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proved to be a place of solace and activities for homesick new students and a place where ethnicity and prejudice no longer mattered. The Indonesian club at Loyola Marymount University (also called Indonesians at Loyola Marymount University [ILMU]) was and still is not exclusively Chinese in membership. Yet, the club represents a place where the tensions the Chinese encountered in the centuries of Indonesia’s history no longer matter. I learned more about the history of the Chinese in Indonesia, their migration patterns, and how they lived in the country while I was writing my senior thesis for the Asian-Pacific studies program.
My curiosity with the Chinese in Indonesia and the communications systems of the country was further stimulated by the time I spent at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a graduate student. I was already acquainted with the scholarly contributions of Cornell researchers such as George Kahin and Benedict Anderson while looking up materials on the Chinese in Indonesia for my Asian Pacific studies thesis. I was, thus, enthralled with the Kroch Library Asia at Cornell, which has every imaginable periodical on Indonesia and an astounding collection of rare manuscripts and books in Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian language. The Kroch library and 17 other libraries at Cornell, along with an intellectual community that conducted the latest research on Indonesia, supported my archival research on the television industry as a social system in Indonesia. The results of the archival research became my master’s thesis at the Department of Communication.
My experiences at Cornell solidified my conviction of pursuing my doctoral degree in communications, with an emphasis on ethnic studies and identity. The rigorous doctoral curriculum at the Culture and Communication Department at New York University provided me with advanced research tools and the