Page 78 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

a dominant discourse was consolidated in which the scapegoating of Chinese
Indonesians was described in terms of genocide and holocaust. As one Huaren
editorial put it, ‘Unlike the Jews of World War II, we global Huarens will not stand
back and wait for the Holocaust to happen. We will fight back! And we will fight
back with impunity!’ This is excessive language which is indicative of the extent of
anger and frustration being ventilated. 13 In the course of this consternation, the
diasporic electronic community was solidified, a community constructed through
the relegation of Indonesia and the so-called pribumi to the realm of the Bad Other.
The Good Chinese Self has to defend himself against this Other – a Chinese Self
defined in absolutist terms of innocent victimhood, at the passive receiving end of
aggression and violence.
I lurked on the site with increasing dismay. What I was witnessing was the
escalating mobilizing effect made possible by the immediacy of deterritorialized
Internet interaction: the accumulative production of an imagined community that
constructs itself through a massive sense of beleagueredness, a paranoid closure
of its discursive boundaries, and the absolutization of a singular normative truth
that could be summarized as, ‘All Chinese in the world unite: stop the killings of
our people in Indonesia.’ I understand, of course, that the sudden surge of anti-
Chinese violence in crisis-ridden Indonesia has been an extremely traumatic
experience, especially as it was widely believed that ethnic tension had been
softening in 1990s’ Indonesia (Heryanto 1998a). I also know that the voices
expressed on www.huaren.org cannot be read as representative: the electronic
diasporic community is a tiny, self-selecting group. 14 Still, in an increasingly
networked, globalized world the very existence of the website is of novel signifi-
cance, providing the infrastructure for the reinforcement of a self-absorbed and
self-rightous transnational Chineseness, one with which I did not wish to identify.
To be fair, the Huaren editors have tried to do their best, in their own words,
to counter the excesses of Chinese chauvinism: ‘Global Huarens are not against the
Indonesian people. We support the voices of conscience. We feel for the Pribumis
who are equally victimized by the extremists, racists, and the fanatics inside
Indonesia’ (Huaren, 14 August 1998). Nevertheless, the very logic of Huaren
cyber-politics reinforces the cultivation of an exclusive diasporic community – that
of ‘global Huarens’ – which homogenizes the meaning of being Chinese
throughout the world. Presenting itself as ‘on the cutting edge of the global digital
revolution’ (Huaren, 31 July 1998), Huaren has played a crucial role in mobilizing
thousands of ethnic Chinese people across the globe to condemn and protest the
‘atrocities’ against the Chinese in Indonesia. When news broke that dozens of
Chinese Indonesian women were gang-raped during the May riots, shocking
photographs of alleged victims – one was of the body of a young, horribly tortured
and raped Asian-looking woman lying naked in a shower stall – were circulated
over the Internet, multiplying rapidly across cyberspace and, understandably,
occasioning an even larger crescendo of outrage. (It turned out later that some of
these photographs were fake) (Heryanto 1999). Anger was turned into action by
the on-line activists through an email chain-letter, the ‘Yellow Ribbon Campaign’,

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