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HOW IT FEELS TO BE CHINESE IN INDONESIA
from an interview with Edwin

Tony Rayns: As an Indonesian of Chinese descent yourself, what do you think is the core  issue? How much of the problem comes from social and racial prejudice in Indonesia, and how much from an internalized denial or even self-hatred?

Edwin: Obviously, we’re a minority. Because of everything that happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government created a certain image of the Chinese population in order to control them or use them as a scapegoat, many of us feel some kind of paranoia. I think that’s the biggest problem.  To call it self-hatred would be too strong. Actually, we don’t know how to be ourselves. It’s an identity problem; you have to hide your identity.

The current problems stem from colonial days, when the Dutch made a classification of citizens which created an ‘us’ and ‘them’ gap between Chinese Indonesians and so-called indigenous Indonesians. The classification created certain privileges (mostly economic) for the Chinese Indonesians, and that produced the social envy which lay behind the sporadic tensions and anti-Chinese riots. The official response to those tensions was to “eliminate the differences” by eliminating the cultural identity of Chinese Indonesians. Hence all the laws about names, holidays, schools and the Chinese language. It’s very important to know that many Chinese Indonesians backed this policy. It was called ‘asimilasi’ – assimilation. This is a very distinctive feature of the ‘discrimination’ against Chinese Indonesians, and it’s an important background to the feelings explored in the film. It’s not unusual to hear of discrimination against minorities, but it’s rare to find a systematic or collective effort to erase cultural identity – especially one that comes from within the minority group itself.

Erasing a culture like that is a kind of cultural genocide, a crime against humanity, but for many decades not a whisper of protest was raised against it. One reason for that is that it wasn’t possible to question ‘authority’ in Indonesia until the Reformasi period began after the overthrow of Suharto. But it’s equally true that it wasn’t questioned because many people, ignorant or afraid, thought it was a sensible policy.

The next important feature of the Chinese dilemma in Indonesia is inconsistency or contradiction. On the one hand, there are conditions which force you to hide, deny or renounce your cultural heritage, obviously an important part of your identity. On the other hand, you are continually made conscious of your ‘difference’ through things like the SBKRI (“Letter of Proof of Citizenship”). To get an ID card, a passport, even to sit a school exam, you have to check a box on a form to indicate your citizenship. Chinese Indonesians have to check the box marked “WNI Keturunan” (“Citizen of Foreign Descent”). It doesn’t specify which race you’ve descended from, but somehow it applies only to Chinese Indonesians; an Arab Indonesian, for example, wouldn’t feel that he had to check this box. This is very cruel: you’re forced to ‘assimilate’, and yet you’re constantly told that you don’t quite deserve to be a ‘real’ Indonesian.

Even worse than the legacy of discrimination and persecution as experienced in riots and hostile legislation is the fear that has been handed down from generation to generation. Fear in all its many gradations: paranoia, insecurity, discomfort, confusion and so on. That’s what this film is about: the fear and the various responses it provokes, such as desperation, hope, dashed hopes, numbness, the search for answers …

Since ‘Reformasi’ many laws have been changed. There’s a re-emergence or resurrection of Chinese culture in Indonesia. But this isn’t an answer to the dilemmas in the film. Many people cannot respond to the revival of Chinese culture; they are numb to it. It doesn’t soothe their discomfort or confusion, their fear or anger in its different forms, and it doesn’t answer their questions. If you’ve felt these things even once in your life, the revival in Chinese culture will not be enough to heal you.

Am I right in thinking that it was the Chinese who brought film-making to Indonesia? Emigrés from Shanghai, who arrived in the late 1920s?

Yes, that’s right.

Why did you choose this subject for your first feature?

It’s the biggest issue for me. I’ve had lots of questions about it in my mind since I was a kid, and my parents never answered them very clearly, so they’ve stayed with me and become a problem. In Indonesia, it’s so difficult to make a film. I’ve finished shooting this one, and I want to finish the post-production now. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to have a career as a film-maker. I can’t be sure that I’ll ever make a second feature. So I want my first film to show the most important thing in my life, and I want to do it now, while I have my energy.

