My Journey as a Chinese Indonesian
Talking about how diverse Indonesians are always means bringing up Chinese Indonesians into the topic.
I am an Indonesian. A 100% Indonesian. Or at least, that’s what I think of myself. Others might beg to differ. But then again, isn’t that the very gist of being Indonesians? Differences here and there, but still one. Or to put it exactly as Indonesia’s loudly resounded jargon: Bhinekka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity).
Throughout my 23-year life, I’ve heard many sentiments about Chinese Indonesians (hereinafter referred to as Chindos), both direct and indirect (the latter are usually the hurtful ones, but I’ve grown accustomed to them somehow, sadly); ranging from the widely spread assumption that Chindos are the extremely smart ones of the society to the bitter stereotyping that Chindos are evil thrifty capitalists that only seek for their profit, albeit by pressing others under their thumbs.
Being a Chindo, I can confirm that almost all sentiments towards us (or more accurately, some of us) are true. The smart Chindos (not all of us are smart, of course) are unbelievably brilliant. People also have known the dark secret of how some extremely wealthy Chindos (again, not all of us are rich, of course) got to where they are now.
It is also because of this sentiments that we undergo many forms of discrimination. Discrimination scares me. It shivers my spine.
I was in a very homogeneous environment: Christian Chindos. I was a majority in my old environment. It was nice to be one of the majority. I felt safe and sound inside my own herd of narrow-eyed humans. It was definitely my comfort zone. It became more and more comfortable as more and more stories, issues, and also sentiments about Pribumis (native Indonesians) showed up.
Reciprocated hostility
My mother, who lived through the times when Chindos were widely discriminated, told me that the government had oppressed Chindos very harshly. That Pribumis had viewed Chindos as the destroyer of their economy, the culprit of everything that had gone wrong, the scapegoat of every doom in Indonesia; peaked by the traumatising horror of the May 1998 riot, when thousands of Chindos was raped and massacred, thousands of Chindos’ shops was looted and burned.
My father also told stories about how hard it was for Chindos to get by the bureaucracy. To make ID cards, to renew his permits, even to get to state schools and universities. When I made it to ITB — Institut Teknologi Bandung, or Bandung Institute of Technology, one of the most prominent state universities in Indonesia — my family members asked me things like: “Whoa, how could a Chindo get into ITB?”, “How much did you pay to pass the test? It must be more expensive since you’re a Chindo”, “So it is possible now for Chindos to get into ITB, it used to be super difficult, if not impossible at all”; all of which represented blatantly that there was still fear of being discriminated.
My grandpa and grandma also had repeatedly testified of the 1965 massacre, in which thousands (the number of casualties is still debated) of communist in Indonesia were killed. In this event, Chindos were linked to Chinese communism and therefore deemed to be deserved being killed. While there wasn’t any reported killing of Chindos in Bandung (their hometown), my grandparents told me that in those times, there would be some kind of sweeping of Chindo residents every now and then. It made them inconvenient at the very least. Some of the times, the sweeper did do something harsh such as banging their door loudly, making them scared.
I myself have had some personal experiences on racism.
One easily reminisced is in 2014, when the presidential election took place. Issues of riot was brewing. The Chindos instinctively sensed that they were going to be scapegoats time and again. Some Pribumis started to accuse that Chindos were fleeing to other countries to avoid the possible turmoil. Maybe it was right. But even if it was right, it was only possible for the upper-class Chindos, not people like me and my family.
On an easy morning in the midst June 2014, my dad and I were waiting in our car for my my mom buying things in a market. We were listening to a local law-themed radio programme. The broadcaster were reading through the received SMS, and he stumbled upon one that questioned the loyalty of Chindos; how Chindos responded to the circumstances.
That was not the worst part.
After reading the SMS, the broadcaster commented, “Kurang ajar emang cina, pas damai aja di Indonesia, pas lagi panas kabur” (“Indeed, Chindos are insolent, they just want to be in Indonesia when it’s peaceful and they flee when it’s getting tense”).
Even my father, who actually had got used to racism and usually didn’t respond to such racism, was utterly shocked that the broadcaster did this publicly on air.
To make things worse, my family is also a Christian family; that makes us double minorities. This matter is actually out of the scope of this writing, but in short, Christians also often become victims of discrimination in Indonesia. Permits to build churches have been highly tedious to get, only to be bombed afterwards, Christians and Christianity have been objects of ridicule, some Christmas are fearful, etc.
