HUI YEW-FOONG. Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011, xvi+342p.

Abstract

Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia HUI YEW-FOONG Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011, xvi+342p.Hui Yew-Foong has written a highly nuanced ethnographic monograph on how the Chinese of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, negotiate their stranger-subjectivity with their host locale. author begins with a two-chapter section, Looking for in a Foreign Land, by performing a dual- task: reconstructing the of the Chinese community in West Kalimantan during the Japanese Occupation (1942-45) and the Sukarno years (1945-65) in light of the emergence of post-Suharto era local Chinese historical narratives, while at the same time deconstructing the narrativity of these recent Chinese histories.Chapter two reconstructs the of a hitherto unnoticed (e.g. in Heidhues 2003) anti- Japanese underground organization, the West Borneo Anti-Japanese Alliance (??????? ?), an organization that has a big place in the aforementioned post-Suharto historical narratives. Alliance was organized by a group of progressive Chinese sojourners in the region, and they carried out low-level tactical resistance during the Occupation. Alliance's leaders were exe- cuted together with, according to one estimate, some 3,000 other community leaders, half of whom were Chinese, on trumped up charges of conspiring to overthrow the Japanese (p.55). Hui argues that although their tactical resistance meant little to overall wartime strategy, and probably had direct connection with the alleged plot leading to the Japanese massacre, framing . . . [their resis- tance] in close proximity to the force of death during the Occupation dissimulates the helplessness of the Chinese communities (p. 63). This serves as an important signpost for the narrators' memory of subsequent events in the post-war years.Chapter three examines the histories of the struggle between the pro-Guomindang (Republic of China, ROC) and pro-Chinese Communist (People's Republic of China, PRC) factions of the Chinese community between 1945 and 1965. As most ethnic Chinese remained Chinese citizens in the early Indonesian years, intra-communal politics continued to be divided along Chinese polit- ical lines. But what remains to be explained is the overwhelming support for the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s. According to an Indonesian survey in 1957, some 25,125 (72%) students went to pro-PRC schools while 9,792 (28%) attended Catholic or pro-ROC schools (p. 84). Hui argues that the memory of anti-Japanese resistance and the common experience of the massacre led the Chinese to shed their previous dialect-group divisions, and to throw in their lot with the newly established PRC. Examining the popular progressive plays and songs from the period, he finds that they have no resonance with the everyday lives of the Chinese in West Kalimantan who sang them, but they nevertheless resonate within the imagination of the singers (p. 97). This reso- nance, argues Hui, stems from the convergence of two desires-identification with the idiom of origin, and identification with the force of history (p. 105).Chapter four, The New (Dis)order: Making Strangers at Home looks into the Narratives of Violence surrounding the memories of the Suharto regime's mass expulsion of the Chinese from the West Kalimantan countryside in 1967. From October to December 1967, in a bid to flush out communist guerillas in the region, the military instigated local Dayaks to evict between 50,000 and 117,000 rural Chinese to the cities. Between a few hundred to two to three thousand were estimated to have been killed in the process (p.131). Hui's is the first academic account to critically examine the Chinese experience of the event (see also Davidson 2008). Corroborating Davidson's findings that the Dayaks were instigated to issue eviction orders first, and kill where the Chinese failed to comply, Chapter four uses personal interviews and narratives published in the post-Suharto Chinese press to confirm that the Chinese were indeed given a day to a week's notice to leave their homes before the massacring bands arrived. …