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"I got the impression that people living outside of Indonesia, even in Australia, did not understand the 1998 riots properly," author Dewi Anggraeni says, reflecting on why she wrote her latest novel which tells the story of a Chinese-Indonesian woman caught up in the violent protests that led to President Suharto's fall.
"There is also the view outside that the Chinese diaspora story around the world is [all the same] when in reality it is much more complicated than that."
The 276-page novel — My Pain, My Country — was written and published in English, and looking back at the chaotic events some 20 years later, it seeks to bring cultural nuance to the anti-government protests in which the Chinese community was also specifically targeted, their houses burned down, and many women reportedly gangraped.
In the book, Nina, a young Indonesian woman of Chinese descent, feels compelled to help her fellow student activists during the protests but finds herself in harm's way amid the targeting of Chinese women.
Despite the Indonesian Government's best efforts to deflect the allegations throughout the book, the lives of many of the novel's characters are forever altered by a series of horrific and traumatic events.
"After I met with and interviewed some of the perpetrators and victims who had experienced, known, or been involved in the 1998 attacks, I felt a need to write something because the specifics [in relation to Chinese individuals] have long-been largely ignored," she said.
Anggraeni, an Indonesian-Australian journalist and writer of Chinese descent, previously wrote a 2014 non-fiction Indonesian book — titled The 1998 Tragedy and the Birth of the National Commission for Women — which detailed accounts and reports of Chinese people being targeted and gangraped, but the book was never translated into English.
Anggraeni said despite attempts and commissions set-up by the Indonesian Government to investigate the reports of gangrapes, the story has gone largely unaddressed until this day, and therefore many Chinese-Indonesians still suffer from a lack of reconciliation.
"There has been recognition — though somewhat reluctantly — about the burning of buildings, the looting of Chinese-owned goods, as well as the shooting of students," Anggraeni said.
"But until now there has been no official acknowledgment as to the existence of rape of women."
Anggraeni said the Indonesian Government has downplayed the targeting of Chinese during the riots — despite US State Department and human rights reports noting dozens of cases of rapes — by maintaining that there is no forensic evidence to examine or victims willing to come forward.
"So at that time, I wrote the book in Indonesian, because many people in Indonesia still did not know about the rape," Anggraeni explains, when asked why the book was never translated.
In the years since, Anggraeni said she was inspired by the accounts of many of the victims, as well many of the 2014 books readers and her colleagues urging her to translate it into English.
Breaking stereotypes through storytelling
But without a translator, Anggraeni said she herself was too drained from the labour-intensive experience of writing the historical account in Indonesian to translate it herself, so instead opted to use the research to create a new novel, in English — My Pain, My Country.
Anggraeni said she also believed the fiction format would be more appropriate for English readers, as it offers the freedom to interweave stories with more emotional depth, rather than academically detailing historical accounts.
My Pain, My Country interweaves the life journeys of three generations of women in Indonesia — many of Chinese descent — as they try to deal with and make sense of the 1998 "tragedies" from a variety of perspectives.
Anggraeni added that since she was approaching the book with English readers in mind, she also decided to target larger global issues surrounding the Chinese diaspora, which she maintains is stereotyped.
"Each and every history and movement [of Chinese people, country to country] has a unique story behind it," she said.
Anggraeni — who lived through and survived the 1965 massacre as a child — first visited Australia in the 1970s for an opportunity to teach Indonesian and French, which she said she has done for many years since.
But she became better known later in life as a writer for the English-language daily The Jakarta Post and as a journalist for Tempo magazine in Australia.
Anggraeni now resides permanently in Melbourne, and she said sweeping generalisations about Chinese-Indonesians, Chinese people, and Indonesians, persist to this day.
"People outside of Indonesia tend to only think about Indonesians in [a uniform] and stereotypical way, [similar to] how people [stereotypically] believe Chinese people dominate the economic sector and live exclusively," she said.
"The stereotypes may be true to an extent, but the underlying dilemmas and individual histories [person to person, generation to generation] are much more complex.
"So I wanted to convey all of these experiences in my book, and felt that using the novel [fiction] format as form of storytelling would be the most effective to do that."
My Pain, My Country is the twelfth book written by Anggraeni — a few thousands copies have been published in the United Kingdom and are available in Australia.
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, novel, race-relations, indonesia, asia
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