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the films in the past. She unearthed the anxiety, dreams, and unresolved problems related to the issue of “Chineseness” as a problematic identity, one which was always marked and negated at the same time. Using Appadurai’s concept of imagined nostalgia, she found interesting and moving patterns by which her respondents constructed a mythic China out of films, coming from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, from which they measured, mirrored, and modeled their racial, gender, and diasporic identities.
This study is significant in many ways. It throws light, in the line of research done by Janice Radway, on the ways consumers actively use the transnational media to construct meaning to settle their own battle of subjectivities within the local contexts. What is most interesting in this study, however, is not the cultural politics of the New Order, that is, between the 1970s and 1990s when the respondents were actually watching the kung fu films, but the very project initiated by Aimee: the act of remembering, reconstructing, and making meaning out of their past in post-Reformasi Indonesia.
The very project illustrates the turning point in the consciousness of many Chinese Indonesians. It attests to the need of Chinese Indonesians as a heterogeneous population to reevaluate the past and reposition themselves culturally. The timing of the research is significant. For many Chinese Indonesians who had to negate their Chinese cultural identity and tradition for decades, it was a moment of return. For the majority of Chinese Indonesians who have been culturally assimilated for many generations and missed nothing, the shock of 1998 had forced them to reevaluate their positions.
As Aimee wrote candidly in her preface, she came to Jakarta after residing out of the country for a long time with a lot of questions about her own identity as an Indonesian with a Chinese background. She also had to deal with her position as a Chinese