Page 67 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

My parents’ dogged determination to assimilate their family into Dutch society
after leaving Indonesia behind was, I believe, a reaction to their disappointment
at their failure, as citizens of Chinese background, to assimilate into, and to be
accepted as full members of post-war Indonesian society. In retrospect, I know
that my own childhood dedication to the nation, my deep and heartfelt investment
in national belonging and nationalist commitment, was doomed from the start:
modern Indonesian nationalism has never managed to accommodate successfully
the presence of the Chinese minority in its construction of an imagined
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community. While the Indonesian nation was from its inception imagined as a
multi-ethnic entity – something which was necessary to unify the hundreds of
ethnic and linguistic groupings making up the country whose spatial boundaries
were determined by the imposition of Dutch colonialism – the place of those
marked as ‘Chinese’ in this ‘unity-in-diversity’ has always been resolutely ambiguous
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and uncertain. In an attempt to control what came to be called ‘the Chinese
problem’ in postcolonial Indonesia, the Suharto regime demanded that ethnic
Chinese assimilate into mainstream Indonesian society through name-changing
policies, bans on the public display of Chinese cultural expression such as the use
of Chinese language and Chinese New Year celebrations, and so on. At the same
time, those of Chinese descent were prevented from forgetting their categorical
difference as the government continued to differentiate between indigenous
and non-indigenous groups, for example, by using special identity cards for ethnic
Chinese. Thus, if I had stayed, my Chineseness – itself, as I have explained in
Chapter 1, a doubtful marker of identity – would have prevented me, politically and
culturally, from ever being able to consider Indonesia ‘home’ in any comfortable,
unproblematic sense (Tan 1997; Thung 1998).
In this context, the recourse to Chinese identification among many Indonesians
of Chinese descent, especially among those who no longer live in Indonesia, is
more than understandable: it is a symbolic attempt to claim a vicarious ‘home’
where a sense of belonging to Indonesia has been thwarted. But staking a claim
to a belonging to the ‘Chinese diaspora’ poses its own problems, given that
most Indonesian Chinese do not speak, read or write any Chinese, no longer
have connections with China, the imputed ancestral motherland, and have very
little active knowledge of Chinese cultural traditions, rituals and practices. In
other words, from a ‘pure’ Chinese point of view, the standards of which are
generally determined within the inner circle of Greater China, and Mainland China
in particular, most Indonesian Chinese are just not Chinese enough, lacking in
‘authenticity’. Our residual Chineseness is always inevitably diluted, hybridized
and creolized precisely because of our long-term history of living outside of China
proper and of intermingling with a wide range of non-Chinese others. Thus, for
those who call themselves ‘Chinese Indonesian’ or ‘Indonesian Chinese’: the
interchangeable use of the two reveals the uncertainty and ambivalence many have
in identifying themselves – the imaginary belonging to a vast and powerful ‘Chinese
diaspora’ can never provide a satisfactory solution to the question of ‘home’.
Imagining oneself to be a member of the Chinese diaspora aligns one with a

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