Stories, Silence and Strategies: Collective Memory in a Chinese Indonesian Family

Abstract

Story-telling is influential in shaping a group?s memory. Through active interpretation of events and their meanings, the social world is constantly created and recreated through the everyday actions of ordinary people. Departing from this premise, this thesis explores how members of a single three-generation Chinese Indonesian family remember, interpret and articulate their ethnic identity and victimization in everyday narratives. To live as normal social actors, the family members rationalize, reframe and resist the dominant discourse of ethnic victimization to various extents. Their narratives are far from coherent as dynamics of resistance and subordination, empowerment and victimization, are differently experienced across gender, class, geographical origins and generations. This kaleidoscope of representations, even within a single family, hints at the fragmented lens with which Chinese Indonesian view themselves today.