Page 70 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

Clearly, what was being articulated here were claims to a new diasporic solidarity
under the common signifier of ‘Huaren’. In the website guestbook we can read
announcements from non-Indonesians such as, ‘To all Chinese in Indonesia, we
are with you all the way! Chinese the world over, unite now!’ Whereas Indonesians
write things like, ‘It’s nice to know that there are a lot of people like us out there
who care about us.’ The transnational sense of Chinese togetherness established
by the site allowed Indonesian Chinese to feel embraced, recognized, vindicated.
This electronic diasporic Chinese solidarity, in turn, propelled calls for political
mobilization. One posting, entitled, ‘Indonesian-Chinese intellectuals must unite!’,
made the interesting suggestion that being part of the largest race of the world
would help the cause of Chinese Indonesians:

Persecution of the Chinese minority in Indonesia will never end if the
Indonesian Chinese intellectuals do not rise up to voice their aspirations
and claims for equal rights and equal opportunities in Indonesia. . . .
You will have the economic clout of the Indonesian-Chinese community
behind you. You will have the sympathy and support of Human Rights
Organizations. You are members of 20% of the world’s population.
(16 May 1998)

In their email personally addressed to me the website initiators asked me to give
them permission to reproduce some of my essays on Chineseness on the site,
and more generally to support the site and to contribute to it. The appeal was
inescapable: I felt interpellated directly and straightforwardly as a diasporic Chinese
intellectual, and was asked to speak up as a member of this group, to speak on
behalf of it and for it. In this age of global diasporas, there is a powerful pressure
on diasporic intellectuals to operate as representatives of their scattered ‘people’.
But I’m afraid I could not respond in unambiguously positive terms to this call for
co-ethnic diasporic solidarity.
Instead, my ambivalent, if engaged, detachment prevented me from becoming an
organic intellectual for the Chinese cause in Indonesia. This did not mean, of course,
that I did not sympathize, at a personal level, with the victims of rioting, plundering
and killing that had once again swept through Indonesia, although it must be
emphasized that not all victims were Chinese. It was also easy enough to pledge my
support for the passionate calls against racial prejudice and discrimination and for
social equality and justice, although precisely my formation as a cultural studies
intellectual had made me all too aware that such seemingly simple demands cannot
ever do justice to the complex political struggles and contradictions emanating from
them. And yes, I do worry, even agonize about the fact that popular violence in
times of crisis in Indonesia tends so predictably to be directed at the ethnic Chinese
minority. But I have been unable to translate this agony into a singular political and
intellectual partisanship in favour of ‘the Chinese’ against ‘the Indonesians’.
Critics might argue that it was my being physically removed from the site of
violence itself, living comfortably in the West, that has allowed me to maintain this

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