The kaleidoscopic structure here echoes your short film A Very Slow Breakfast, in which the viewer discovers only gradually that the characters are members of the same family. Can you say something about this approach?

I think it is … a coincidence.

I doubt it! You’re obviously drawn to non-linear storytelling, building something up from fragments.  I’d call it centripetal storytelling: it has a center and shards fall out in different directions from that center.

To be honest, I try to follow my subconscious instincts when I make films. I don’t think things through in advance, I try to let the film take the shape it seems to want.

The main story in this film is the relationship between the firecracker girl Linda and the editor boy Cahyono. You see them in flashbacks when they were kids, and she asks him “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  As she’s grown up, Linda has seen how those around her respond to the identity question: her father the dentist, her mother the former badminton champion, her grandpa the billiard player, and her non-Chinese best friend the editor. She takes on board all these realities, exactly as all Chinese Indonesians of my generation do. But I want to give each character his or her autonomy, to show how each of them copes with the problems and survives. And so I need to show not only Linda’s reality but also those of the eight other characters – including the pig.

Romi and Yahya represent power. As I’ve already suggested, Chinese Indonesians as a group have always been screwed by whoever was in power: the Dutch, Sukarno, Suharto. It was their fate as a minority group to be taken advantage of. Sometimes they’ve been cast as scapegoats, a smokescreen for whatever was really wrong, and sometimes they’ve been exploited for their economic standing.  At the same time, because they’re in constant need of ‘protection’, Chinese Indonesians have always sucked up to whoever is in power, be they politicians or the military. The relationship between the dentist and the couple represents exactly this vicious circle of dependency in the Chinese Indonesian story. Towards the end of the film, we learn that the couple may not even be real officials, when we see them shopping for uniforms. I guess the implication is that ‘power’ can be a uniform that you put on. You may not be entitled to it, it may not be justified, there may be no substance to it at all, but it gets you what you want.

The dental nurse Salma is not Chinese. She’s someone who wants to become popular, she wants to appear on Planet Idol. I wanted this in the film because it’s so much a part of what’s happening now in Indonesia; everyone wants to be famous and appear on TV. We have so many ‘reality’ shows and talent contests. So when Salma goes on the show, she wears an Islamic headscarf. It’s her way of grabbing the audience’s attention and sympathy. It signals that she’s really devout so that she can win more votes from the viewers. I guess that expresses my view of the ways that people manipulate religion. Anyhow, her relationship with the dentist Halim represents another circle of dependency. He wants to marry her, a Muslim, because that will bring him closer to a non-Chinese identity, which represents to him a potentially better life. (At the same time, ironically, he’s taking steps to lose his Indonesian identity by trying to enter the American ‘Green Card Lottery’.) And Salma takes advantage of the relationship to get what she wants, which is to become a pop idol.

Respecting the individual agendas of all these characters, whether they’re of Chinese descent or not, is what makes the film look fragmented. The structure allows many underlying layers to emerge.  I have made shorts (like the new one, Hulahoop Soundings) which demand a more linear kind of storytelling, but Blind Pig is essentially about feelings – and, as you know, feelings and logical thinking don’t really go together. I don’t think it’s possible to ‘design’ emotion in a logical way. Certainly I can’t do it.

We didn’t have a screenplay as such for the film, we had something more like a description of the action, broken into 40 distinct sequences.  We shot them as written, and we started out editing them in the order they were written – but as we went along with the editing, we tried to puzzle it up a bit. We decided to repeat a number of things, with slight changes, but the emotion is different each time. The repetitions reflect the fact that Chinese people in Indonesia have been through the same things so many times, in the 60s, the 70s, the 90s and still now.

How did you choose the characters?

Almost 100% of the film is drawn from my own experience, and so I know these characters very well. I experienced some of these scenes myself, so it’s very personal.

Does any of them represent you directly?

Yaaaa … I think I put a lot of myself subconsciously into Linda, the firecracker girl.

How did the structure evolve?

I always start my films with one strong image clear in my mind. In this case, it was the image of Linda with the firecracker in her mouth. For me, it sums up the feeling that being Chinese in Indonesia is to be someone who is waiting for something to blow up. I’ve had that feeling in my head for so long, and the image crystallizes it. The act of taking a firecracker and putting it in your mouth like a hotdog somehow becomes a metaphor for the way that feelings build up and accumulate over time.

