Stenberg (石峻山), J.Stenberg, J. (2022). “Finding the Distant Homeland Here”: Contemporary Indonesian Poetry in Chinese [“在这里找到了遥遥的祖籍” – 印度尼西亚华 文当代诗歌]. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 18(2), 312-334. https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.1163/17932548-12341469

"In situations where a language is in some way marginalized or under threat, as has certainly been and still is the case with Chinese in Indonesia, the insistence on writing in Chinese as a political and cultural act can become a feature of the corpus. In the New Order years, Chinese in both written and spoken forms was widely suppressed in Indonesia. There was only one regular print outlet within Indonesia – the Harian Indonesia 印度尼西亚日报, and that was under close government control (Hoon 2006: 97). The effacement of the Chinese script went so far that Western travelers to Indonesia remember having their luggage checked for works in Chinese, since “printed matter in Chinese characters [fell] under the same category as pornography, arms, and narcotics in the short list of items visitors are prohibited from bringing into this, the world’s fourth largest country” (Heryanto 1997: 27). Suppression was, however, uneven over genre, space, and time – Chinese singing and Hong Kong movies, for instance, continued to circulate – but Chinese Indonesians had to be perpetually wary of public expression (Dawis 2009).

Thus, for a certain circle of Chinese Indonesians, the resumption of writing and the reestablishment of publication outlets in Chinese has itself been a political statement – a reinscription of an erased community into the world Chinese-language community as well as a way to stake a claim as an element of multiethnic Indonesian society. As the inaugural editorial statement of one Sino-Indonesian publication said in 1999, “Chinese-language Indonesian writing is an inalienable constituent of global Chinese-language writing” ([phrase omitted]), while also carefully noting that such writing was “‘rooted in Indonesia,’ an inalienable and organic part of Indonesian literature as a whole” (Yinhua wenyou 1999). Thus, Tee Kim Tong’s observation that Malaysian Chinese-language authors “write (or choose to write) in Chinese because such an act helps manifest their self and cultural identities as well as community consciousness” (Tee 2010: 84) is equally apt for those writing in Chinese in Indonesia.

The anxiety and loneliness of literary production in Chinese in evident in work such as that of Zhang Hanying 张汉英, whose “Street Lamp on a Cold Night” 寒夜里的路灯 is subtitled “for Chinese Indonesian authors” 献给印华写作者 and begins

You stand lonely at the side of the road

Body draped in dust, torso ground down by the years

Trembling slightly in the dense mists of evening

I’m delighted to hear the faint sound of your heartbeat

Zhang 1997 [1992]: 298

你孤独地伫立路旁

披一身风尘，岁月磨伤了躯干

在朦胧的夜雾里微微地颤抖

惊喜依稀听见你心跳的声音

With its evocation of signs of life continuing despite hardship and its explicit address to writers, the ability to continue literary production in Chinese is in this poem cast as an absolute question of survival."