Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia
So pervasive is the integrationist logic of post-civil rights America that it’s sometimes instructive–if not a little jarring–to talk to minorities abroad who could not imagine abiding by its rules.
To that end, I conducted an interview with a thirty-something ethnic Chinese professional to get her perspective on interethnic relations in this thriving multicultural East Javanese port city of 3 million inhabitants. Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia, which, with almost 300 ethnicities, is one of the most diverse countries in the world. While the level of ethnic mixing varies across the country, the overall intermarriage rate is low. A 2020 study found that almost 90% of Indonesians marry within their ethnic group. The ethnic Chinese are thought to be the least likely to outmarry.1
Given the sensitivity of the topic and the recent political turmoil, my interviewee asked that I not publish her name. We talked over a poolside table at a luxury hotel, where I had thought she could speak honestly about her experiences as an ethnic Chinese Indonesian.
Although there were few people around, my interlocutor still looked around to make sure that no ethnic Javanese hotel guests or hotel workers could overhear her. She’d occasionally break into a whisper. Once, when asked what her parents had taught her to think of the Javanese, she refused to cite specifics. I then nudged her to tell me just two things they had said. She obliged. Just two. I can only assume that she thought that whatever else her parents had said would either have reflected poorly on them or have been just too insulting to the Javanese.
Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are widely known to enjoy a higher economic status than other ethnicities in Indonesia. They are what author Amy Chua has called “market-dominant minorities,” ethnic groups “who for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the ‘indigenous’ majorities around them.”2
The resentment this economic imbalance inevitably creates has periodically erupted in anti-Chinese scapegoating and even violence. In 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, some indigenous Indonesians blamed the ethnic Chinese minority for the nation’s economic plight. This sparked two days of large-scale rioting in Jakarta in which Chinese-owned businesses were looted and burned and dozens of Chinese Indonesian women were raped.
That level of violence pushed some wealthy Chinese Indonesians to emigrate to Singapore, but it also ultimately led to the collapse of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime, a watershed moment that has since led to growing democratization and acceptance of ethnic pluralism in Indonesia.
***
Under Suharto’s 32 year rule, the government’s cultural policy was stridently assimilationist. Although “Unity in Diversity” was the national motto, government policy promoted cultural homogenization. In August of 1967, Suharto called for the complete assimilation of Indonesians of foreign heritage. Ethnic Chinese were pressured to assume Indonesian names and abandon Chinese customs. Chinese-language newspapers were banned with the exception of one that was published by the government. While private Chinese groups could still establish schools, Chinese-language instruction was prohibited. Enforcement of assimilation laws was uneven and sometimes nonexistent, but the message was clear. Under Suharto, Chinese Indonesians developed multiple strategies to obscure their distinctiveness while preserving their networks.
All that changed when the regime collapsed in 1998. Decentralization and democratization allowed both ethnic and regional identities to reemerge. After more than a generation of restrictions, “Chinese Indonesians were now allowed to publicly display their religions, beliefs and customs and to start civil rights groups to reassess their position in society.”3 Of course, the new openness also enabled greater public expression of simmering ethnic tensions.
If my interlocutor’s story suggests anything beyond the anecdotal, it’s that the ethnic Chinese residents of Surabaya are eager to remain separate yet not necessarily very traditionally Chinese. I recount our conversation mostly because I think it sheds light on the very different ways Americans perceive and manage ethnic difference.
***
In both the governmental and the cultural spheres, diversity is generally celebrated as a positive social benefit in the United States, At the same time, anti-discrimination laws combined with strong contemporary social dictates on what is acceptable to say or discuss make many Americans reluctant to speak openly about ethnic and racial differences. So, ironically, what is presented in the abstract as an overall social good is also seen as a minefield that’s best to avoid.
