The Chinese of Indonesia and Their Search for Identity: The Relat ...

members of this particular generation? Why were they, as young Chinese individuals who could not speak or write Chinese, drawn to them? Growing up in a state-controlled environment that set the agenda for media production and distribution, why did they still seek imported Chinese media? Was it a way for them to maintain some sort of cultural connection to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan— “mythic homelands” that they had never been to? What meanings did they derive from the series and films? How did their media consumption evolve throughout the years? How did this group of people, through their collective memory of growing up in this media environment, negotiate their cultural and national identities? Since no study to date has examined the link between Chinese Indonesians and their collective memory created by media consumption, these questions have been left unanswered.

In recent years, a growing body of work has explored the significance of memory as a resource to foster a sense of collective identity. Gillis (1994) pointed out that people are constantly revising their memories to suit their current identities. According to him, memories help all of us make sense of the world we live in, and “memory work” (p. 3) is embedded in complex class, gender, and power relations that determine what is remembered and/or forgotten. He also noted that the media have become one of the major social institutions where the past is stored and categorized. Among the few media scholars who offered a theoretical framework to explore the media and the past, Thompson (1995) argued that communication media may be used by migrant or dislocated groups to sustain cultural continuity. That is, communication media provide a means for these groups to recontextualize their traditions and histories and turn them into more flexible and accessible forms. He referred to this as the “re-mooring of traditions” (p. 187). Other than Thompson,