Being a Chinese-Indonesia
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 06/13/2006 1:42 PM
Wijanto Hadipuro, Jakarta
Once I happened to meet a Chinese-American lawyer. When she found out I had married a ""native"" Javanese woman, she asked me, ""Has that made your life easier?"" Her question really made me realize some things about my position.
I remember what happened when I went to get my marriage certificate. I went to the office alone, without my wife. The woman who waited on me picked up a big book and tried to find my name. She looked two or three times but could not find it.
She looked at me several times before asking me whether my wife was a ""native"". When I nodded, she was angry and asked me why I didn't tell her in the first place. She then picked up another book.
I do not care what kind of book they use to register my marriage. What I care about is her expression when she found out my wife was ""native"".
Marrying a woman from another ethnicity and religion has not actually made my life easier. I have to think things over for a long time before I bring my wife and my daughter to visit my family, because most of my relatives cannot accept my wife's background.
My wife has also had bitter experiences. We got married according to my religion. We both believed in Jesus Christ, but we had different religions. She was told by her religious leader that she did not belong to the faithful anymore because she got married outside her religion.
I have a Chinese-Indonesian friend who is Muslim. He married a ""native"" woman. During the riots of in May 1998, I told him he was lucky that he could go anywhere safely, because he had successfully assimilated with the Indonesian majority. His answer surprised me: ""Nobody will ask about my religion or my wife,"" he said. ""People will look at my face and because I look like a Chinese, my religion and my wife will not save me from harm.""
When I visited Atlanta, I was accompanied by a black officer from the Public Works Office.
""Charles,"" I said, ""there are so many black people living in Atlanta, and you can work at government offices. I think it is good that there is not any discrimination against black people here.""
His answer, too, was a surprise. ""Government rules can't make discrimination disappear from my social life."" he said. ""Not all white people want to interact socially with black people like me.""
A place without social discrimination would be utopia. Charles' remark reveals another fact we must accept: that government regulations can't abolish social discrimination.
My wife was discriminated against in terms of her salary. She earned less than her Chinese-Indonesian friend, just because they worked at a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian businessman. My wife with more than five years' experience at the company got only half the salary of her Chinese-Indonesian friend, who had worked for just a month at the same managerial level.
Once I read an article about indicators of social tolerance. According to the article, there are three degrees of social tolerance. The worst is when somebody does not tolerate the existence of anyone from outside his group. Such a person will try to banish ""different"" people if it's not possible to make them the same as him- or herself.
In the case of religion, for example, somebody from a certain religion might say someone from another belief system will go to hell. Another, less extreme example is when somebody does not tolerate other people's religious activities.
A better level of social tolerance is when someone accepts the existence of ""different"" people. He or she may work together and cooperate with them, but cannot accept the ""different"" person becoming a family member, for example, through marriage.
The most tolerant people are those who not only accept ""different"" people, but can welcome them as family members. This group of people is the smallest. There are only a few people who can do that, and my experience shows that people like this are marginalized both by their own groups and their spouse's groups. If you belong to this group, believe me, your life is more complicated than the lives of the other two groups.
We are born with differences. That is true. But some differences are significant for certain people, and some are not. We have to accept that. It is no use to claim equality among all those inherited differences, even by way of the law.
My experience proves that if you are not strong enough, you should keep your group identity as strong as possible. Assimilation and regulations cannot remove social discrimination from every corner of the world.
I have never regretted my decision to marry a Javanese woman, and I will not claim equal rights to citizenship. I am happy with that as long as everybody can accept my existence. If you are Chinese-Indonesian you will be better off going to a school where there are a lot of Chinese-Indonesians and working for a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian. It will help you avoid a lot of discrimination.
The writer is a Chinese-Indonesian who married a pribumi (native) woman.
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I am a Chinese-Indonesian
Aimee Dawis, Jakarta | Wed, 02/06/2008 2:16 PMIn December last year, I attended a seminar in Singapore. I was welcomed by the seminar representative at the Changi Airport.
