the back of my
mind.
I have not, to date, explicitly ‘returned’ to the country of my youth as a site of
active intellectual engagement. However, as Italian-American writer Marianna
Torgovnick (1994: ix) has remarked, ‘There are always crossings between personal
history and intellectual life.’ So it was that a few years ago I suddenly found myself
irrevocably absorbed in Indonesian affairs, from the safe solitude of my computer
screen, through the Internet. This chapter tells the story of this electronic involve-
ment, but it will also give me an opportunity to reflect on some of the dilemmas
facing the so-called diasporic intellectual, a rather controversial topic today (see
e.g. Ahmad 1992; Chow 1993; Dirlik 1994a; Hall 1996a; Radhakrishnan 1996;
Friedman 1997; Robbins 1999). The terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘hybridity’ are often
conflated in contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies, as if the two refer
to the same field of experience and practice, and necessarily go hand in hand.
Here, I wish to argue for a clear distinction between the two. Perhaps somewhat
surprisingly, I will caution against ‘diaspora’ and come out strongly for ‘hybridity’.
In the previous two chapters, I have elaborated my own perspective on the
Chinese diaspora. The Indonesian focus of this chapter will throw light on
the political biases attendant on the current global valorization of the Chinese
diaspora, both at the macro level of international relations and at the micro level

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