The view from the periphery: the voices of self in transnational narratives

Abstract

Many Indonesian Chinese transnationals in Hong Kong consider themselves rootless and nationless. Wherever they have been, they were (and still are) at the periphery--they were the Chinese ethnic minority in Indonesia in the 1950’s, they were the returnees who had overseas quanxi (connection) that made them politically suspicious in the 1960’s, they were the new immigrants from the backward uncivilized China mainland to Hong Kong in the 1970’s. Even after decades of residing in Hong Kong, they are still not quite “local”. These Indonesian Chinese retain distinctive language and cultural practices. They are typically multilingual in varieties of Huaqiao Guoyu (Overseas Chinese Mandarin), Indonesian languages such as Bahasa Indonesian and Javanese, Chinese dialects such as Chiuchao, Hokkien and Hakka. They listen to and dance with Indonesian folk songs, wear Indonesian attire, enjoy Indonesian and Peranakan/Nyonya food, maintain close kinship ties with Indonesia and Singapore. Their self-perception of identity is an ambivalent topic that brought up past reconstructed memories and reinterpreted experiences. This paper takes their self-narratives as sites of analysis to explore their multiple voices and performativities in relation to issues of language and cultural ideology and identity. Ong (1999) exposes needs for observing the environs concerning transnationals, arguing that if “we pay attention to the transnational practices and imaginings of the nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his flexibility, we obtain a different picture of how nation states articulate with capitalism in late modernity”. This paper examines the transnational practices of these individuals and the condition that enable their mobilities (or the lack of) both in physical and symbolic/social levels, and how these practices can be understood in times of sweeping sociopolitical changes with evolving relationship between individuals and the nation states.