After shaking hand, he asked me, "Are you ethnic Chinese? Your name is not Chinese, but you look Chinese." I told him that I am Chinese and he was taken aback. "I couldn't tell from your name that you're Chinese," he said.
The puzzlement around my name and my identity as an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia continued throughout the one-day seminar.
As a writer and researcher on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I was invited to present my paper on China and the Cultural Identity of the Chinese in Indonesia.
Hoping to dispel the confusion arising from my name, I decided to begin my presentation by explaining my name and the historical implications and significance of naming among the Chinese in Indonesia.
In 1966, the Indonesian government issued a policy which strongly recommended Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent change their names into Indonesian ones to prove their loyalty to Indonesia.
This policy was released in the wake of the Soeharto regime's closures of Chinese schools, bans on public expressions of Chinese culture and language and widespread government suspicion regarding the Chinese community's role in the PKI's (The Indonesian Communist Party's) uprising in 1965.
Being a heterogeneous and diverse community, the Chinese in Indonesia responded to the name-changing policy in distinct ways. My father chose to change his name to Didi Dawis from Djie Ie Ling.
His other six siblings chose different names for themselves. One of his siblings who chose to keep his Chinese name.
While the names chosen by my father's family (except for his youngest brother) have been Indonesianized to the extent most people cannot tell that they are Chinese, there are other Indonesian names chosen by the Chinese in Indonesia that implicitly indicate that they are still Chinese.
For example, those with the Chinese surnames of Tan, Ong and Wee chose Indonesianized surnames such as Tanuwijaya, Ongggara and Wijaya.
These names show a desire to retain a sense of Chineseness while at the same time complying with the government's policy.
When Abdurrahman Wahid served as the President of Indonesia between November 1999 and August 2001, he abolished the Presidential Instruction Number 14, signed in 1967 by Soeharto, which restricted the practice of Chinese customs and religions to private domain.
Following this abolition, he signed the Presidential Instruction Number 6, stipulated in the year 2000, which allows the public celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Megawati took a step further by declaring Chinese New Year has been a national holiday in 2003.
Other than the official celebration of Chinese New Year, the revival of Chinese culture may be seen in the establishment of schools offering Mandarin as a mode of instruction and a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers in Indonesia.
In 1999, a television channel that broadcasts news in Chinese (Metro TV) and a radio station (Cakrawala) have joined the growing number of Chinese-language newspapers to form a media climate that is more open to Chinese language and culture.
The dazzling array of choices and opportunities arising from the acceptance and embrace of Chinese language and culture in today's Indonesia does not mean the process of identity process and maintenance among the Indonesian Chinese is less complex than in the Soeharto era by any means.
The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug-of-war between self-positioning and being positioned by others.
With the available options, the Indonesian Chinese are now presented with various means to (re)negotiate their own sense of Chineseness. From the moment their babies are born, Indonesian Chinese parents are no longer pressured to name their offspring with Indonesian names. In my observations, some parents have chosen to meld not two, but three cultures together by giving their newborns names such as Adrian Wijaya Ng, Louisa Kartadinata Liu; the first names being Western (because the parents have been educated overseas), the middle names being Indonesian, while the last names are Chinese. Yet there are many other parents who still prefer to name their babies with Indonesian names such as Hendra Suryajaya or Dewi Kurniadi.
The differences in attitudes and expectations in the Indonesian Chinese community with regards to naming reveal the polyphonic nature of identity issues. As Indonesia erases the discriminatory regulations against the Indonesian Chinese, members of this community are presented with different sources of Chinese cultural expressions that begin with their names and formal Chinese language education and continue with Chinese media, Chinese organizations and cultural performances.
Depending on their distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and the choices they make, the next generation of Indonesian Chinese and their parents may uncover new channels and avenues in their continuing process of being Chinese in Indonesia.
The writer teaches in the graduate programs of the University of Indonesia School of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communications, and the Letters Department at the School of Humanities. She can be reached at canting@hotmail.com.
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