Page 75 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

(1983: 15) remarks in his historiographical study of the Chinese in Indonesia that
‘the dominant theme of Chinese political activity in the late colonial period was to
press for equality of status for the Chinese with the Europeans’. In no way did the
Chinese in this period see any benefit in forging alliances with the ‘natives’, who
were at the bottom of the oppressive colonial hierarchy. 11 Is it surprising then
that at a later stage, when the ‘natives’ mobilized themselves, they didn’t rush to
invite the Chinese to join their ranks? Post-independence efforts by Indonesia-
oriented Chinese leaders to be integrated into the syncretic national community
of ‘Indonesia’ have always had to struggle against the legacy of separateness
reinforced by the competing force of Chinese nationalism. As Suryadinata (1979:
xv) puts it, ‘the Indonesian nationalist movement, having emerged after overseas
Chinese nationalism in Java, understandably tended to exclude the Chinese from
the movement’. In short, the emergence of modern nationalism in colonial
Indonesia has solidified the distinction between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘non-
indigenous’ – a distinction that continues to frame ethnic relations in Indonesia
today. As Takashi Shiraishi (1997: 205) has remarked, ‘the rise of modern politics
. . . signified the “awakening” of the Chinese as Chinese and of “natives” as natives.’
Postcolonial Indonesia inherited this state of affairs, and is living with its legacy to
this day.
As modern nationalism is in principle a practice of constructing a unified
peoplehood, the question of who does and who does not belong to the Indonesian
people is central to the operation of the Indonesian nation–state. Thus, while ethnic
Chinese people during colonial rule were not in general concerned about the
formality of their national belonging – such a concern being a feature of fully
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fledged political modernity which simply didn’t apply on colonial territory – after
decolonization those who chose or were forced to stay in Indonesia were faced
with the necessity to declare formal loyalty to the new nation–state, now under
control of ‘the natives’. In other words, ethnic Chinese subjects were placed in the
quandary of having to take on, formally, a singular, bounded and exclusive national
identity, but at the same time always remaining under suspicion that their loyalty
might not be undivided – the trace of their Chineseness, no matter how residual,
always read as a sign of imperfect national belonging.
I know that my father suffered deeply from this ambivalent positioning. Having
grown up in the last decades of colonialism, he actively chose Indonesian citizen-
ship and made a conscious decision to help build the new nation directly after
independence. But in social terms, he experienced directly how his Chineseness
impeded a harmonious and productive working together with pribumi colleagues.
The truth is inescapable: his life as an ethnic Chinese was easier and more secure
during Dutch rule! My father, by virtue of his generation, can be described as a
colonial subject, for whom the creation of the new nation–state of Indonesia and
its imposition of a fixed, state-related, national identity was a restriction on his
earlier, more fluid and blurred sense of communal Chinese identity under colonial
rule. When the discrimination became too confining he decided to sever all his ties
with the country that he could no longer consider as his ‘homeland’. Indonesia,

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