Being Indonesian in Today’s Age

KOMPAS/AHMAD ARIF

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The two young women are third-generation Chinese-Indonesians. However, Indonesia is their homeland and their future. They had spent just one week on a student exchange program in China’s Fujian Province and they already missed Indonesia.

“I miss Indonesian food,” said Cindy Gulla, a student at Jakarta’s Pelita Harapan University (UPH). She said she found Indonesian food spicier and tastier than the Chinese food she found in Fujian.

From appearances alone, it is difficult to distinguish Cindy from Fujian’s local citizens. The former member of wildly popular girl band JKT 48 has straight hair, almond-shaped eyes and pale skin. Locals often speaks to her in Mandarin but she just politely shakes her head and responds in English that she is Indonesian.

Having been born and brought up in Jakarta, Cindy cannot speak Mandarin. “I learnt the language back in school but I am not interested in it and I cannot speak it anymore,” she said.

Meanwhile, Risky, a student of Tanjungpura University in West Kalimantan, wears a hijab and speaks in a thick Malay accent. She was born in Bekasi, West Java, and grew up in Pontianak. Her prescription eyeglasses hide her almond-shaped eyes.

With her appearance, Risky said she was better accepted by those around her. If Cindy is often stigmatized as an Indonesian of Chinese descent, Risky has it the other way around. “People often don’t believe me when I say I am of Chinese descent. My grandparents were born in China. I think they were from Fujian,” she explained.

Cindy and Risky are just two members of an Indonesian student exchange program in Fujian, China. Fujian is a region in southern China with a historically close relationship with Indonesia.

Most Chinese-Indonesians can trace their family history to the region. Fujian is a port city from where many of the Chinese Empire’s armadas set sail in the past, including Cheng Ho’s famed armada that sailed to Indonesia several times from 1405 to 1433.

Many members of the student exchange program have Chinese ancestors. Udayana University student Teresa Tania, for instance, is a fifth generation Chinese-Indonesian. “Even if my ancestors were from Fujian, it’s just family history. I am an Indonesian. I feel foreign in China,” she said.

The relationship between China and Indonesia has long been established. Chinese ambassador to Indonesia Xiao Qian said that, during the era of Silk Road maritime trade, Indonesia held an important position in connecting China to countries in the West.

Historical research shows that a majority of Indonesians have the same ancestors as the Han people, China’s ethnic majority. A genetic study by Albert Min-Shan Ko from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology shows that the ancestors of Austronesians came from Fuzhou in Fujian. They first set sail to Taiwan around 8,000 years ago.

Around 5,000 years ago, the ancestors of Austronesians first spread to the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Pacific Islands and Madagascar. The results of this study were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in March 2014.

Today, speakers of Austronesian languages make up the majority of Indonesians.

A genetic study by the Eijkman Institute of Molecular Biology found that, prior to the arrival of Austronesian language speakers, there had been migrations from Asia to the Nusantara archipelago some 15,000 – 35,000 years ago. “In the Java and Sunda regions, the Austroasiatic genetic composition is more dominant than Austronesia,” Eijkman Institute geneticist Herawati Sudoyo said.

The institute’s latest genetic study reaffirms that there are no native Indonesians. All Indonesians essentially came in waves from foreign lands and can trace their ancestral history to Africa.

Thus, the human migration to the Nusantara region was a long process that went on for thousands of years. The process went on naturally before any modern state boundaries were established.

Cindy and Risky’s grandmothers belonged to the last waves of Chinese migrants to Indonesia. In the late 1960s, China was suffering from widespread poverty and political turmoil. Consequently, many Chinese, especially those living in the country’s southern regions such as Fujian, chose to migrate to places around the world, including Indonesia.

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Mohammad Nasir said during the inauguration of the Eijkman Institute’s National Genome Center in Jakarta on Thursday (26/4/2018) that dividing Indonesians based on their physical features was an outdated mindset. “I have neighbors who are of Chinese descent but even their parents were born in Indonesia. Legally, they are Indonesians,” he said.

KOMPAS/AHMAD ARIF

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Identity politics

Today, China is an economic superpower. It is also growing rapidly in science and technology. The United States National Science Foundation reported in 2017 that China had become the country with the highest number of published scientific papers in the world.

In 2016, China published more than 426,000 scientific papers, or 18.6 percent of all indexed papers in Elsevier’s Scopus. During the same period, the United States produced 409,000 scientific papers.

China is catching up with Japan and South Korea as the preferred country to pursue higher education for many students around the world, including those in Indonesia. In order to attract potential students from Muslim countries, Chinese colleges offer halal food canteens.

At a number of colleges, such as Fujian’s Xiamen University, students are able to access Google and social media sites such as Facebook.

Aland Dharmawan from Malang and Maggie from Medan, for instance, are now pursuing master’s degrees at Xiamen University. They chose to go to China because of scholarship opportunities and a better chance of securing a job amid increasing Chinese investment in Indonesia.

They also wish to trace their ancestors. Maggie was finally able to meet her cousin in Xiamen. Long-separated families are reconnected. Despite being awed by China’s progress, Aland and Maggie said they wished to come home and work in Indonesia. “I miss West Sumatran cuisine,” Maggie said.