Introduction to the Provincial Mandarin
A newsletter made in Indonesia (not Bali).
In late September 2022, I published my first Substack piece on parliamentary republic vs constitutional monarchy rather than introducing myself, to demonstrate what kind this newsletter is about and to introduce my style of writing.
My name is Mario Rustan. I was a regular contributor for The Jakarta Post opinion section from 2007 to 2019, and a columnist for the Indonesian feminist website Magdalene from 2014 to 2019. Funny year, that 2019. I thought it would be a great year, with opportunities to expand my writing avenue, personal growth, and social network. Instead, I lost it all – my columns were canceled not for any personal reason, but maybe due to low readership.
The Post rejected my contributions for various reasons such as “Untimely”, “Couldn’t fit into the lineup”, and “Might not interest the reader”, while Madge (I miss the days when they called themselves that) said that my column attracted few readers.
Maybe they were right. Then came 2020, first the pandemic and then the outrage in the West. And then the sea change in global media, including in my former media. The newspaper went through a major staff cut. The website stopped publishing in English and made a swipe to the left.
The Southeast Asian far left (consider how “far left” is more seldomly used than “far right”) of the 2020s isn’t so different to the Western, uh, progressives or democrat socialists. They (used either as a singular or plural pronoun) believe that their own government and society are fascist. They believe in the violent power of words. After hating white men in the 2010s (I was guilty of that), they turned to white women in the 2020s. They believe that sexual binary, sexism, and racism were invented in Europe. And finally, they are bourgeois graduates who believe they know what’s best for the common people.
Luckily, in Southeast Asia, the far left cannot dominate the discourse in media, education, and public policy like in the West. But of course, what happens in the West also affects us. We were so concerned about the wave of anti-Asian assaults in the early 2020s, especially as our citizens were among the victims. We see our childhood memories reinvented with modern Western values. Even Chris Evans wasn’t happy with us. While we know the West has no obligation to accept us, Western minorities believe we’re obliged to shelter them.
Turning Right
I read Fox News and the New York Post at first for a guilty pleasure, and then as a free news source. In 2021, they were more honest about the anti-Asian assaults than their competitors CNN and the New York Times. And they could sympathize with the victims better.
CNN offers a comprehensive analysis of China and Asia, but that “mostly peaceful protest” stance lost me. We know a riot when we see one, and the Indonesian public condemned violent protests that happened in Jakarta from 2019 to 2021, protests that the left supported online just because they wanted what happened in the West to happen here.
I know Substack from Jill Filipovic, and I subscribed to hers around 2019. In 2021 I read Bari Weiss’ newsletter Common Sense, and it remains my favorite news medium. When I was on feminist Twitter in the 2010s, Weiss was pretty much a controversial/reviled figure, along with Andrew Sullivan and Wesley Yang. You know their stories, their bemusement with the absurdity of media and politics in the 2020s.
I wanted to publish my own Substack newsletter early this year, with the first post on how I got over my grudge over Australia just as Australians found it trendy to be mad at their own country. But I worried about how it would be received, on the commitment to make my substack growing and relevant, on the feedback, and if I’m not just making a glorified blog/Twitter rant.
Meanwhile, I remained perplexed by what was going on in the West. I had to deal with the fact that I had become 40 and achieved almost nothing. With lingering disappointment that I couldn’t be a family man in Perth, Jakarta, or Singapore.
I went through the year sorting out all these doubts, questions, puzzles, and frustration. Happily, I came to understand what happened to me and to the world in this century. I’ve got a clear picture of my past and present. In the northern summer/southern winter of 2022, I believed the time has come to walk my future.
The Provincial Mandarin
Again, in that fateful year of 2019, I reviewed a Hong Kong University Press book on county magistrates in present-day Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Those men had it rough – administering a borderland full of pirates and smugglers, of powerful landlords and arrogant superiors in Guangzhou. All so they could be vilified in Cantonese novels and opera.
Luckily, I don’t have to face pirates and taipans in this emerging/Third World country. Instead, I become a sideline spectator in all the current madness in the West, including in Australia. “Provincial Mandarin” is easier to type than “County Magistrate”, especially since I never took any law subject. Plus, Google won’t confuse the result with actual county magistrates.
I also found out that “mandarin” is not a Chinese word (the Confucian officials were called guan), but a Portuguese analogy to the Malay official menteri. What a fitting name for this Peranakan Chinese. By adopting the mandarin persona, I also wish to play to the stereotype of the Asian nerd now disliked in Western education – meritocratic, uncombative, and um, politically out of touch.
This newsletter is free to read, and I plan to publish a 1000-word essay every ten days. The essays would circle around the topics of politics, international relations, and history. Very common topics, but lucky for me, there are still not many Asian writers online, especially who aim for the general reader internationally, despite our numbers. So, here’s one.