Page 76 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

for him, or rather the postcolonial nationalist project of ‘Indonesia’, was the very
reason for his diasporization to the West.
By contrast, I grew up as a postcolonial subject in the 1950s and 1960s, and I
internalized the desire to be a full national subject. I identified deeply with the
Indonesian people as a whole, as they emerged from three centuries of colonial
oppression. Then, I experienced my Chineseness primarily as a frustrating
stumbling block in my smooth insertion into this national narrative; now, I know
that it was the sign of a structural contradiction that refused to be erased. As a
discursive category, Chineseness in the Indonesian context will always be uneasily
articulated with conflicts around class, nation and race. As a visible marker of ethnic
difference, it affects the lives of individuals who can be read as being of Chinese
ancestry irrespective of their personal political commitments and their degree of
assimilation, their efforts to be accepted as ‘just as Indonesian as anybody else’
(Kwok 1999). Indeed, as Ariel Heryanto has argued, the very emphasis on the
need to assimilate the Chinese tends to reinforce ‘the active and conscious othering
of the Chinese’ in ‘the reproduction of the native Self’ (1998a: 101).
I left Indonesia because my parents decided to, and I will never know what I
would have done had I been forced to make my own decision either in 1966 or,
indeed, in 1998, when so many Chinese Indonesians again diasporized themselves
as we did more than thirty years ago. However, if there is anything from my
childhood that remains a central affect in my diasporic intellectual engagement – an
affect strengthened, not weakened, by my adult formation as a non-Western but
Westernized intellectual living and working in the West – it is my ‘third worldist’
attachment to the hopes and aspirations of the postcolonial nation, even as I am
deeply disturbed by the pernicious antagonism between Chinese and pribumi that
so profoundly fractures the Indonesian nation. In other words, I care about both
the plight of the millions of ethnic Chinese people in Indonesia who are condemned
to live in fear for their safety whenever an economic or political crisis strikes, and
for the well-being of the Indonesian people as a whole. This expression of dual care
may sound naïvely utopian, articulated by a distant diasporic subject who can no
longer claim to be an Indonesian today. However, precisely my position as a
diasporic intellectual leads me here to resist, both theoretically and politically, the
common diasporic temptation: that of an increasingly absolutist ethnic identification.

Globalizing diasporic rage
As the riots worsened and the death toll rose in Jakarta and other cities from 12
May onwards, messages on the Huaren website Bulletin Board became more
desperate and exasperated. There were calls for help, rumours about new riots,
eyewitness accounts, stories of pain and suffering, tips on how to defend oneself,
encouragements to fight back or advice on how and where to flee, calls for all
huaren in the world to protest and express solidarity, further indignation about the
pribumi. This went on for weeks after the rioting had subsided, and after Suharto
had stepped down: the sense of confusion and bewilderment, of not knowing what

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