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Indonesian with historical baggage in the new cultural politics of the post-Reformasi Indonesia. As her research was done in a constructivist paradigm, Aimee did provide a framework for the meaning-making processes to occur. This is not to say that her project was biased but to note it had an important “side product”: What occurred in the focus group discussions was the process in which the members of the groups, with Aimee included, helped one another in understanding themselves and their histories as Chinese Indonesians.
The 2000s also saw the rise of political consciousness of many Chinese Indonesians. Organizations bearing Chinese identity, such as Perhimpunan Indonesia Tionghoa (Perhimpunan INTI), or The Chinese-Indonesian Association, and Paguyuban Sosial Marga Tionghoa Indonesia (PSMTI), or the Social Organization of Chinese-Indonesians, which counted their members by the thousands in 2008, sprung up. In short, Aimee’s study is a part of this new awakening, a cultural process of identity in flux, a phase that will keep on shifting as Indonesia redefines itself in the future.
Aimee’s study points to the failure of the New Order assimilationist policy. However, one thing to remember is that, while forced assimilation by the state betrayed underlying racist motives, it should not be equated with cultural assimilation, which occurred more “naturally” with different dynamics in diverse localities throughout the Indonesian islands for hundreds of years. The process has resulted in the hybrid peranakan cultures and has enriched local cultures. To assume that some of the respondents who were not interested in learning Mandarin or who did not consider themselves Chinese were victims of the New Order policy is not only guilty of essentializing the content of Chineseness but also is forgetting the fact that even without the forced assimilation, the processes of cultural assimilation had been there all along. There is a caveat that in this era of new