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

about their culture and identity? What role does the memory of growing up in a restrictive media environment that specifically curtailed Chinese language and, hence, Chinese culture play in this negotiation of meanings? Is there a sense of community created by this government-imposed surveillance? To focus the study further, I asked my respondents a series of questions (see appendix H) during the focus groups to specifically find out how the policies of regulated assimilation provided the context for their identity construction. These questions also allowed me to explore the role of electronic media⁷ (i.e., the Chinese films and series) in shaping the cultural identity of Chinese Indonesians and the extent to which these media helped to mold their “Chineseness.”

In order to place the results of the focus group interviews within a theoretical context, I critically review how scholars have studied the relationship between media, identity, and memory in chapter 1. In this chapter, I argue in greater detail that the sociopolitical and economic situation of Chinese Indonesians, where the government formally repressed their culture and language as they were growing up, provides a unique angle for scholars to explore the role of memory and media in identity formation and maintenance among a diasporic community. Furthermore, the longing and desire of Chinese Indonesians to connect to an imagined mythic homeland allows scholars to expand on Appadurai’s (2000) concept of “imagined nostalgia”—to miss things that one has never lost through media texts such as mass advertising (p. 77). Whereas Appadurai argued that mass advertising evokes feelings of nostalgia through scenes of bygone lifestyles, life stages, and landscapes that consumers have not directly experienced, the imported Chinese media conferred a feeling of ‘imagined security’ for Chinese Indonesians whom I interviewed. During my interviews, they revealed their desire to