It looked like a typical Chinese language class. A young woman named Mela strode to the front of the room and performed a skit about shopping at the beauty counter. "I shop by quality and by price," she said in near-perfect Mandarin. But the location of the scene was a bit more unusual. The class took place at the University of Indonesia, the top school in the world's fourth-most populous country, and almost all the students, including Mela, who was wearing skinny jeans and a headscarf, were Muslim.
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A decade ago, an indigenous Indonesian, or pribumi, studying Chinese would have been almost unthinkable. Indonesia had a history of conflict between its Chinese minority and Muslim majority dating back to colonial times, when Dutch rulers favored the Chinese over the pribumi. But today many young Indonesians -- both ethnic Chinese and pribumi -- are leaving behind the old ethnic strife and learning Mandarin to take advantage of China's booming economy. When U.S. President Barack Obama visits the country of his childhood next month, he may find a population increasingly looking north across the South China Sea rather than east across the Pacific.
Although millions of ethnic Chinese lived in Indonesia and were the driving force behind the economy, Mandarin had been excised from public life since long before students like Mela were born, as part of a general effort to assimilate the Chinese by force. Under the rule of President Suharto, from 1965 to 1998, Chinese schools and books and even the celebration of Chinese New Year were forbidden. Ethnic Chinese were strongly encouraged to adopt Indonesian names, and cina, meaning China or Chinese, became a racial epithet.
The Mandarin language was driven underground in many parts of Indonesia during those years, and studying Chinese became a clandestine activity. For example, Henry Tong, the owner of a company in Java that manufactures gloves, told me he learned Chinese as a child by reading Hong Kong comic books and from a private tutor. "When we studied, we had to close all our doors and windows. And when we saw somebody from the army outside, we quickly hid our books," he said.
In May 1998, riots broke out in Jakarta and other cities as demonstrations against economic woes turned into widespread looting and arson lasting for nearly three days. Much of the violence targeted the ethnic Chinese and their businesses, though ultimately most of the people who died, trapped in burning malls, were non-Chinese. But the riots also brought down Suharto, and the next elected president dismantled the country's anti-Chinese policies.
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