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Minority Stages
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171Introduction1.Contemporary migrants from China to Indonesia do not constitute a large group, although the presence of Chinese laborers particularly has recently been an Indonesian media f lashpoint. However, temples quite frequently engage migrant or visiting religious staff from China, often recruited in ancestral places and charged with performing the “authentic” rituals. On other kinds of recent migration from China, see Hew 2017.2.The scene belongs to the Pipa ji 琵琶記 narrative. The convoluted publication and perfor-mance history of this work, attributed to fourteenth-century author Gao Ming 高明, have gen-erated a substantial subfield of Chinese theatre and drama studies. It remains a major narrative in kunqu repertoire and has been translated and/or adapted into numerous foreign languages, including a Surabaya-published Malay version held in Leiden (Louw 1934).3.These include a plot to launch a rocket attack on Singapore from Indonesian territory (uncovered in August 2016), a November 2016 petrol bomb attack on a monastery in Sing-kawang, and the burning and plundering of temples in Tanjungbalai (North Sumatra) in August 2016, reportedly because Meiliana, a Sino-Indonesian woman, protested against loud calls to worship from a mosque. In August 2018, she was sentenced to a jail term for blasphemy.4.The most prominent recent conf lict has been over the waters around the Natuna Islands, with skirmishes between the Indonesian navy and PRC vessels in June 2017.5.For instance, this important difference has largely established a barrier between Asian studies and Asian-American (or other hyphenated) studies, which the latter especially is reluctant to break down. There is an inherent anxiety in studying diaspora that, by emphasizing connections with an ancestral land, is likely to delegitimize that community in the eyes of the “receiving” society. It is partly on account of such an anxiety that I am eager to stress that in applying a Chinese emphasis here (not least as a result of the limits of my own capacities) I reject any suggestion that there is tension with any given work’s or tradition’s full “Indonesian-ness.”6.This spurious association between an entire class and an entire ethnicity remains a common, and rather dangerous, feature of anti-Chinese feeling.7.As Leo Suryadinata has pointed out, the tendency to label Sino-Indonesians as a trading minority has meant that they are treated “as if they have neither culture nor literature” (2004, 149). Indeed, the association of Sino-Indonesians with economics is in part a result of NOTES
© University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu

171Introduction1.Contemporary migrants from China to Indonesia do not constitute a large group, although the presence of Chinese laborers particularly has recently been an Indonesian media f lashpoint. However, temples quite frequently engage migrant or visiting religious staff from China, often recruited in ancestral places and charged with performing the “authentic” rituals. On other kinds of recent migration from China, see Hew 2017.2.The scene belongs to the Pipa ji 琵琶記 narrative. The convoluted publication and perfor-mance history of this work, attributed to fourteenth-century author Gao Ming 高明, have gen-erated a substantial subfield of Chinese theatre and drama studies. It remains a major narrative in kunqu repertoire and has been translated and/or adapted into numerous foreign languages, including a Surabaya-published Malay version held in Leiden (Louw 1934).3.These include a plot to launch a rocket attack on Singapore from Indonesian territory (uncovered in August 2016), a November 2016 petrol bomb attack on a monastery in Sing-kawang, and the burning and plundering of temples in Tanjungbalai (North Sumatra) in August 2016, reportedly because Meiliana, a Sino-Indonesian woman, protested against loud calls to worship from a mosque. In August 2018, she was sentenced to a jail term for blasphemy.4.The most prominent recent conf lict has been over the waters around the Natuna Islands, with skirmishes between the Indonesian navy and PRC vessels in June 2017.5.For instance, this important difference has largely established a barrier between Asian studies and Asian-American (or other hyphenated) studies, which the latter especially is reluctant to break down. There is an inherent anxiety in studying diaspora that, by emphasizing connections with an ancestral land, is likely to delegitimize that community in the eyes of the “receiving” society. It is partly on account of such an anxiety that I am eager to stress that in applying a Chinese emphasis here (not least as a result of the limits of my own capacities) I reject any suggestion that there is tension with any given work’s or tradition’s full “Indonesian-ness.”6.This spurious association between an entire class and an entire ethnicity remains a common, and rather dangerous, feature of anti-Chinese feeling.7.As Leo Suryadinata has pointed out, the tendency to label Sino-Indonesians as a trading minority has meant that they are treated “as if they have neither culture nor literature” (2004, 149). Indeed, the association of Sino-Indonesians with economics is in part a result of NOTES
© University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu
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