The civil rights era push for racial integration also had the ancillary effect of encouraging ethnic assimilation. Starting with the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, which, as historian Anders Walker has written, “rested on the unsupportable assumption that black history, black traditions, and black institutions were inferior and should be destroyed, erased in favor of assimilating blacks into mainstream white America” had a profound effect on how Americans viewed the integration of all non-white groups.4 While diversity in America–as in all multiethnic nations–was always challenging, a desire to remain separate from the Anglo-centric mainstream was now viewed by both conservatives and liberals as being contrary to the judicially-sanctioned national drive to a harmonious future.
Ethnicity, which was once understood to be a more or less inevitable, if unfortunate, part of being an immigrant nation, came to be seen as a vestigial remnant of a primordial past, one characterized by ancient grudges, irrational loyalties, and primitive religious rituals and beliefs. The new integrationist nationalism now saw the embrace of ethnic identities as old-fashioned tribalism, which ran counter to the modern goal of national unity.
By the early 1970s, however, evolving anti-discrimination law and the advent of affirmative action–or positive discrimination as the British call it–incentivized the claiming of minority identities. Ethnic pressure groups lobbied the government to be granted protected status on the grounds that they had collectively suffered historic discrimination. Gaining protected status ensured that their co-ethnics benefitted from anti-discrimination laws and strategic advantages in college admissions and job applications.
This new regimen did not replace integrationist nationalism. It lived uncomfortably alongside it. While integrationism pushed assimilation, the civil rights regime encouraged continued ethnic identification. These conflicting regimes forged a new dynamic in which, in order to implement the new civil rights policies, government bureaucracies began to categorize members of specific national origin groups into larger administratively-convenient aggregate categories. Just as early modern governments in Europe once impose standardized weights and measurements on distant villages that had long since developed their own varied techniques, the U.S. government imposed new groupings in order to better keep track of the nation’s population.
What this meant was that growing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin American were now funneled into a new system in which, upon arrival, they were now categorized not as, say, Chinese or Korean, but as “Asian” and then assessed as to whether they could be designated as “protected minorities,”
The conflict between the ideologies of integrationism and minority protection forged a new type of assimilation, one that encouraged the children and grandchildren of immigrants to abandon the premodern elements of their heritage while remaining identified with one of the government-created categories. A Mexican Catholic, for instance, would transform into a “Hispanic,” with all the warmth, history, texture, and ancient religious customs that this cold bureaucratic term implies. The post civil rights American ethnic, in other words, was encouraged to drop the specific texture of their heritages while remaining vaguely distinctive from the majority. They were expected to strip themselves of ancient roots while integrating into a deracinated, aggregate “ethnic” category. In short, foreign-born parents could remain Korean while their children were transformed into “Asian Americans.”
The one exception to this rule was reserved for indigenous peoples largely because progressive whites saw their primordial identities as a powerful symbolic challenge to the prevailing norms of “western civilization.” Whereas Catholicism, for example, was viewed part and parcel of an oppressive western order, ancient indigenous beliefs were seen as fundamentally innocent, a quality many late 20th century American whites began to crave for themselves.
In any case, by the late 20th century, genuine cultural pluralism, the acceptance–however grudgingly or even racist–that all groups did not act, believe, or see the world the same as one another had given way to a conflicted ideology of national unity/homogeneity wrapped in faux, officially-sanctioned diversity. At the same time, Americans received constant warnings to watch what they said and did around protected minorities–or at least those with powerful allies–because any missteps might land them in a heap of trouble.
***
My interlocutor, I’ll call her Angela, is a third-generation Chinese Indonesia. Her grandparents were born in the Fujian Province in southeastern China and mostly spoke Hokkien. The street she grew up on was entirely Chinese. She estimates that her childhood neighborhood was maybe 90% Chinese. She attended all Chinese schools but the instruction was in Bahasa Indonesia, a standardized version of Malay, which was once the language of a tiny minority that for political and linguistic reasons was chosen to be the country’s official language upon independence in 1945. (Not entirely unlike Standard High German, Bahasa Indonesia was made the official national language in an effort to unify a nation of many tongues). Every single one of her friends is Chinese. She dated only Chinese men and eventually married one.
