Page 71 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

stance of ambivalence – a stance that one may not have the luxury to sustain in the
heat of the violence and in the face of personal assault. Such ambivalence is often
dismissed by self-appointed radical First World theorists as leading to political
passivity and intellectual quietism (e.g. Hutnyk 1997). However, I believe that my
diasporic ambivalence can serve the elaboration of a more positive, even necessary
political discourse: it enables me to maintain the detachment needed to resist the
drift towards ethnic absolutism that many contributions to the Huaren website
seemed to exhibit and to argue for a less antagonistic articulation of ‘Chinese’ and
‘Indonesian’ – in short, to argue for a politics of hybridity. But such an argument
can only meaningfully be made with a nuancedly situated and historically informed
sense of the stakes involved.

Chinese/Indonesian negotiations
As I read through the plethora of international, mostly Western newspaper reports
on the crisis in Indonesia, I was numbed by a narrative that is monotonous in its
constant reiteration of the following refrain: ‘The six million Chinese make up only
3% of the total population of 200 million in Indonesia, but they account for 70%
of the country’s wealth.’ Repeated with some minor variations in all the articles I
have read about the crisis, this ‘fact’, constructed through objectivist statistical
discourse, just sits there like a solid, silent rock, apparently defying any further
unpacking and specification. The apparent obviousness of the ‘fact’ provides the
illusion of a simple, parsimonious ‘explanation’ for the whole crisis, a sense of
immediate understanding that does not warrant any further questioning. This does
not mean that the ‘fact’ is not ‘true’ in some general empirical sense, but we all know
that any ‘truth’ is not only constructed, but also produces a sense of reality that
compresses and represses the intersecting power relations and complex historical
contradictions that have worked to generate it. What is particularly disturbing
about the constant reiteration of this ‘fact’ is that its seductive simplicity will only
serve to reinforce the way in which ‘the Chinese’ are permanently locked into an
antagonistic relationship with the pribumi, and with ‘Indonesia’ more generally.
To be sure, the ‘fact’ reflects a common-sense truth shared and accepted
throughout all layers of Indonesian society: that the Chinese are richer and better
off than the pribumi. Personally, I have always known this truth for a fact: it was
the taken-for-granted experiential reality which my family lived by when we were
still living in Indonesia, and a statement I have heard repeated countless times after
we left. Chinese-Indonesian common sense would have it that anti-Chinese
sentiment among the majority Indonesians is to be blamed on ‘jealousy’, whereas
many non-Chinese Indonesians routinely accuse the Chinese of ‘arrogance’ and
‘exclusiveness’. The depth of feeling that keeps the two categories apart cannot be
overestimated: it pervades daily life and colours everyday social interaction and
experience.
As I read through all press accounts I could find on the Indonesian crisis, I came
across a short article by Yenni Kwok, a 25-year-old journalist with Asiaweek. Born

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