"Strangers Who Are Not Foreign"

On 1 January 1960, a regulation prohibiting so-called aliens from trading in rural areas came into effect and the livelihood of thousands of Chinese Indonesians was taken away. Taking a strong stand against this measure, Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote nine letters to a friend which were published serially in the newspaper Bintang Minggu. In March, after the tremendous positive response that greeted them, the letters were republished in book form as Hoa Kiau di Indonesia (Overseas Chinese in Indonesia). The authorities reacted by banning the book and imprisoning Pramoedya.

This paper illuminates Pramoedya's public role as an intellectual by examining how his book sparked an unprecedented debate about Chinese Indonesians. In Hoa Kiau, Pramoedya begins to address racialism while interrogating the notion of Indonesian identity. He locates the 1960 regulation in historical context, thereby stressing its continuity with racially based policies of Dutch colonial rule.

In the process, Pramoedya steps outside the overblown public rhetoric of "independence" and "freedom" prevalent at the time, thus gaining a clearer perspective on inherited patterns of power and its abuse. Against the charged anti-Chinese climate which he attributes to a "nationalism suffering from sickness," he crafts a language that provokes empathy, dialog, and critical thinking. Not merely a history of the Chinese Indonesian community or a simple defense of it, his book created a language which disturbed contemporary assumptions about nation and community.

Sumit K. Mandal, Cornell University