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Suharto fell, in 2 hellish days, Chinese shops were set on fire and looted. More than 150 women of Chinese descent were mass raped. However, these women later disappeared, leaving no traces or evidence of the atrocity.
When Aimee started her research in 2002, the country had a different atmosphere. In 2000 President Abdulrachman Wahid annulled legal discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, and the following year President Megawati issued a decree to make Chinese New Year one of Indonesia’s national holidays. Chinese dragon dances were performed in public places and Mandarin language courses mushroomed. This also happened to be the dawn of China as a rising global economic player.
In this climate of openness, Aimee gathered 25 Chinese Indonesians born after 1966, who had watched videotapes of Chinese kung fu (martial arts) films and series from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan during the time when anything Chinese was restricted. She, herself, was part of this generation. It has to be noted, however, that Chinese Indonesians were not the only kung fu film consumers. The fact that the videotapes were popular at that time, and were available all over Indonesia, indicates that the consumers were not bound by race or ethnicity. Up to the mid-1980s, the 200 million population was entertained with the sole television channel allowed, the state-owned Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI), which was filled with official rituals and ideological indoctrination. In this context, it is not surprising that people consumed the kung fu films and series during their pastime.
However, Aimee assumed that the Chinese Indonesian consumers had other motives, consciously or unconsciously, for watching the kung fu films in a forbidden time. She employed focus group discussions as a means to find out the context, the reasons, and the ways each of her respondents consumed