Chinese tragedies
Having read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's article "Drawing on history for harmony" on Nov. 4, one could not help but conclude that all past racial disharmonies were top-down. And yet, one of the possible approaches to racial harmony is bottom-up, that is, to look for the bluish birthmark on our buttocks, a birthmark traceable to Mongolian or Chinese blood.
V.S. Naipaul writes in his book Beyond belief as follows: "Religious or cultural purity is fundamentalist fantasy. Perhaps only shut-away tribal communities can have strong and simple ideas of who they are. The rest of us are for the most part culturally mixed in varying degrees, and everyone lives in his own way with his complexity."
And in 1995, V.S.Naipaul had the strongest intuitive foresight to have conversations with quite a few of our present most- influential leaders.
On the effect of the Cold War on Chinese here and other Chinese tragedies from 1966 to 1968, Lynn Pan, the present most authoritative writer on overseas Chinese recounts in her book Sons of the yellow emperor, the story of the overseas Chinese, as per the following.
"On the effect of cold war politics upon Chinese, the recounts are as follows (page 219-222 ): The main obstacle to the finding of a modus vivendi between the overseas Chinese and the other races, wrote the late scholar Victor Purcell in 1965, was the continuance of the Cold War. If the artificial alignment of humanity consequent upon this could be removed, it was likely that the presence of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia would become increasingly less a 'problem'. There is no doubt that anticommunism blurred into anti-Sinicism (and vice versa), and not just in Southeast Asia... All through the 1950s the American policy toward the Chinese diaspora has as its aim the preservation of overseas Chinese loyalty to the nationalist government on Taiwan... Federal agents swooped through the Chinatown repeatedly to sniff out 'un-American activities'. (page 222 ) ...The desinicization of emigrant Chinese did not worry Peking quite so much; it was all right for the overseas Chinese to cut their ancestral ties so long as they transferred their attachments to their adopted countries and not to Taiwan... In the long run, the contests between the two harmed the reputation of the overseas Chinese, for it encouraged the image of an unassimilable and chauvinistic minority, on which the indigenous nationalists and politicians of the host societies were all too ready to exploit, to keep alive the overseas Chinese scapegoat.
"There is no reason to suppose that the overseas Chinese, left to themselves, would not have conformed to the classic immigrant pattern, the first generation resolutely resisting change, the third generation becoming totally assimilated, to the dismay of their grandparents."
On the tragedies from 1966 to 1968, "The degree of violence varied from place to place and from month to month. In northern Sumatra, ...hundreds of Chinese were killed and thousands terrorized. The most fearful of the stories came out of West Kalimantan, where Chinese were horribly murdered... The military command, upon receiving news of the killings, ordered the Chinese to evacuate the jungle villages and make for the coastal towns... The conditions of camps were appalling. Food ran short, typhoid and cholera were rife and within 10 weeks of the evacuation order some 4,000 Chinese had died. An English journalist who visited one of the camps in 1968 learned that relief workers were removing between 15 and 20 corpses a day."
The Chinese until now seem to be the illegitimate children of two worlds, where they are used and hated when successful and rich but despised and discarded when they are poor and cornered. Until now, they are still the illegitimate children on the run with the memory and knowledge of poverty, unprotected, danger, humiliation and indignity.
SIA KA MOU
Jakarta