The Relevance, and Irrelevance, of Being (Half) Chinese
The Provincial Mandarin wishes you a great New Year
From 1968 to 1999, it was illegal to publicly celebrate the Chinese New Year in Indonesia. General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for three decades, believed that the assimilation of Chinese Indonesians would prevent more anti-Chinese riots that blighted not just Indonesia but also Malaysia and Singapore in the 1960s, and perhaps solved the “Chinese question” that gripped postcolonial Southeast Asia – could the Chinese be a part of our nationhood?
Chinese New Year celebration wasn’t banned but kept in homes. That meant no public holiday, public or commercial acknowledgment, or street parade. My school friends celebrated it with their families but even the school didn’t acknowledge it. For the school, we were Christians and Muslims and that’s enough. We either celebrated Christmas or Idul Fitri, and New Year’s Day was on 1 January.
Suharto resigned in May 1998, a week after a severe anti-Chinese riot in Jakarta, and Chinese Indonesians celebrated the 1999 Chinese New Year cautiously, with the Asian Financial Crisis still happening and further fears of riots and repression still hanging. In January 2000, President Abdurrahman Wahid removed the restriction, it became a holiday for Chinese communities in January 2001, and finally a public religious holiday in 2002. Formally it’s Confucius’ birthday.
For many other Chinese societies, Suharto’s Indonesia was a Nazi regime, and liberation came in the new millennium. Chinese Indonesians were finally free to speak Chinese, display Chinese text, discuss their culture and heritage, and have political power.
Chinese Indonesians, truthfully, had decent lives even under Suharto. Like elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the tycoons were Chinese. Chinese children got quality education in Christian schools. There were Chinese Indonesian celebrities – singers, actors, artists, and socialites. Like other middle-class Indonesians, the Chinese were free to travel the world.
And yet, by 2000, we felt Suharto had held us back for 30 years. Unlike the Malaysian Chinese, we couldn’t write and speak Hokkien, let alone Cantonese or Mandarin. We didn’t have Chinese names, and we weren’t even sure who was Chinese or not Chinese among us. We preferred to eat with a spoon and fork rather than chopsticks. The assimilation program worked, and other Chinese didn’t see us as Han people.
The catchup trend ran until about ten years ago and it hardly changes anything. Chinese Indonesians don’t use their clan surnames. Nobody says studying Mandarin is fun. Nobody uses it in the mall, as K-pop is blaring and shoppers in hijab carry paper bags written in Korean hangul and Japanese katakana. Almost nobody has converted to Buddhism or Confucianism, while in fact, more have converted to Christianity. Assimilation stays in Indonesia.
I never celebrate any Chinese New Year. My father’s family is all-Catholic, and my mother’s family celebrates both Christmas and Idul Fitri. My Chinese friends in university were also more Catholic than Chinese. While I had attended a Japanese Christmas party, I was never invited to any Australian Lunar New Year party. Maybe unlike Christmas, a Lunar New Year celebration is more restricted to families.
Alright, what’s with Chinese and Lunar? The Lunar New Year term is quite recent and comes from Vietnamese and Korean Americans’ demand to be included. The Koreans are obviously not Chinese and won’t stand the international term of “Chinese New Year”. Many Vietnamese Americans have Chinese backgrounds but have quite different experiences and cultures from the Chinese, especially in America. Finally, other Asian groups don’t want to be identified as Chinese, like Tibetans and Mongolians.
Even the Chinese themselves could have their preferences. Some will prefer “Chinese”, arguing that the other cultures follow the Chinese tradition, and there are other lunar new years celebrated throughout the years, including the Islamic New Year. Some are fine with “Lunar” for two reasons: It’s more inclusive, and it obscures the Chinese association, hence making it more marketable.
Others might think that “Lunar New Year” is the more modern and oppa-approved since it’d be the English term used in the K-pop fandom. To put it crudely, a Chinese New Year might not be queer-friendly enough, but a Lunar New Year might be.
&
For about ten years I made it into the Indonesian op-ed market of Chinese New Year commentary (it feels so empty without me). Other writers had their angles. The Chinese must do their part to help Indonesia and Indonesians must give away their prejudices. Not all Chinese are rich. The Chinese are not foreigners but have long roots in Indonesia. The New Year’s celebration was a good opportunity to build bridges and solidarity.
Meanwhile, with my liberal outlook, I called for the emancipation of rights and normalisation of Chinese culture. One could be wholly Indonesian and wholly Chinese. Being Chinese was not different from being another ethnicity in Indonesia, from an Acehnese to an Arab.
But everybody knows being Chinese is different, wherever you are. You’re a part of a nation of overachievers, from the Republic of Singapore to the People’s Republic of China, to Chinese Americans and Southeast Asian Peranakans (who might have stopped having Malay blood for the last 100 years). You know that you’re a “Jew of the East”. You know the Arabs had the same network and grit as you and had the same religion as the Malays and the Javanese, but they didn’t become the tycoons of Southeast Asia. Armenians, Persians, and Jews? They are gone from modern Southeast Asian societies.
The funny thing about being a Chinese Indonesian is, that other Southeast Asian Chinese believe we’re oppressed, surrounded by millions of hostile Muslims. The funny thing is, we don’t think so. We can live with pork-free restaurants and all-Indonesian TV and public services. We don’t see the need to migrate. Nobody expects us to convert to Islam. Somebody like me, a biracial, is rare but normalised.
In fact, I often feel pity for the Malaysian Chinese. They have the Chinese names, the freedom to write and speak Chinese, and the Commonwealth membership, and yet are strangers in their own land. Close interactions between Malays and Chinese are rare in Malaysia, all Malays are expected to be Muslims, and many have migrated to the West, where they feel that they are minorities too – even when Australians and probably Canadians have encountered only Malaysian Chinese and take them as representatives of Malaysians.
&
Now the Lunar New Year is just another public holiday in Indonesia, a chance to travel, sleep late wake up later, shop, and work harder if you’re in hospitality. For many Chinese Indonesians, it can be as fun and stressful as an American Thanksgiving, the good food and the rivalries with relatives come all at once. And with the general election coming in four days, there would be too many interesting political conversations.
Meanwhile, the West, at least the English-speaking world, is turning its attention to the Lunar New Year. As a politically halal, diversity celebration. In the past, the Guardian published some sketchy articles complaining about the authenticity of the Chinese New Year celebration in the UK, which swiped the traditions of the Cantonese diaspora there. This year, BBC publishes the sob stories of Asian professionals from Malaysia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong whose offices still didn’t do LNY parties hard enough (very authentic Passover, Easter, Idul Fitri, Nowruz, Samhain, and Deepavali office parties will follow). If the British countryside is too white, then London is not Chin…Lunar enough.
Well, have fun appreciating the Confucian subscribers and followers, liberal white people. Remember, it’s only far-right white people who are not enthusiastic about the Lunar New Year. Live long and prosperous!