Chapter 15 - On Silence, Seeking, and Speaking: Meditations on Identity, Photography, and Diaspora Through Family Albums

Summary

Important disclaimer: The term “Chinese-Indonesian” or “Indonesian-Chinese” does not fully hold the layers of complexities and intricacies of this identity. As the understanding and usage of terms evolve, people have created and used the terms “Tionghoa,” “Hoakiau,” “Peranakan,” “Indo-Chinese,” and more recently “Chindo,” a portmanteau popularized by English-speaking urban millennials mainly in Jakarta. Who knows if any term will ever evolve to truly encompass the full extent of complexity and intricacy of being Chinese-Indonesian. ▶15.1 ▶15.2

Another disclaimer: I didn’t know I was Chinese-Indonesian until 2017.

“The Hoakiau are not voyagers from abroad landed on our shores. They have been here for as long as our own ancestors. They are, in fact, Indonesians, who live and die in Indonesia, but because of a certain political veiling, suddenly become strangers who are not foreign.”

PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER

When I first started this essay, I was in the midst of a five-month quarantine lockdown in Brooklyn, NY, a nest of revolutionaries and a hotspot for both protests and riots following the murder of George Floyd and other Black-American citizens who, after 400 years, continue to be marginalized, disenfranchised, and treated as second-class citizens in the United States. Sounds of sirens surround my apartment and helicopters hover above as I wait in limbo for my artist visa extension to be approved by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), now working with new policies under a chaotic administration implementing a radically new agenda. I contemplate my (dis)place(ment) here in the United States—how I’ve spent half my life sending hundreds of pages to USCIS every few years to prove my worth—and my (dis)place(ment) in Indonesia—where my family has resided for centuries but continues to be alienated.

I am neither a historian nor an academic, and I do not consider myself a photographer or an expert on Chinese-Indonesian identity. I am simply an artist working in film and theater, constantly scrutinizing patterns and phenomena within a society and its sub-societies. My search for truthful stories and traditions of storytelling has led me to investigate the history behind photographs from my family archives.