On Chinese heritage
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