Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (45 page)

The anti-communist conflagration of 1965 gave many indigenous Indonesians a chance to avenge the jealousy they felt for the hard-working, clannish Chinese on whom they depended for so many of the things they wanted or needed. Sukarno and the PKI had both been flirting with Beijing, ergo, any Chinese person must be a communist and therefore fair game. ‘It was doubly unfair, because lots of the Chinese community here were refugees who fled China after the communists won the civil war in China in 1949,’ said Hermanto, the chrysanthemum tea shop owner. ‘Then they get accused of being PKI and . . .’ He drew his finger across his throat.

The Chinese Indonesians that survived 1965 were roundly discriminated against. They were not welcome in the civil service, the military or the other institutions of state. Relatively well educated, they were pushed even further into the markets, shop-houses and small factories that
are
the private sector in most of Indonesia. They kept their heads down, worked hard, and strengthened kinship networks that they could draw on in dangerous times. These networks are really not so very different from the web of exchange which ties Mama Bobo into her vast extended clan in Sumba. Except that among Chinese Indonesians the medium of exchange is not buffalo but contracts and capital, and they are not slaughtered, but used to spawn more contracts and capital.

Like the Javanese princelings of the pre-colonial age, Suharto needed the capital and the commercial networks that the Chinese diaspora could provide. He handed out monopolies; in return, the Chinese Indonesian compradors underwrote many of Suharto’s political operations. Indonesia got capital investment in export-led industries, and the Chinese got richer. Typically, though, what Suharto gave with one hand he took away with the other. He entrenched social discrimination against the Chinese; Chinese schools, temples and newspapers were closed down, and the ethnic Chinese were pressured into taking Indonesian-sounding names.

In the mid-1990s the Australian government published a book that included an eye-catching table showing that ethnic Chinese controlled 80 per cent of the Indonesian economy. Much less eye-catching and always overlooked (including by me, in my reporting for Reuters on the subject), was footnote 17, which mentioned that the figures didn’t include those bits of the economy that are controlled by state enterprises or foreign multinationals. A reworking of the numbers suggests that Chinese Indonesians owned just under a third of the nation’s wealth, still eight times more that you would expect for a group that makes up just 3.5 per cent of Indonesia’s population.

Their disproportionate wealth made Chinese Indonesians an easy scapegoat when the rulers of the day felt the need to allow people to blow off political steam; the first major assault on the Chinese community dates back to 1740. Looting and the systematic rape of Chinese women reached a peak in the chaos that led to the downfall of Suharto. Since then, many of the discriminatory laws of the Suharto era have been repealed, and Chinese Indonesians have begun setting up bilingual schools and drifting back to Confucian temples. ‘It’s got a lot better now,’ one Chinese shopkeeper told me. ‘By which I mean, I no longer live my whole life thinking: I wonder if I’ll get through this year without my shop being burned down?’

In Singkawang, Melanie had assumed the role that the Reuters photographer Enny used to play. She sat on the back of our rented motorbike as I cruised around town looking for adventure, and poked me in the ribs when she saw something interesting. At one such poke, I skidded to a halt in front an old Chinese lady, her face framed by thick curtains of freshly made noodles hanging out on the dusty roadside to dry.

I greeted her, but she spoke virtually no Indonesian. Then I brushed off my rusty Mandarin and tried that. It worked; she brightened up instantly and became quite chatty. The noodle factory belonged to her son Ah Hui, she said, and she invited us in to look around.

It was like the seventh circle of hell. Under a single bare lightbulb, a huge machine that looked a bit like a mediaeval instrument of torture whirred and clanked. Into its maw, Ah Hui – skinny, shirtless, sweating – poured a crumble of flour, egg and water. Clank, clank, chug-chug-chug, whirr, shudder,
clunk
, bang,
boom
, clunk. It felt like someone was playing the drums on the inside of my skull. The machine burped toxic black fumes and suddenly all was silent. A bolt had shaken itself out of place. One of the teenaged workers fished around in the dough, extracted the bolt, put it back in place, and restarted the machine. Eventually a sheet of dough emerged and was wound, pressed, combined and rewound around a large stick, like a giant toilet roll.

