Page 68 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

powerful deterritorialized community notionally bound together by an abstract
sense of racial sameness and an equally abstract sense of civilizational pride, but it
does not relieve one from the difficulties involved in the very concrete, historically
specific condition of occupying a minority status in the social and political context
of the Indonesian nation–state. For a twice-migrated subject such as myself the
quandary is clear: do I indeed belong to the Chinese diaspora, or to a notional
Indonesian diaspora?

Electronic diasporic mobilization
As what came to be known as the ‘anti-Chinese riots’ erupted throughout Indonesia
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in the first months of 1998, my distance from the site of turbulence and trauma
was put to a test when one day in February, out of the blue, I received an email
from the initiators of a new website, http://www.huaren.org. The website was
set up, so I was informed, specifically in response to the plight of the Chinese in
Indonesia. ‘Since every crisis in Indonesia would almost always turned out to be
anti-Chinese, we all felt enough is enough and let’s use the internet technology to
broadcast our concerns,’ so I was told. I checked out the site immediately and kept
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logging in for several months. ‘Huaren’, the standard pinyin transliteration of the
term ‘Chinese people’, was chosen as the name for the site for its brevity. Huaren
was initiated by a number of diasporic Chinese living in the West, most importantly
Joe Tan, a Malaysian-born, New Zealand-based R&D chemist, and Dan Tse, a
research engineer from Hong Kong who now lives in Vancouver, Canada. Together
they sought the assistance of a Chinese Malaysian computer specialist in California,
W.W. Looi, who set up the Huaren website, and a Chinese American lawyer,
Edward Liu, to establish the World Huaren Federation, a non-profit organization
based in San Francisco (Arnold 1998). The specifically Chinese character of this
new mode of electronic diasporic mobilization was emphasized lightheartedly by
Liu, who said in an interview: ‘Computers and the global huaren are like soy sauce
and rice. Combined together, they taste delicious and give sustenance, packing
energy and carbohydrates. At least four million of us around the world are Internet
users, computer geeks and techies’ (The Straits Times, 20 August 1998). It is no
accident that Huaren has its base near Silicon Valley!
Huaren’s mission is ‘to serve as a conduit for Chinese around the world to discuss
issues that are relevant to the Chinese Diaspora with the goal of promoting
understanding within and among its numerous geographical groups’ (www.huaren.
org/mission/). Although this Internet organization identifies itself as one by,
about and for all diasporic Chinese, what propelled the establishment of the site
was news about the crisis in South-East Asia, Indonesia in particular. In the course
of 1998, it became an intense, politically charged space for many self-identified
Chinese people from all over the world to express and share, mostly in English
but sometimes in Indonesian and occasionally in Chinese, their responses to the
evolving crisis in Indonesia. The use of English, explicitly encouraged by the site
keepers, signals a desire to have a global reach, an international hearing, even as

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