The firecracker is one of several specifically Chinese motifs that appear in the film. Did you put them there strategically?

Some I chose, some came in spontaneously. I just put in things that I relate to. I could compare my film with other Indonesian films that deal with Chinese issues, where the architecture, the locations, the props, the wardrobe, everything is so Chinese. I didn’t want to do that in Blind Pig. Because the characters here don’t really want to be Chinese. They hide the signs of their Chinese ancestry. You can still see that there’s a Chinese element to them, but it’s hiding somewhere. You can smell it.

The pig is also in some sense a leading character. Exactly how much of a taboo are pigs and pork in Indonesia?

In Bali, for instance. They’re Hindu, so they have no problem with pigs. There are also some villages in Java with pig farms supplying meat to the Chinese, but not so many.  But if you grow up Chinese in Indonesia, you live with Muslim friends for whom eating pork – or even touching it – is a taboo.

There’s a significant background emphasis on the media in the film.

Cahyono is an editor of TV programs, and he’s working on a piece to commemorate the ten years since the riots in 1998. If I want to talk about paranoia in the Chinese Indonesian community, I have to bring in the riots. What you see in that footage is the embodiment of fear. As a member of a minority, you constantly feel threatened. You have a firecracker in your mouth, and you’re waiting for it to explode. The scene in the editing room is very important because it shows Linda and Cahyono looking this fear in the eye and gradually singing, smiling and laughing about it. It’s important that they’re from the young generation, looking at something that happened when they were little kids. They look at something that is severely uncomfortable, their eyes meet and they share a sort of comfort. They finally come to laugh at it. This is their statement, how they face the fear.

You know, after the riots in 1998, many Chinese shop-owners put up signs on their premises reading “Owned by Muslims”. They also put Indonesian military stickers on their cars. I have a cousin who did it.

Aside from the riot footage, which was given to us by the cameraman who shot it, I wanted to use television broadcasts to add elements to the film which wouldn’t otherwise appear. You also hear sound from a TV program about prostitution for example.  The other TV programs you see – the show that tries to interview Linda, the talent contest and the TV evangelist – all represent things that I think are wrong with TV today.

Why do you use the Stevie Wonder song several times in different contexts?

The Stevie Wonder song is … so annoying. It was a popular song when I was a kid, you heard it everywhere. I chose to use it here because it represents the work of a black American who is blind but who became massively popular. As such, he’s an inspiration to the dentist Halim. If a blind, black man can become popular in America, Halim wants to bring his family to America.

Do you think of yourself as a surrealist?

To be honest, I’m not very good with “isms”. The most interesting thing for me about cinema is that it can be so magical, almost mystical. It’s shocking!  The way cinema does this is so beautiful for me. As I said, I start from one powerful image or sequence, and something surprising comes from it. Look what was started by the first films screened by the Lumière Brothers … so magical.

We’ve already had a lot of feedback about the unconventional (and, for many, uncomfortable) form of this film, the way it tells its stories. Personally, we’ll be happy if the story and characters provoke discussion. Linear storytelling is perhaps not always the best way to tell a story, especially not this particular story. That’s why we didn’t spell out the characters’ attributes, jobs and relationships in the film. Things are obviously interconnected, but it’s never that explicit. That’s why we always say that the story is built up from fragments – pieces of broken glass that you can put together to form a mosaic. And the process of putting the pieces together should lead to discussion – hopefully, many layers of discussion.

Ultimately the form of the film, its content and the way it’s edited, mirrors the feeling that it is trying to express and the story it is trying to tell:  how it feels to be Chinese in Indonesia. Uneasiness, unidentified feelings, repeated confusion, unclear causes and effects. Scattered puzzle pieces, fragments, which you sense are part of a bigger story. A strong feeling, although you’re not exactly sure where it comes from. So you ask yourself what the story is and why you find yourself feeling that way.  That’s how we hope the audience will participate. We’re not offering the viewer a story with a beginning, middle and end, but, we hope, something more than that:  a whole experience.

– from an interview by Tony Rayns (30 January 2008)