| Chapter : | Introduction |
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live in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan—places where they could freely exercise their cultural freedom. However, they also confided that they would ultimately have chosen to live in Indonesia because they could not speak Chinese. The complicated struggles in identity formation that Chinese Indonesians experienced as they were growing up, as well as the longing for an imagined life that clashed with their reality, are discussed further in chapter 4, where I examine the common themes arising from my study.
Before I discuss the themes and other findings of my study, I explain the methodology and research design of the study in chapter 2, setting it within the contexts of my own personal and intellectual history. In this chapter, I draw upon my experience as a native ethnographer and the complexities of doing research on my own community. Being a Chinese Indonesian who has lived more than half of her life abroad, “going home” to Indonesia as a native ethnographer posed many intricate issues such as rediscovering my role as a Chinese Indonesian and the various expectations that came with that role. My status as a Chinese Indonesian researcher also placed me at the dangerous tip of overidentification—the risk of projecting one’s own concerns onto the people being studied and defending their values, beliefs, and practices rather than studying them (Woods, 1979). My recognition of this potential risk pushed me to maintain a critical distance from my respondents while engaging with them in the dialectical process of meaning making. It is in the first part of chapter 2 that I discuss this risk and other issues dealing with being a native ethnographer. In my discussion of native ethnography, I also lay out the reasons why I decided to undertake a qualitative case study. In the second and third sections of the chapter, I discuss the constructivist paradigm and the constructivist research design, respectively. The constructivist