Page 66 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

in a ‘Third World’ postcolonial nation. I have not gone through the turbulent
social, political and economic changes brought about after the upheaval of 1965.
I have no sense of what it was like to live through the so-called ‘New Order’ installed
by Sukarno’s successor, Suharto – generally represented as a time of brisk economic
growth, increasing affluence and rapid modernization as Indonesia launched itself
as one of the tigers of South-East Asia, but marred by Suharto’s autocratic rule,
rampant nepotism and corruption and a growing disparity between rich and
poor.
My disconnection from my Indonesian past was highlighted dramatically when
news broke about the devastating effects of the economic crisis which ravaged
through Asia in 1997. Indonesia was among the hardest hit by the crisis. Again,
the value of the rupiah tumbled, massive social chaos set in as millions lost their
jobs and livelihoods, and mass riots erupted which targeted Chinese retailers and
shopkeepers, who were scapegoated for the rising prices of basic staples such as rice.
Student demonstrations against the Suharto regime became increasingly militant.
The unrest led ultimately to Suharto’s surprisingly swift stepping down on 21
May 1998, but not before four students from Trisakti University in Jakarta had
been killed by security forces and mass violence broke out in the following
days throughout the city, leaving more than 1200 people dead. As thousands
of frightened ethnic Chinese were reported fleeing the country, I kept being
reminded of my parents’ ever so casual remark about rivers red with blood – a
haunting image that somehow failed to arouse in me any deep feeling, whether it
was rage, resentment or fear. The most tangible feeling I had was one of confusion,
of detached ambivalence, of no longer knowing how to relate to the place I used
to be so committed to call ‘home’.
‘The problematic of “home” and belonging’, Avtar Brah (1996: 193) remarks
in her book Cartographies of Diaspora, ‘may be integral to the diasporic condition,
but how, when, and in what form questions surface, or how they are addressed,
is specific to the history of a particular diaspora.’ But an even more basic question
to ask is how, when, and in what form particular groups begin to define them-
selves as a diaspora in the first place. Against the current tendency to objectify and
dehistoricize diasporas as if they were given, always-already existing formations,
it is useful to suggest, paraphrasing Raymond Williams (1961), that there are
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no diasporas, only ways of thinking about groups of people as diasporas. In the
present global historical conjuncture, the notion of an ‘Indonesian diaspora’ has
very little public currency. While many Indonesians have migrated elsewhere (for
example, as labour migrants across the Asia-Pacific region), they have not generally
represented and organized themselves collectively in terms of their long-term
dispersal from ‘the homeland’. There is, however, a hugely powerful and increas-
ingly expansive discourse of the ‘Chinese diaspora’, and it is within this discourse
that people of my family background routinely tend to be included and include
themselves. Indeed, most Indonesians who have migrated out of the country are
people who identify themselves as ‘Chinese’, and they often cite this very fact as
the reason why they have moved out.

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