On Chinese heritage
Being an avid reader of your in-depth study of our heritage, particularly of those aspects relating the customs and cultural life of the local-born Chinese of the olden days, I for one think that I am duty bound to make some corrections to your last article titled Chinese-language program now aired on TV (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 31, 2001).
The overly used "Mandarin" is in fact a misnomer. What is now known as the Chinese "national language" is "standard Chinese" promulgated by the Chinese republic following the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century in the same manner as Parisian French was adopted as the standard language replacing the various regional patois after the French Revolution.
The Han nationality is the main nationality and Hans are distributed all over the country, in addition to there being 56 minority nationalities. Therefore, the Chinese language is also known as the Han language. And the spoken Chinese uttered by the Qing emperors' officials and the court mandarins in Beijing was none other than the Beijing dialect. Hence, spoken Chinese is customarily called Mandarin in English by non-Chinese.
It is, of course, quite correct to say that one speaks Mandarin, but one can in no way write Mandarin. And neither can we read Mandarin.
By the way, Barongsai means "lion dance" and the word sai is the Hokkien dialect's word for "Lion", or Shie according to the Mandarin phonetic alphabet.
It might interest you to note that the designation Xin Wen News for a Metro TV news program is redundantly repetitive, because Xin Wen is the Chinese word for news.
In essence your article has driven home the point that local Chinese Indonesians were deprived of their identity and denied the pursuit of freedom by the Soeharto regime in its attempt to force assimilation.
We now realize that Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has proved to be the wiser when he relented and decided to "let nature take its course" having realized that forced assimilation was futile because he knew that the Chinese have the world's oldest culture (some 5000 years), and can in no way be forced to change at will.
LIEM SIAN TIE
Jakarta