On minority and majority

On minority and majority

I'm commenting on Mr. Zahar Indra's letter in The Jakarta Post
on July 8 titled Minority and majority stock.

As your perception you wrote:

1. "Yellow ethnic Chinese are better than brown ethnic Javanese."

2. "Have you, ethnic Chinese, ever thought of inviting your
ethnic Javanese neighbor to a chat in front of your TV."

3. "It is easy to build up invisible walls around you by way of
not speaking the language everyone understands, by boasting you
are richer and better educated, that local culture, local food,
local language, in fact everything local is inferior."

From the above I understand you are suffering from a severe
inferiority complex and that you are living in a exclusive
community. Since the jaman Belanda (Dutch colonial era), schools
have been open to everyone. There is no dividing line between the
Dutch, the indigenous and nonindigenous people. They study and do
their homework together and when it gets late, they eat together,
and sometimes, when it gets very late, they stay for the night.

Have you ever asked your fellow indigenous Indonesian who has
ethnic Chinese as neighbors whether they have ever been invited
for a dinner or ever received cookies and dishes?

"Everything local is inferior" are your own words, and not the
words of the ethnic Chinese. The majority of ethnic Chinese do
not and also cannot speak Chinese. How can you reproach them by
way of not speaking the language everyone understands?

I have an indigenous son-in-law and a late indigenous foster
mother, while my brother has two indigenous sons-in-law and one
indigenous grandson-in-law. In addition, I have more tennis
friends who are indigenous Indonesian than ethnic Chinese.

Can you imagine that a lot of ethnic Chinese have married
indigenous Indonesian women and that indigenous Indonesian men
have married ethnic Chinese women. Almost everybody knows that
the president director of Bank Summa (the son of Om William, the
former owner of Astra) has married an indigenous woman. Arief
Budiman of the 1966 Generation is an ethnic Chinese and is
married to an indigenous Indonesian woman.

The majority of ethnic Chinese here cannot speak the Chinese
language and use Bahasa Indonesia in their daily lives which
means that they are not an exclusive community because they have
learned Bahasa Indonesia by socializing with indigenous people.
This has been so from even well before World War I, 1914-1918.

Before the monetary crisis, I heard many people speaking
Chinese in Chinese restaurants, but a lot of them were Chinese
from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan,
Thailand and Vietnam.

When I was still working in a pharmaceutical company, I was
often visited by Chinese-Americans, as representatives of
American companies, who could speak Chinese. During Dutch
colonial times we had three groups of Chinese people:

1. the Dutch Chinese (the gelijkgestelden)

2. the Chinese

3. the Chinese who after 1945 become Chinese-Indonesians.

The first group left for Holland, the second group left for
China and the third group stayed in Indonesia.

SENO MULIANA

Jakarta