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

Three. Batavia

64 three Batavia F amily circumstances had begun to change by the time Thiam Hien returned to Batavia in 1938. His brother Bong had graduated from the AMS Yogya in 1936, a bit surly and resentful of Thiam Hien, who could not send him money during his final year. It had been a miserable year for Thiam Bong. No less proud than his brother, he had had to accept the charity of the Jopps and live in utter frugality. No wonder he was inclined to obsess about financial security. In Batavia he found a job first with the trading arm of a bank, which was difficult and demanding work, and then more comfortably in a large import-export firm. From his pay of forty guilders a month Bong set aside twenty, saving enough within two years to bring Non and Omah Nakashima to Batavia. With little money and dependent on relatives, they had long wanted to leave Aceh. When they arrived in 1938, the family rented a house in Mangga Besar, a Chinese district behind the city’s principal canal. Non soon found a job selling shoes in a Bata shoe store in Pasar Baru. As for Sin Eng, after the onset of the economic depression, he no longer worked regularly and began, apparently, to sink into his own humiliated depression. For a time he had a job with a sugar estate, which kept him away from Batavia, but when that gave out there was little else. In general, peranakan were harder hit by the depression than totok. Totok had options. Some returned to China, which was not the homeland of peranakan; others engaged in the petty trade that peranakans’ lack of adequate skills and worries about status made very challenging. Without work or money, Sin Eng lost dignity and stat- Batavia 65 ure. As the eldest son, the more self-assured Thiam Hien gradually displaced his father (tacitly, of course) as head of the family. Two jobs came Thiam Hien’s way after he arrived back in Batavia. One was in a “crisis school,” a Dutch-language HCS supported by community funds for poor Chinese children. It had been organized by a wealthy benefactor, Dr. Loe Ping Kian. A Catholic priest who had heard about Thiam Hien’s teaching experience asked him to take over direction of the school, a position he held just long enough to tangle with Dr. Loe. Loe called the new director on the carpet over some problems at the school but backed off when Hien, not one to take orders or censure easily, insisted on his own authority. His second job, selling telephone subscriptions, provided sufficient income for his needs, so he left the school. Working with a middleman who made contacts for him, he systematically canvassed the Chinese commercial district along the Molenweg (now Jl. Hayam Wuruk). The commission of ten guilders per order earned him about a hundred guilders a month, twenty-five more than his income from the crisis school and enough to cover his expenses for law school. At the time, with everyone in the family working except Nakashima, their funds, though not luxurious, were adequate. When Thiam Hien announced his intention to study law, the family agreed. In the emergence of Indonesia’s small professional class, the Rechts­ hogeschool (law faculty) played an important part. A product of the educational expansion of the Ethical period, it was founded in 1924 to meet the demand for legal education for those unable to study in Holland. All who could afford it, mainly children from peranakan families, or who had support from the colonial administration, mainly children from Javanese priyayi families, went to the University of Leiden in Holland, whose prestigious law degrees adorned Indonesia’s legal elite for a generation into independence. Everyone else applied to the Rechtshogeschool, which doubled the number of graduate lawyers and diversified them ethnically. Outer islanders, particularly Minangkabau from West Sumatra and Bataks from North Sumatra, flowed in, along with Javanese, Sundanese, peranakan Chinese, Arab, and Dutch students . In Batavia, unlike Leiden, from the very beginning Indonesian women were accepted to law studies. Without the Rechtshogeschool, Thiam Hien and many others might never have studied law. By the time Thiam Hein entered, there were already more than two hundred Indonesian (including indigenous Indonesian and ethnic Chinese) graduates from the two law faculties, Leiden and the Rechtshoge­ school. 66 Batavia His decision to study law...