Therefore it was not easy not to hear any racist comment hurled at Pribumis by Chindos. I have grown accustomed to advise like “just give in, remember that we are just mere lodgers in Indonesia,” “Be careful when you make friends with Pribumis.” Or questions like “Is she a Chindo or a Pribumi?,” “Are any Chindos involved in the accident/event?”
I’ve grown accustomed to racism.
This stories is not exclusive to my family, it is prevalent in most Chindo households. Try this: search in Quora for this kind of story, you’ll find some more terrifying stories. Like this one.
I can assure you that my stories above are nothing compared to other Chindos’. More reason for me to be grateful.
It is therefore understandable if Chindos (especially older ones) have developed hostility to some extent towards Pribumis. I’m not saying that they’re right or that Chindos are playing victim; but you can’t really blame them, can you?
Inherited fear
This old-school tendency for staying away from Pribumis is often blindly passed to the next generations, via stories and testimonies like what I got from my parents. This is also often what’s holding young Chindos from the society, the full spectrum of Indonesians.
I remember vividly when I was at the final year of junior high school, about to proceed to senior high school. There was this favourite state school in Bandung, called SMAN 3 Bandung (SMAN stands for Sekolah Menengah Atas Negeri, or State Senior High School, the number 3 is just an identifier). I didn’t want to go there, but knowing one of my friend (a Pribumi Indonesian) decided to go there, I casually asked my parents what if I went there too, they immediately crushed my trivial musing by stating that I would definitely be horribly treated not only by the students, but also the teachers. It happened again three years later, when I was weighing between ITB and a private university. My parents’ main concern, from what I had seen, was less of which one of these two universities was the best choice and more of how ‘safe’ would I be if I chose ITB over the other one.
This time, despite all the fears that had been haunting me, I chose to go out on a limb and chose ITB, with its colourful heterogeneity. I was still petrified. Lots of what-ifs went on my mind. Being double minority sucked, big time.
“My mom said…”
Long story short, I took the enrolment test and got accepted to ITB.
I followed all the procedures, all the orientation programmes.
I met my classmates, other people of my batch, some lecturers, seniors, canteen ladies, security personnels, and many more. I also applied to some student organisations.
Oh yeah, it was also the first time I was called “Mas” (a form of address to Indonesian men of approximately the same age) instead of “Koh” (Chinese for older brother). It was really weird at first. Really, really weird. Unbeknownst to me that “Mas” would be one of the most mellifluous words for me.
It didn’t take long for me to experience my first encounter with racism. Just under a week.
It was just minutes before the first calculus class. The students had gathered inside the class. It was very noisy.
I think I did something wrong, I can’t remember my exact mistake, and my Pribumi Indonesian friend scolded me quite hurtfully. Then he laughed, as if nothing had happened. He said that he was kidding, just being playful with me. Then, while still laughing, he said, “It feels nice to scold at a Cina (Cina is Indonesian for ‘China;’ but in Indonesia, it is thought to be a derogatory term for Chindos).”
I don’t think anybody else heard it. Seriously, it was very noisy.
I froze. My fear became real.
I let it slide. But I didn’t forget it.
Despite him saying that he was just being playful, his last comment struck me hard. I was immediately reminded to everything that my mom had said about Pribumis.
Fight or flight
Nothing for the rest of the day really caught my attention. I got home. I lied on my bed and thought to myself.
“How can I survive here?”
I could’ve just flocked with other Chindos (as a lot of them opt to do) to avoid any other potential racism.
I chose the alternative: to stand tall, face my fears, and try to blend in completely. Completely.
To give a little more background, I think I have to state that it was in ITB that I first faced Indonesia with its full diversity; ethnic groups, religions, languages, everything.
At first it was unbelievably hard. There was always impulses to just take the ‘straight’ path and just join in with fellow Chindos.
Some aspects in my life that came from the way I brought up were just unfit with their values. Attitudes, customs, ways of approaching things, the way we treated others. Even some of our jokes were just too starkly different.
I couldn’t expect them to treat me the way I preferred. Nor they had any need for me to try harder to blend in. I realised that it was up to me and I just could expect myself to sand my sharp corners here and there and try to squeeze myself harder into the puzzle.
Again, to make things worse, I was a hardcore introvert. I still am. You should know that it is highly exhausting for me to be in crowds.
Despite me screaming inside to get to the library and shield myself inside a cubicle, I tried my best to keep being with them (well, part of them, but it was the best I could do).
I ate lunch with them. I actively participated in forums. I joined student organisations. I chanted for the sports teams. I spent the night with them. I customised the way I spoke to every subgroup’s colloquialism. All of this while still maintaining who I was.
