Huozai biechu. Xianggang Yinni huaren koushu lishi (Life is Elsewhere: Stories of the Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong) (review)

The problems which the young Indonesian Chinese were faced with after their "return" to mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s and the difficulties they encountered after they decided to leave the ancestral land and re-migrate to Hong Kong have been the subject of various studies. The earlier ones appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹

Wang Cangbai, the editor of the present volume, is familiar with the history of the Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong. His PhD thesis is an examination of how the Indonesian Chinese re-established themselves during the period of transition.² It focuses attention on the way this community was re-constituted during the last 30 years, and shows how, in response to the political changes within the area, it has recreated transnational networks that link its members to Southeast Asia and to China, and in so doing, attained an original identity.

The present work has a title which is reminiscent of the famous novel by Milan Kundera: Life Is Elsewhere (1969). It is a collection of stories about the lives of ten Sino-Indonesians (for the most part of Hokkien origin, born in Palembang in the 1930s and 1940s) who went to China in the 1950s and 1960s, partly out of a desire to continue their Chinese education, and partly because they wanted to contribute to the motherland. They are presently settled in Hong Kong.

In a very concrete manner, the book deals with the main themes elaborated in Wang's thesis. In his preface the editor explains that he has made use of the research notes which he took at the end of the 1990s. After selecting ten —seven men and three women —among the 60 informants with whom he had kept occasional contact, he decided to visit them again in 2005 in order to present his project of writing an oral history.

This project was well received by his former informants who kindly agreed to cooperate, which explains why the life stories presented in this book make very pleasant reading. The participants were selected by Wang to provide an overview of the different situations in which these Indonesian Chinese were placed in China and in Hong Kong.

A lengthy introduction is aimed at presenting in a cursory manner the situation in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s (especially during the anti-Chinese riots of the 1960s). It recounts the resinicization of the youth in the Chinese schools, the wish of these students to go to China in order to further their schooling and to devote their energy to the development of the ancestral country, quite often regardless of the objections of their parents who held a more realistic view of the situation in the motherland. While in China, these Indonesian Chinese encountered economic and political difficulties because they found it difficult to adjust themselves to the local conditions, hence their desire to leave the country, in spite of the prospect of facing discrimination of another kind that awaited them in Hong Kong. It is worth noting that more than 90 percent of these Southeast Asian Chinese who settled in Hong Kong were native to Indonesia. Their numbers were estimated between 300,000 and 500,000 (their families included).

These young returnees met with vastly different conditions depending on the periods in which they migrated. In order to underline this aspect, Wang, who has collated their stories, gives the floor first to Lai Zengchuang , a Sino-Indonesian of Hakka origin born in 1917. After completing his studies in Hong Kong (from 1932 to 1939), Lai went to Southwest China where he trained interpreters in English while working in a camp belonging to the US forces until the end of the war. Then he went back to Indonesia where he taught in Jakarta and Palembang. In 1955, he was...