Thanks to a class she took for a summer in China, she speaks a little Mandarin, but not very well. Still, she says, the Chinese business people who come to Surabaya consider her fully Chinese. And, with China’s growing commercial presence in the region—it is, by far, Indonesia’s largest trading partner—that’s a big advantage.
When she was a little girl, Angela’s parents made it clear that the Javanese were not like her. Not only were they not at their same “cultural level,” but when they got paid they just frittered away their money. “They don’t know how to save,” she said in a concerned tone. She wouldn’t tell me what else her parents told her.
Other than language, the biggest difference Angela saw between herself and her parents and grandparents was religion. A few years ago, she said she began to question why her elders “worshipped their ancestors rather than God.” She converted to Catholicism not long after. While Christian missionaries had been proselytizing the Chinese in Indonesia since at least the 19th century, the number of conversions exploded under the Suharto regime. Some converted as a way of obscuring their ethnicity, their way of complying with the national policy of assimilation. Conversion was “not a matter of what they believed,” writes sociologist Andreas Susanto, “but what they perceived was safe.” So why not convert to Islam, the majority religion? It may have been a reflection of their “reluctance to assimilate into the indigenous society,” of keeping “their distance” from the Indonesian majority.5 Converting to Christianity also gave Chinese Indonesians a sense of belonging to a global network. Today, almost half are either Protestant or Catholic.
But Angela isn’t living under a coercive assimilationist policy, and other than her apparent disdain for what she called “ancestor worship,” I didn’t get a full grasp of why she converted. It’s quite possible that she did so religious reasons, that she was looking for some meaning in her life. Still, her parish is 60 to 70% Chinese, but the rest are mostly from migrants from outlying Nusa Tenggara and Madura islands. It’s the first time she has ever chosen to be in an ethnically-mixed private setting. She said she enjoyed it.
Without language and religion, it’s not entirely clear what Chineseness means to Angela other than the networks, attitudes, and behaviors that make for success in a global marketplace.
Before we said our goodbyes, we discussed the ethnic tensions that still exist between the Chinese and Javanese. We talked about the growing upward mobility among the Javanese. I asked her whether that was a good thing, thinking that perhaps Javanese economic success could undercut some of the jealousy and resentment some had felt for the Chinese. She disagreed. She didn’t like the trend. She said, “It just means there’s less for us Chinese.”
***
I have no idea whether Angela’s opinions are reflective of Chinese Indonesians at large. All I can say is that her honesty rattled me. It bothered me. I wasn’t used to it.
Sure, I’ve heard Americans utter all sorts of raw things on racial and ethnic matters over the years, but rarely so openly, and never to a complete stranger with a notebook in his hand. It made me wonder how much of America’s post-civil rights era “unity in diversity” regime has been based on the policing of speech, whether free intellectual–and cultural–expression had been among the costs of America’s much celebrated diversity. I wonder whether the price of social peace means we actually have little idea what Americans are thinking when no one is around. And, if so, can that really be considered peace?
- Raka Ibrahim, “Marrying into Chinese-Indonesian Families: Stories of Interethnic Relationships,” The Jakarta Post, January 31, 2022. https://www.thejakartapost.com/culture/2022/01/30/marrying-into-chinese-indonesian-families-stories-of-interethnic-relationships.html. ↩︎
- Amy Chua, World on Fire : How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 6. ↩︎
- Marleen Dieleman et al., “Chinese Indonesians and the Regime Change: Alternative Perspectives,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed. Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 3. ↩︎
- Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 232-233. ↩︎
- Andreas Susanto, “Diversity in Compliance: Yogyakarta Chinese and the New Order Assimilation Policy,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston, 2011), 80-81. ↩︎
