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

paradigm provides the methodological framework for this study while the constructivist research design outlines the strategies and steps that I undertook in the implementation of my study.

The third and fourth chapters of this book present the findings of the study. The third chapter paints a picture of Chinese Indonesians during Suharto’s New Order by showing the heterogeneous nature of the Chinese Indonesian community, the assimilationist policies that created a restrictive media environment where Chinese culture and language were suppressed, and how my respondents reacted to these policies. The material in chapter 3 serves as the background of my respondents’ conditions of reception when they consumed the imported Chinese media in Suharto’s New Order. As I point out in the chapter, personal factors such as families, religious affiliations, and regional origins interrelated with macro factors such as politics and the Indonesian society to impact these conditions of reception. They also affected the extent to which my respondents maintained their Chineseness through the media.

I tackle this notion of Chineseness and the process of identity construction in chapter 4, where I analyze my respondents’ interactions with the imported Chinese media in further depth. As mentioned, chapter 4 shows how some of my respondents looked to Chinese media as a source of imagined security, where their identity as Chinese was unquestioned and they would not be discriminated against. This longing for an imagined mythic homeland was translated by other respondents as a desire to emulate the characters they saw on the screen. That is, because the assimilationist policies caused an absence of Chinese images in the Indonesian media landscape, my respondents saw the characters in the imported Chinese media as role models in their adolescence and childhood. For example, the “cool” gangsters in Gangland Boss or A Better Tomorrow taught my male