I don’t know if anything had changed for them, but I started to feel accepted.
Give, and you will receive
Time flew, and apparently they mistook my nerdiness for smartness. I was made the head of the class’ academic division (just a fancy term for peer tutoring group).
Lots of my friend underwent difficulties with ITB’s academic programme. I felt what they felt. I had been very ignorant to my grade before I decided to take the enrolment test, and I had struggled really hard to pass the high school in one of the most competitive high school in Bandung.
I was overwhelmed with empathy.
Not to boast myself, but for some reasons, I had been quite ignorant with my grade in ITB. Whenever I had had an exam, I had allocated just the last day for studying. But this changed and I decided to study a week earlier to be able to master the exam materials so that I could tell them more about what I knew.
More and more people came to the study sessions. More than any lunches, forums, sports events, everything I had attended before.
And it was by studying with them that I felt more than just being accepted. I felt needed. I felt useful. I was made the integral part of the group.
We started to form stronger moral connections than just mere acquaintances.
Jump inside the kaleidoscope
For most of my life, I had looked at Pribumis’ lives from without.
Through the looking glass.
It was at this point that I started to question myself. To be sceptical about my core identity.
On one hand, being with my family, talking with them, doing Chinese customs, made me feel that I was still different from Pribumis. On the other hand, I always felt at home in the crowd of my Pribumi friends, felt like I was a proper Indonesian.
At first, it wasn’t really matter; but within time, I came to love the latter more.
It was your cue in, identity crisis; or not, maybe I overemphasise. But that was what I felt.
I couldn’t really make up my mind. I had been indoctrinated that Chindos were different from Pribumis from the very core values. That Chindos could never immerse and assimilate completely with Pribumis. That we should be extra cautious when making friends with Pribumis.
If those all had been true, I wouldn’t have made myself so comfortably around Pribumis that most of the time I forgot I was a Chindo. I wouldn’t have been received so well by them that I felt more understood by them than by my own family or some of my Chindo friends. I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate every different thing of theirs the way they have done to me alike.
Above all, if our values were so starkly different, I would never have fallen in love with Indonesia so easily that I was willing to give my blood, sweat, and tears for this country if needed. This very country whose native inhabitants had shed litres of blood of my kind, plundered our shops to bankruptcy, devoured what was not their rights from our women, sent flocks of us to mental hospitals.
I really want to be an Indonesian. A proper one. Even if, in order to be a 100% Indonesian, I have to abandon my Chineseness completely, I’ll do it willingly. My love, dream, and hope for this country are much bigger than just a finite part of my identity.
Indonesia is just too resplendent a kaleidoscope for me too just be a viewer.
How is it today?
While everything has been more benign for Chindos, every now and then, I still observe discrimination practices; be it in the form of derogatory term, selective treatment, or even humour-coated mockery. The elephant is still in the room.
One that was known even internationally was the times when Mr. Basuki Cahaya Purnama — better known as Ahok — became the governor of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. He was risen to the post replacing Mr. Joko Widodo who went to compete in the 2014 presidential election. After his 5-year period ended, Ahok tried to defend his position by running for the subsequent governor election. While things are superficially kept neutral, the reek of racism wasn’t really absent.
I also have stumbled upon some news of talented Chindos that brought Indonesia’s name world-wide through their achievements and awards. On which, the public’s comments are nice, friendly, and above all, inclusive. One instance is the ones on the news about Yuma Soerianto, a programming prodigy who has made connection with Apple.
In contrast, whenever there are news of Chindos accused of something bad, in addition to the condemnation, there will be some derogatory and racist terms used, inciting exclusivity. For example, when Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita was called by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), said comments were ubiquitous on social media; ranging from something tacit as the China’s flag emoji to innuendos like “This is the evidence that people like to flock with their kind, and even adopt its habits.”
Numbers speak more
I feel compelled to share this one research from 2017 on Chindos by Charlotte Setijadi from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. I recommend you to read the full paper, but here I’m just going to display the result of surveys done on how Pribumis feel about Chindos.
Sky is the limit
Also in 1998, in another side of the Earth, three scientists, including Tony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek, founded Project Implicit. They define themselves as people who are interested in implicit social cognition — thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control.
In this project, the scientists devised a test of something that ostensibly obvious: that we (our brains) formed connection quicker between pairs of idea that were already related in our minds than those that hadn’t been.
