No Concessions: The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer

Two. Java

43 two Java A t puberty Thiam Hien was confident, bright, and ambitious. Family status had made it possible for him to begin his education in the ELS (Europese Lagere School or European Primary School) (fig. 2.1). His command of Dutch was apparently quite good, and he proved to be a quick study. He had done well in the ELS, and thus could move on. The next step was MULO (Meer Uitgebreed Lagere Onderwijs, Extended Primary Education), a middle school from which, if successfully graduated, students might enter high school. This was the route by which the most competent children of the most privileged elite, whether ethnic Indonesian or ethnic Chinese, could acquire superb educations . The odds, of course, were nowhere near as much in their favor as for Dutch children. Kutaraja had a MULO, though not a Dutch-language high school. Thiam Hien, however, had already developed an itch to go to Java. A Greek-Japanese friend whom he admired had already left for Batavia, and Thiam Hien wanted to follow his example. Like many curious and energetic boys, he wanted the adventure of travel and novelty. In the colony, Batavia was the London and New York. Only Singapore, perhaps, promised more. So Thiam Hien wrote to his father, asking if he could attend MULO in Batavia. Sin Eng agreed. Sin Eng was then working as a commercial clerk in Batavia but was just about to set up his catering service back in Kutaraja. He may have thought that Thiam Hien and Bong, because their grades showed promise, would enjoy better odds in Java than in Kutaraja. Bong attended MULO in Kutaraja and then 44 Java followed Thiam Hien to Java. Only Lian, to her misery, was denied the opportunity of attending good government-supported schools, because the boys’ education took priority. She stayed in Kutaraja with Omah until the late 1930s. Java reshaped Thiam Hien’s life. In his teens he returned to Kutaraja for visits and spent a year in Medan before high school, but his ties with Aceh loosened and faded. After 1926, when he left for Batavia by boat, he belonged essentially in Java. It was not an unusual story then. Hundreds of educated young men from the outer islands, especially Sumatra, found their way to Java to enter good schools. Like Thiam Hien, they lived with relatives or, while at high school or university, in rented rooms. Few returned home permanently. None of the cities outside of Java, with the possible exception of Medan, offered the educational, social, intellectual, political, or vocational opportunities of Bandung, Semarang, Surabaya, and, above all, Batavia. Being in Java, however, was not the same as being of Java. If few outer islanders returned home, neither did many ever really make Java their home. Fig. 2.1 Yap (seated left rear), with schoolmates at the ELS primary school, Kutaradja, Aceh, n.d. Java 45 Those who learned Javanese had a better chance of doing so, but lack of family connections and cultural patina kept them always apart. This was no less true of outer island peranakan than of indigenous outer islanders. Javanese peranakan were essentially Javanese—speaking Javanese, linked to one another and often (among the well-off and well-educated) to Javanese elite families and fully at home with the complexities and subtleties of Javanese lore, trade, and political and social gossip. Even when they married into Javanese peranakan families, as Thiam Hien eventually did, the outer island ethnic Chinese might never fully appreciate the texture of Java. For those who were interested only in getting along in trade or a profession, it did not matter much. For those who wanted more, as Thiam Hien did, it was difficult to find their way to the center of things. Again, it was not so much that he was from Aceh as that he did not belong to Java. Although he migrated in early adolescence, he remained somehow an outsider all his life, a stranger in a slightly puzzling land. He may not have been interested in being absorbed. Nor were there in his social circles, in and out of school, pressures to assimilate. He never learned Javanese. He was good at languages, but he studied only those of Europe. He was not attracted to Javanese music or art, despite two years in high school in Yogyakarta, a center of Javanese high culture, and several more years teaching...