Page 72 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

and bred in Jakarta, she confirms that she feels ‘as Indonesian as any indigenous
pribumi’, but that she is also ‘ethnically Chinese’. ‘Some people think I can’t be
both. Not completely, anyway.’ She is acutely aware of the social separation between
most Chinese and pribumi in daily life and the mutual distrust that governs relations
between them:

But now a confession. For all my ‘Indonesian-ness’, I was brought
up almost in a different world from the pribumi. Chinese schools are
banned in Indonesia . . . so most Chinese go to private Christian
schools. At the one I attended, the only other children were Chinese.
There were pribumi living on my street, but I can’t honestly say I knew
much about them. . . . It wasn’t until I returned from studying in the
U.S. and took a job in journalism that I got to know any pribumi. Now
I count a number of them among my closest friends. But I am an
exception. For most Chinese, the only pribumi they ever get to know is
their household maid, their pembantu. Once they reach adulthood, there
is almost no further social contact. Even in professional life, the two groups
rarely mingle.
(Kwok 1998)

She also testifies to the tacit sense of superiority that many Chinese have in relation
to their non-Chinese fellow Indonesians:

I remember, when I was a youngster, asking my father why they [pribumis]
were referred to as fangui (literally ‘rice devils’, but meaning inferior).
‘We eat rice too,’ I said. ‘So we’re also fangui, right?’ My father just smiled.
It was too difficult – and probably too embarrassing – to explain.
(ibid.)
Kwok’s description resonates painfully with my own experiences of more than thirty
9
years ago, and it was confirmed during a short return visit I made to Indonesia in
1996. During this trip I was made to feel uncomfortable immediately when one of
the first things the taxi driver did was complain about how the Chinese conspired
to keep ‘us’, the real Indonesians, poor. He also made the improbable comment
that ‘they’ wanted to take over the country and multiplied themselves much more
quickly than ‘us’. My companion, an Indonesia specialist from Australia, kept quiet,
while I decided that it was better not to reveal that I was a Chinese-Indonesian
myself – I let him believe I was a Japanese tourist. A few days later in Jakarta, I was
appalled by the strict social division in the rather nice restaurant I was having lunch:
all the servants were Javanese pribumi, while almost all the guests, well-dressed
and at ease with their middle-class life-style, were visibly Chinese. The proprietor,
predictably, could also be identified as Chinese. It was the obliviousness of all
involved with the ethnic inequality so materially enacted here that disturbed me
most. As an outsider, I could of course afford not only to notice, but also to morally

61