For example, I can safely be sure that all of you will automatically subsume the names “John,” “Peter,” “Bob,” under the category “male names”. Mutatis mutandis for “Jessica,” “Jennifer,” and “female names”; “tomato,” “lettuce,” and “vegetables”. That being so, our brains will work harder if we encounter alien idea like an eight-year old beautiful girl named Peter, or when someone says that tomato is actually a fruit (it is both, actually).
In the test, named the Implicit Association Test (IAT), there are some subtests, like gender, sexuality and age. Your task in all of the subtests is to associate the terms or pictures to the correct groups, like the example I’ve mention in the prior paragraph.
The most popular test is the Race Test, in which you have to group negative words under the category “bad”, positive words under “good”, photos of African-Americans under “black” and photos of Caucasians under “white”. Oh yeah, and you are compelled to do it as quickly as you can. To warm up, you are tasked to group single items to the respective categories. As the test goes on, the items and categories are mixed: you have to press E if a negative word or an African-American appears, and I if a positive word or a Caucasian does, and then the control is inverted. In the subsequent sections, they are mixed. So you press E for negative words or Caucasians, I for positive words or African-American; then the control is inverted.
The algorithm used measures the time you take to complete the questions and also takes consideration to the number of errors you make. The quicker you do, the stronger the association between the pairs for you.
I may have explained it vaguely, but I hope you get the idea. I recommend you to take the test before proceeding reading.
Anyway, it turns out that at least 80% of the respondents are indicated to be in favour with Caucasians. But what does this figure means? Rather than indicating that 80% of them are racists, it denotes that what we choose to believe (in this case, not being racist) is not really what we unconsciously believe.
This may seem tangential to the topic, but why does this matter?
It might seem innocuous at first. But if you think about it a little more, what if this unconscious hostility struck a job or scholarship interviewer? All the competencies of an interviewee can possibly be rendered worthless. What if a highly skilled Chindo, having skills that are most needed in Indonesia, boldly stating himself as a member of the Indonesians, still favours working away from Pribumis for reasons they don’t even realise, and just decides to work in a company in which there are more Chindos than Pribumis, albeit with smaller impact to the country? Regrettably, thoughts like “the black are lazy and unintelligent,” “Chindos’ motivation to work in my company is just to hoard wealth for themselves,” and “Pribumis are evil towards the Chindos” at the least, will unintentionally cloud their judgement and are counterproductive.
Every now and then, all this gets me thinking, among all limitations, how severe does racism hinders Indonesia from being a developed country? How big of a benefit that the people subjected to racism could’ve given to Indonesia? Based on the figures from the aforementioned research, if Pribumis think that Chindos are more privileged, have they ever thought of how many missed opportunities Chindos could’ve brought about to Indonesia had there not been any hostility and prejudices? Conversely, had Chindos been more inclusive, they could’ve made more friends with Pribumis and subsequently felt safer in their own country.
You may say I’m a far-fetched dreamer, but I do genuinely hope that someday, somehow, Indonesia will be a nation where racism, apartheid, discrimination, alienation, racial hostility — and the unconscious versions of them — are nonevents and irrelevant anymore. Not only for Chindos, but for each and every ethnic and racial group in Indonesia. I long for an Indonesia where every citizen not only has equal de jure, but also de facto rights, opportunities, and obligations. As Utopian as it may seem, I believe that this is not impossible to be achieved even by a country as diverse as Indonesia.
Indonesia’s newly-reelected President, Mr. Joko Widodo, stated in his inauguration speech that it is projected that in 2045, Indonesia will have been a developed country, with a GDP reaching 7 trillion USD, and poverty rate plummeting to near zero percent; placing it within the top five world economies.
It is indeed ambitious, everyone thinks so. But is it implausible? Far from it.
Therefore, I call for every Chindo reading this essay to direct your life towards our shared aims. For those who have been away and even thought to leave Indonesia to build careers and empires abroad. For those who have been disappointed by how this country has treated or not treated you. Indonesia still needs you. Indonesia needs more Soe Hok Gie, Thee Kian Wie, Kwik Kian Gie, Mari Elka Pangestu, Susi Susanti, Dian Muljadi, Mely G. Tan, and some other names that while I can’t write them all here, more can be added to the list.
And I hope it’s mine and yours.
References
Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2016). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people. Bantam.
Hok, S. G.(1983) Catatan Seorang Demonstran. Jakarta: LP3ES.
Gladwell, M. (2006). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.
Setijadi, C. (2017). Chinese Indonesians in the eyes of the pribumi public.