Once the ridged shelves along the wall were loaded with toilet rolls, the mangles were changed for blades and the shredding of noodles began. A peculiarly beautiful Dayak boy in a battered red cowboy hat sat at the mouth of the monster machine. As it spat out noodles, he scooped them over polished wooden sticks and handed them off to a team of boys who hung them in the drying room next door. It was a big room with a skylight and many ceiling fans, all crusted with spider webs and soot. Dotted around the floor, invisible among the curtains of drying noodles, were rusty burners fed with gas from tubes that trailed across the floor; I became aware of them only when my bare feet drifted too close to the flames. The burners speed the drying process; the room was an inferno.

Beyond the noodle curtains, not a metre from the flapping door to the loo, a wooden hot tub full of noodles steamed over an open fire; once softened, they would be packaged up and distributed to the street vendors around town.

Though the business was started by his grandfather, Ah Hui was not optimistic about its future. His own son was only six. ‘By the time he’s old enough, he won’t want to do this sort of work.’ Ah Hui said that, already, all of his staff were Dayaks. ‘Chinese kids, they ask for higher wages, and then they only stay long enough to learn the business. After that, they set up in competition with you.’

As we were leaving, Ah Hui’s mother gave me a huge bag full of noodles. ‘It’s so nice to find someone who speaks Mandarin,’ she said. ‘Hardly any of you young folks do.’

Returning to the chrysanthemum tea shop, I mentioned this to Hermanto. His own father was a Mandarin teacher, he said. Though he kept some texts hidden in the roof of their house, after the killings of 1965 the teacher did not dare to contravene Suharto’s policies; he did not teach his own son Mandarin. ‘Mine is the lost generation,’ Hermanto said. ‘I feel like I’ve been cut off from my roots.’

Ethnicity and roots are issues that loom large over Kalimantan; sometimes they erupt into cataclysmic violence. The killing of the Chinese in 1965 was an anomaly: the enduring friction is between two quite different ethnic groupings, the Dayaks and the Malays, who both consider Borneo to be their ancestral homeland. Over a century ago the greatest of all adventure writers, Joseph Conrad, set his first novel in Borneo. ‘The Malays and the river tribes of Dyaks or Head-hunters are eternally quarrelling,’ he wrote in 1895.
*

The Malays, spread across Sumatra, peninsular Malaysia and Borneo, established Sultanates in what became the larger trading centres of Kalimantan centuries ago. They grew rich by stockpiling and selling on exotica from the island’s forests: hornbill ivory, rhinoceros horn, gold, indigo, camphor and the delightfully named dragon’s blood, a bright-red resin used by apothecaries. These and other glories of the forest were collected and paddled down the rivers by Dayaks, the colourful forest-dwellers who featured so prominently in
Boys’ Own Paper
-type stories of the late Victorian period. These stories tell of great, steamy rivers that snake lazily through lush and fetid jungles. Tattooed savages with distended earlobes and pointed teeth sit around on the verandas of their communal longhouses, sharpening darts for their blowpipes and biding time until their next headhunting raid.

Feared by the colonists and neglected by more recent regimes, the Dayaks have sat for much of the archipelago’s history at the margins of the state, permanently under-represented in the bureaucracy and politics. They were unable to defend their forests against Suharto and his cronies; hundreds of square kilometres of their homeland were fed into the jaws of Taiwanese plywood factories. And their traditional systems of tribal leadership, their adat, could not stand up to the onslaught of Suharto’s ‘one-size fits-all’ structure of village government.

