Page 64 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

of identity politics and the politics of everyday life. Let me put it clearly at the
outset: coming from a family of Chinese descent, my relationship to Indonesia
is necessarily a profoundly troubled one. Not having forgotten my early years of
growing up in that mind-boggling country, it is still an ambivalent site of identifi-
cation and disidentification for me. It is precisely this ambivalence that will point
me towards the necessity for an intellectual and cultural politics of hybridity.
Indonesia is a non-Western nation–state that arose out of the legacy of
Dutch colonialism, and is now the fourth most populous country in the world. Its
territory encompasses an archipelago of thousands of islands, scattered over a vast
area of sea between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. As an imagined
community, Indonesia is a new nation: Indonesian nationalists, under the leadership
of Bung Sukarno who would become the country’s founding President, declared
national independence on 17 August 1945, which was only formally recognized
in 1949 after four years of bloody struggle against the Dutch colonizers. The
Indonesian nation–state is not only postcolonial but also multi-ethnic – an
ambitiously synthetic and syncretic, irrevocably modern and modernist project.
Being constructed out of a complex and conflictive colonial history, Indonesia has
to negotiate massive economic, political and cultural challenges and immense
internal and external contradictions to keep the nation together. This is testified
by recent troubles across the country such as in Aceh, West Papua and Timor,
where forces of separatism and demands for local autonomy – against the central
power of Jakarta – have been particularly strong. (The situation of the Chinese, as
I will illuminate below, is qualitatively different.)
As for many other ‘Third World’ countries, the 1960s were tumultuous times
for Indonesia. I remember clearly how we, as postcolonial Indonesian children,
were deeply infused with a desire to become a strong and respectable, modern
nation. Children are a captive and impressionable audience to appeals of national
feeling. Our sentiments of national pride were cultivated not only by the many
schoolbook stories about national heroes and heroines who struggled against
the Dutch colonizers, but also by seemingly mundane cultural practices such as the
regular singing of the national anthem and the raising of the Indonesian flag –
solemn rituals which, certainly in my own case, never failed to bind me ever more
strongly to the Indonesian nation. The fact that we were a poor, newly decolonized
nation was deeply ingrained in our young minds, and it was an incentive – inculcated
into us and internalized by many of us – to work and learn hard for the modern
future of the nation, what I felt to be our nation.
But this march forward was disrupted dramatically by the failed coup d’état
of 1965. Official history would have it that this coup was masterminded by the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and supported by the communist regime in
Beijing. I remember vividly when it happened, as the whole nation was inescapably
thrown into turmoil in the months after that fated September night, when six
generals were killed and the government of then President Sukarno, beloved leader
of the struggle for national independence, was thrown into disarray. Schools closed
down indefinitely. The economy collapsed, with prices rocketing sky-high as the

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