Indonesians finds home away from home at UC Berkeley

Indonesians finds home away from home at UC Berkeley

By Dewi Anggraeni

BERKELEY, California (JP): Mention University of California
Berkeley to an Indonesian who grew up in the 1970s or even in the
late 1960s, you will most likely be told of Professor Widjojo
Nitisastro's think tank, also known as the "Berkeley Mafia".

The Berkeley Mafia was the first batch of technocrats whose
collective expertise was utilized by the New Order government to
revamp Indonesia's dire economic situation at the time.

While the New Order government itself may have outlasted its
usefulness in Indonesia, the core of the Berkeley Mafia, such as
Professors Ali Wardhana, Emil Salim and Subroto, still hold
considerable standing among economic experts.

Curiously, if we then associate UC Berkeley with free market
economy or hard-nosed economic rationalism in its Southeast Asian
Studies Program, the current courses offered do not reinforce
that supposition. Instead, listed are culturally oriented courses
such as Orality and Literacy in Insular Southeast Asia; the
Poetry of Indonesia and Malaysia in Translation; Articulations of
the Female in Indonesia, and specifically in the Malay/Indonesian
field, language courses. Offered as well are seminars and
readings in Malay letters and oral traditions, and in modern and
traditional Indonesian and Malay Literature.

Has the university changed direction? The short answer is No.
Along with other universities in the Western world, UC Berkeley
is still in the forefront of social, political, technological as
well as cultural and literary research and studies. What the
Berkeley Mafia has revealed is only one facet. While compared to
Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, Indonesia does not loom
high in the Southeast Asian Studies Program, it is the quality
that counts. An Indonesia component may be present in various
courses, from Economic Development, Political Science,
International Economics, Law, Geography, History, to Civil and
Environmental Engineering. In fact, Dr. Eric Crystal, now heading
Southeast Asian Studies, is a self-confessed Indonesianist.

The Southeast Asian Studies Program at UC Berkeley was
inaugurated in 1954 to meet a national need and the extensive
interest in the region. Eric Crystal also pointed out that during
World War II, UC Berkeley became a language training center,
assisting the increasing role of the U.S. in the war. Apart from
Indonesian and Malay, the other languages taught were Thai,
Vietnamese and Malayo-Polynesian linguistics. And after the big
war, the U.S. gradually became a haven for many Southeast Asians.
California seems to have been their favorite destination for a
second home. It is now the home of, for instance, 75,000 Hmongs,
25,000 Miens, 100,000 Cambodians and 100,000 ethnic Laos.

North Asia is still the biggest contributor to California's
ethnic Asian population. It is understandable, since the Chinese
had been there since the gold rush era of the 1850s. The Japanese
came shortly after the war. By the 1990s, there were 300,000
Chinese and over 100,000 Japanese living in California.

It is not clear what came first. The more recent growth of
California's Asian population may have stemmed from UC Berkeley's
pioneering language training center. However, UC Berkeley's
strength in Asian and Southeast Asian Studies may well owe its
drive from California's ethnic Asian population. The state
especially has a fair representation of Asians, 11 percent out of
the total 33 million. San Francisco, across the bay from
Berkeley, has the biggest Chinatown outside China.

Interestingly, student population at UC Berkeley is dominated
by Asian-Americans, 38 percent. Caucasian-Americans, while being
the majority 52 percent in the state, only represent 35 percent
of the university's student population. This has caused some
resentment on the part of the Caucasian-Americans.

"In other states, the tension is usually between the whites
and the blacks, but in California, it is very much between the
whites and the Asians," explained Eric Crystal.

In 1960 the Center for Southeast Asian Studies was established
to develop research, teaching and training facilities on the
region. It has since become a very busy and active department,
sponsoring annual Southeast Asian studies conferences, lectures
and workshops during academic year and providing numerous
opportunities to visiting faculty and scholars from Southeast
Asia and other parts of the world to work with Berkeley faculty.
Thus, interdisciplinary research and interaction in the region of
Southeast Asian studies are promoted.

The university's Southeast Asia library collections are known
to be one of the finest collections in the U.S., along with Yale
and Cornell universities library collections. Its strength lies
especially in social sciences and humanities, available in
Western as well as the countries' own languages, covering both
prewar and postwar periods of Southeast Asia. There is, for
instance, a wide range of Dutch colonial literature on Indonesia,
including all the major newspapers and other publications. In
fact, according to Professor Ling-chi Wang, chair of the Ethnic
Studies Program, the library's Indonesia component is one of the
most comprehensive Southeast Asia collections in the U.S.

The Berkeley township grows around the university. It even
gives the impression of being an extension of UC Berkeley. The
streets, the shops, the book rooms, are full of young people who,
from their mannerisms and their clothes, could only be students.
Even the older people around are unmistakably academics or
academic support staff. The whole town oozes of learning and
academia.

In the thick of this atmosphere, even though you are
continents away from Indonesia, it does not seem strange speaking
the language here.