The Kho/Go Families and the Legacy of the Chinese Malangers
Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar by Melani Budianta, a professor of literary and cultural studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia.
Malang is known as the breeding ground of many Indonesian intellectuals and activists from Chinese background. It has 'produced' professionals of diverse fields, from world class artists, national soccer players to the first female aeronautic engineer.
Questions have been raised about the social construction of the city which has propelled such active middle class citizens. What is more interesting to know is the fact that many of these professionals and activists are somehow related in the web of family trees which
connect these 'Malangers'.
Discussion about Chinese in Indonesia usually covers the issue of the ideological divide of the integrationist and the assimilationist, the ‘totok’ and the ‘peranakan’, and has yet to
examine the close-knit family and friendship network that binds the seemingly segregated political camps and cultural divide. In this work in progress, Melani Budianta will draw her analysis from the family tree, the available biographies of family members, the
photographs as templates of the changing times in the Malang and the demographic mobility of the Chinese middle class family.
Melani Budianta is a professor of literary and cultural studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia. She has done research on cultural diversity and identities in Indonesia. The work-in-progress presentation is a part of a book manuscript entitled Transiting in Malang: The Chinese in 1940-1960.
The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar is a cooperation of the KITLV, IIAS, VVI , the Programme in South and Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Cultural Anthropology & Development
Sociology, Leiden University.