The main concern of this research is the question of relationship between “double outsiders” their new “third home.” My focus is on Chinese Indonesians who migrated to Netherlands after deciding to leave Indonesia (their “second home”) because of growing resentment against them. During my stay at IIAS, I would like to collect data that will enable me to reconstruct the life experiences of those who moved to the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s.
Soeharto’s fall in 1998 was a turning point for the Chinese Indonesians as well as scholars who are interested in studying them. There has been a notable increase in the study of Chinese Indonesians, many of these focusing on their “Chineseness” in relation to their memories under Soeharto’s discriminatory assimilation policy. Not many researches however have looked at the experiences of Chinese Indonesians of the pre-Soeharto period. This is partly due to the limitation of the documentation.
To some extent, this was the limitation of my own dissertation on the dynamics of Chinese Indonesian culture in post-Soeharto Indonesia where I examined the so-called “revival” of Chinese culture in terms of the return of the Chinese language, the new-religious movement that returned to Confucianism, and “museumization” of Chinese Indonesian culture in the state run amusement park, Taman Mini.
These cases show the continuities and discontinuities of Chinese Indonesian heritage from 1960s and the present and also between what is considered “Chinese” and “Chinese Indonesian.” What I thought was lacking in the dissertation was a more in-depth historical and geographical context to understand them.
By conducting this proposed project, I hope to address this gap in my dissertation and place the issue of Chinese Indonesian-ess in its proper historical setting, as well as deal with the equally important process of their second migration to a third location, the Netherlands.