The Sea

In 1995, our nation had just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of our independence from colonialism. It was venerated as ‘The Year of Golden Indonesia’. Yet, soon after the nationwide festive celebrations, we entered the ‘years of living dangerously’.

Riots began to spread all over the country. In one city, a Chinese reportedly tore the pages of the Holy Quran, causing Muslim mobs to retaliate by burning every Chinese- owned shop in town. In another city, a Chinese protested as his sleep was disturbed by early morning drum-beating during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, causing the masses destroyed all houses and shops of the Chinese, as well as factories, banks, churches, temples.

Our national television continued to air a public message from the government, showing a helpless traditional sailboat being rocked by rolling waves in the middle of a dark, stormy sea, as flashes of light raked across the sky. Then appeared the image of our president Suharto on the screen with his familiar stretch of smile, as the narrator said in a calm, deep voice: ‘The storm certainly will pass, you just need to trust your captain.’

Those days, all media were the mouthpieces of the government. We never heard anything about brutal massacres that happened in Aceh, West Papua, East Timor. We had never been aware of the massive corruption of the Suharto family, so that the Forbes magazine had crowned our president as the sixth richest man on the planet, while the great majority of his people were living on less than two dollars a day. Most people wouldn’t dare to openly criticize Suharto or his government, if they didn’t want to suddenly disappear, as if vaporized.

As the Southeast Asian financial crisis swept Indonesia in 1997, prices rose to exorbitant levels as basic commodities became scarce, people got hungrier and angrier. Demonstrations, something we had never seen before under the authoritarian regime, suddenly sprang up everywhere. People shouted louder, as now they had got all the guts, to urge Suharto to step down from his apparently eternal throne. People were protesting against the government, yet it was the Chinese’s shops, houses, churches and temples that they burned to the ground.

Being Chinese in Suharto’s Indonesia was in fact being a second-class citizen. The identity card of an ethnic-Chinese citizen would be marked with a special code, which would add complication for the holder when dealing with government’s draconian bureaucracy. It was also harder for the Chinese to get enrolled in public schools, to be a civil servant, or to be involved in politics. Their scope of activities was more or less limited to one sector only: business and commerce; and thus, it was not surprising that the ethnic-Chinese on average became richer economically than the majority of native population. With no political power, money had become their last source of security.

But the more you have, the more you feel insecure. The rich Chinese would generally live in exclusive residential complexes, with their palace­like houses being fortified with high and solid walls, as if to protect them from the indigenous sea of poverty surrounding them. Also for the sake of feeling secure, some of them would prefer to mingle with only the members of the same ethnicity, and thus, they would reinforce their prejudice that the natives were lazy, poor, backward, dangerous. On the other hand, the native population was increasingly convinced that the Chinese were an arrogant and exclusive people, who only mind their own business, only think to enrich themselves, reluctant to blend in with the locals, and reluctant to share their wealth—in short, ‘un-nationalistic’.

Those years, the regime’s propaganda was intense, claiming that ‘the Chinese only make up two percent of our country population but control ninety percent of our national economy!’ The poor, angry, and ignorant masses simply regarded the Chinese as ‘foreigners’ who had robbed the country and caused all their miseries; while they saw themselves as a wounded nation ironically being colonized in their own land of fertility and abundance.

Overwhelmed by fear, tens of thousands of Chinese fled overseas. The exodus invited more condemnation. See how they treat our county, no more than a hotel that they can check in and out of as they please! See that they’re never willing to suffer with the rest of the nation! But does being ‘nationalistic’ mean you should foolishly wait to be burned inside your homes? The majority of the Chinese, in fact, were like our family, who had nowhere to go, no passport, and no money. Eventually, the four of us slept on the same bed with all the lights on, with a hoe, a sickle, and a crowbar already prepared under the bed. My father also had painted a sign in front of our shop-house, in big capital letters: ‘BELONGS TO NATIVES’.

In 1998, the Indonesian currency depreciated 750 percent in less than six months. Ten thousand students held a massive demonstration in Jakarta, outside the university gates, and suddenly, the security officers started shooting into the crowds, killing four students. Right after the incident, mass riots turned into a massive rampage with a clear target: the Chinese. They were checked on the streets, robbed, beaten, stripped naked, burned, killed, and some women were raped. Thousands of people ran amok, looting private houses, offices, shops, and malls. Among the mobs there were those who had special abilities of throwing Molotov cocktails and of provoking the masses by yelling something like, ‘Attack! That mall is owned by Chinese!’ Amidst this mass destruction, men laughed insanely, attacking and burning and looting anything they encountered, spewing revenge and hatred, as if the pangs of poverty they had been suffering would be compensated by their destruction of the city and its symbols of wealth and modernity.

The aftermath of the Jakarta riots was 5,723 buildings and 1,948 vehicles destroyed, 1,109 people killed due to fire incidents and twenty- seven were shot dead. The numbers of Chinese killed by the mobs and of the Chinese women raped remained unknown to this day.

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