Page 69 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

it also means that access to the site would be limited to those who are relatively well
educated and economically privileged. (I will return to the more general significance
of Huaren in the global production of the Chinese diaspora in Chapter 4.)
Reading through the Bulletin Board of the site, I was made aware of a growing
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sense of collective militancy and indignation I was not exposed to before. After
riots in the town of Medan in early May 1998, where according to news reports
at least six people were killed and hundreds of Chinese-owned shops were looted,
hostility towards non-Chinese Indonesians, generally referred to as ‘natives’ by
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Huaren users or, to use the official Indonesian term, pribumi, hardened. In a
posting titled ‘Indonesia, curse?’ one contributor set the tone:

After reading so many postings and responses in this Bulletin Board,
Do you know that the pribumi in Indonesia are useless? Looting, robbing,
stealing, killing, scape goating are all they know. I can’t believe seeing
some Indonesian Chinese . . . still saying good things about the
Indonesians! Sad, so sad! (I wish I was in Medan, together with my huaren
friends fighting those bastards!) Hate ya, pribumi suckers!
(7 May 1998)

And another:
What makes me so sick is that those so-called ‘good’ pribumi did nothing
much to raise their concern for their Chinese friends, ignoring riots,
atrocities on Chinese. This type of outrageous racial violence has been
allowed to carry on for decades. How on earth can other people just listen
and watch the situation on TV? In the past Chinese tried the diplomatic
way to get the Indonesian authorities to put effort in eliminating such
criminal acts of violence. . . . We have tried the soft approach, it has not
worked. We simply cannot keep waiting for them to change their attitude,
other action plans must be implemented. Those mobs must be laughing
away knowing they still can get away with murders.
(7 May 1998)
I cite these examples here because they are particularly explicit in their expression
of ethnic resentment, and I would not like to suggest that all the contributors
spoke with one voice. But what was generally enunciated on the site, and what the
site itself made possible through the interactive immediacy of Internet technology,
was an assertive politicization of Chinese ethnicity determined to defend and fight
against its enemies in Indonesia. Furthermore, there was clearly a transnational
dimension to this electronic community as people wrote in from Germany, the
USA, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and so on, as well as
from Indonesia. One author explicitly called for ‘Huaren outside Indonesia [to]
play a leading role in the organization [of support] because we Indonesian Huaren
cannot afford such visibility’ (7 May 1998).

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