Joining bits and pieces: a Chinese Indonesian mother–daughter collaborative witnessing as a resource for writing an autobiographical novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I as researcher and my mother as collaborator present small stories about our own and my late grandmother’s lived experiences during the New Order and Reformasi eras in Indonesia. Both perform a collaborative witnessing, which is a form of “relational autoethnography” that enables researchers to focus on and evocatively tell the lives of others through conversation and shared storytelling as a source that informs my life writing practice. Collaborating with my mother, this article is a reflection on how I, as a young Chinese Indonesian woman writer, capture and negotiate my family’s hybrid identities as double minorities through writing an autobiographical novel on my late grandmother’s and my mother’s lived experiences as well as my own.