In the mid-1990s a small group of well-educated, urban Dayaks grew tired of being portrayed as savages and even more tired of seeing most government jobs go to the Malays, an ethnic group favoured by Jakarta in part because they were nice, civilized Muslims, descended from the sort of Sultanates that Suharto’s people understood. This small group formed the Institute of Dayakology. They found staunch allies among international development fashionistas, who had recently begun to focus on protecting trees, tigers and exotic tribes, and who had persuaded the United Nations to declare a Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Dayak leaders quickly became fluent in the rhetoric of indigenous rights. These days, the organization describes its core principles as ‘Gender equality and justice, fraternity, freedom, human rights, democracy, openness, justice, togetherness and anti-violence, so that the process of marginalization, oppression, exploitation and the invasion of globalization can be stopped, so that the dignity, values and sovereignty of the indigenous Dayak community may be upheld.’ The language is modern, but it gave voice to resentments that had been festering since Conrad’s day and before. Nowadays, the real political battles are still between Dayaks on the one hand and Malays on the other. But a third ethnic group – the Madurese – have become stuck like a punchbag between the two.

Madura is a parched and crowded island off the north-east coast of Java where it is hard to scrape a living; the Madurese have a reputation for ferocity. No one would rent me a motorbike when I visited Madura, because a few days earlier an itinerant toy-seller (‘an outsider, like you’ – from West Java, it turned out) had been killed and his motorbike stolen. ‘Imagine if it happened to you,’ said a Maduran woman with a posse of three Hondas, which I was eyeing hopefully. ‘You’d be dead, but me, I’d lose the bike.’ Then, more seriously, she said: ‘You can’t trust anyone in this island. Not anyone.’

The Dayaks have skirmished with the Madurese since they first arrived in Kalimantan as transmigrants in the mid-1960s. Then in 1997 a group of Madurese men were rude to a couple of Dayak women. The ensuing quarrel exploded into a frenzy of killing that spread far and wide across the province. As many as 1,500 Madurese died and tens of thousands were left homeless and huddled in refugee camps.

I found in chatting to the women in the District AIDS Commission offices in Singkawang that the legacy of this violence makes for unlikely conversation. We started off talking about sex, a mundane subject for people who work with HIV. The chat flitted over prostitution, alighted briefly on alternatives to the missionary position and then buzzed around the anticlimax of marriage. We decided you could track a relationship by looking at a girl’s underwear. If you’re still in lacy matched sets, you either haven’t made it to first base yet, or you’re in love. There’s a slow slide into matching-but-comfy, then the inevitable whatever-is-clean phase: the greying knickers that once were white paired with a red bra that has seen better days. ‘Then you know you’re well and truly married,’ said Ibu Ibit, a Malay in her early thirties.

There’s something utterly universal about this sort of girl talk. ‘When I think of how much time I’d spend washing my hair,’ Ibit said, laughing. ‘Back when we were courting, I mean. It had to be all shiny, all fragrant, even though I knew perfectly well that I was
not
going to take off my jilbab. Now, if it’s even a little bit cold, I look at my husband – ’ she gives a slow sidelong glance, half wicked, half guilty – ‘and I’m like: it’s a bit chilly, darling. Shall we just leave bathing ’til the morning?’

And then the conversation drifted on, and somehow we were talking about the ethnic war of 1997. ‘Everyone just went crazy,’ said Olin, who was Dayak. She described her elder brother and his friends coming home one day holding a human heart which they had cut from an immigrant from Madura. ‘They laid it out there in the yard and the elders were making us all eat,’ Olin said. Warriors who eat their enemy’s heart are said to become invincible. ‘My elder brother had already eaten, and when I refused he was really angry, threatening me with a machete. Everyone was shouting, and insisting, and finally I swallowed a little bit.’ Olin related this in an absolute monotone. ‘Then I ran behind the house and threw up. I didn’t stop throwing up for a week.’ It wasn’t until she followed someone’s suggestion to eat a bit of dog that Olin’s stomach settled.

I asked Ibit if she remembered anything about these ‘Troubles’. ‘Oh, we had our own Troubles,’ she said, and told me of the copycat pogrom, in 1999. Ibit described her daily walk home from middle school in Tebas, a small town in Sambas about an hour north of Singkawang, where she grew up.