Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (44 page)

Kalimantan is the Indonesian part of the giant island of Borneo, which dominates the map of island South East Asia. The four provinces that made up Kalimantan at the time of my trip occupy the southern three-quarters of the island. To the north, over the mountains swathed in jungle that cover the centre of Borneo, are the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, and the tiny independent sultanate of Brunei.

Though it’s relatively empty – there are only twenty-five people in each square kilometre of Kalimantan, compared with 1,055 in Java – Kalimantan manages to be racially complex. The Mayor of Pontianak’s grey silks were the traditional dress of the Malay Muslims who originated in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula and who settled on Kalimantan’s coasts and drifted up its rivers long before Europeans reached these shores. The forests of the interior have always been home to the many tribes that now crowd under the umbrella term ‘Dayak’. They generally lived in communal longhouses close to a river, paddling or trudging into the nearby forest to clear land for temporary plantations. And as early as the eighteenth century, a large Chinese community established an independent state in the west of the island. Much more recently, migrants from Java, Madura and other overcrowded parts of Indonesia filtered in, some on government-backed transmigration programmes, others drawn by work in the oilfields and coal mines that have made southern and eastern Kalimantan among the richest parts of the nation. Nearly one in five people in Kalimantan was born elsewhere.

Behind the monument, thirteen school groups were showing off their equator-themed science projects for the local TV cameras and the judges of the provincial science contest. One group was explaining the Seven Wonders of the Equator, which include disappearing shadows, water swirling down plugholes in different directions on either side of the line (not true in fact, though enthusiastically ‘demonstrated’ by several groups), weak gravity and high-intensity sunlight. These students were mostly ethnic Chinese, from an expensive private school, and they had prepared their project in English. ‘The intensity of the sunlight is great richness, because from it we will make sun force,’ explained one boy. Another elbowed him: ‘Solar power, not sun force,’ and they giggled.

I asked how much of Pontianak’s electricity supply actually came from ‘sun force’. ‘Ya, almost none. We’re just talking about potential,’ said one of the boys. I suggested, half joking, that they go and speak to the Mayor about realizing that potential, about making Pontianak a model of energy efficiency. ‘Yes, we will!’ they yelled, in English. ‘We are the new generation. We can change the world!’

I had company on this leg of the trip. I’d come across a blog,
Gangs of Indonesia
, and had written to its author Melanie Wood out of the blue to say how much I liked her work. During one of my pit-stops in Jakarta we met in a cocktail bar, a place humming with Indonesian yuppies stirring absent-mindedly at their pomegranate-with-vapours-of-fresh-ginger cocktails and stroking their iPads. We chatted for a while and I mentioned that I’d be leaving in two days’ time for Kalimantan. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she had said.

I looked her up and down. She was wearing a well-cut blouse, a short, navy-blue skirt, and elegant sling-back heels; I couldn’t imagine her in a rusty bus with sick-bags swinging from the ceiling. I tried to explain how I travelled, but she was unfazed.

Melanie was a great travel companion; she was hardy, resourceful, cheerful and game for almost anything. And she was tall and blonde, with piercing blue eyes. Beside her I became almost invisible, hardly foreign-looking, even. That meant that Melanie took over as Pied Piper, followed around by gaggles of children, posing for the endless photos that are the tyranny of universal cell-phone ownership. I felt like I was on holiday.

Singkawang, which sits on the coast about four hours north of Pontianak, is one of the few towns in Indonesia where the majority of the population is ethnically Chinese. The whole town has a very Straits-Chinese feel to it; the buildings are mostly two-storey shop-houses with saloon doors, a colonnaded balcony on the upper floor and carved metal awnings providing shade below. It could be Singapore or Penang circa 1940, but for the tatty 1980s construction values.

The first evening in Singkawang, Melanie and I sat at an outdoor cafe that specialized in a tea that looked a bit like rooibos, but was in fact made from a local variant of chrysanthemum, picked in the wild by Dayaks. Around us flowed a procession of young people on Vespas and Lambrettas. These beautifully restored scooters were the latest trend. Their riders wore retro helmets to match; the national law requiring full-face helmets was roundly ignored. Even brand-new Hondas had been dolled up to look 1950s.

I got chatting to Hermanto, the owner of the tea stall. He said Singkawang didn’t get many Western visitors. ‘The only thing we’re known for is human trafficking!’ he said cheerfully. I had indeed heard that the town was the hub of a huge mail-order-bride business; was it true? The brides, yes, he said. The trafficking, no.

The bride business started in earnest in the 1970s, when Taiwanese firms were busy turning West Kalimantan’s trees into timber and plywood. Visiting businessmen realized that the Chinese women of Singkawang might make good companions for the many poorer Taiwanese men who had aged through their compulsory military service without being able to marry, and alerted the traditional matchmakers who still helped many Taiwanese parents find appropriate spouses for their children. The matchmakers helped couples to exchange letters and photographs; if they and their families agreed, the woman would go off to Taiwan. Hermanto said that most of the brides in those early days were in their forties – old maids, by Indonesian standards. ‘Of course, some men pretended they were richer than they were, there were disappointments. But mostly it was win-win.’ These days, Hermanto said, people still used matchmakers, but there were fewer bad outcomes. ‘The candidates Skype each other, and flights are so cheap that the guy almost always visits to see if they get on.’

Newspaper stories that described these exchanges as ‘trafficking’ almost always quoted the same woman, Maya Satrini. Google told me she was a member of the Singkawang district AIDS commission, so I wandered down to see if I could find her in their offices. She wasn’t there, but her colleagues had the same relaxed attitude to the bride market as Hermanto did. They saw the hook-ups between Taiwanese men and local women as not much different to internet dating. ‘You pay a fee to a dating website, you pay a fee to the matchmaker; what’s the difference, really?’ said one woman.

The major difference is that the matchmaker’s job is to ensure that the girl’s family gets paid a bride-price. That’s been the case in traditional Chinese societies for millennia, but in recent years it has been recast as ‘selling’ women. The suspicion of anti-trafficking look-outs is further aroused because matchmakers draw up contracts, often for three or five years. That means that if the relationship doesn’t work out, the woman can come home without losing face, just as a migrant worker comes home after a two-year contract working as a housemaid in Malaysia. Unlike maids’ contracts, though, these ones specify that any children of the union stay with the father.

‘If she’s from a poor family, getting married to one of those guys might be the best chance she has of helping her parents. Filial piety is still very much part of our tradition,’ Hermanto had said. I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me that there might be poor ethnic Chinese families in Indonesia.

Some of the first written records of life in the islands that coalesced into Indonesia are written in Chinese. Traders from mainland China have been an integral part of the archipelago’s economy for well over a thousand years, and they have contributed culturally too. The Chinese admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan, was among those who introduced Islam to the ports of northern Java. But Indonesia’s relationship with its Chinese immigrants has been fraught.

Many of the earliest Chinese immigrants were actually traders who had the doors to their home ports slammed on them by a Ming Dynasty emperor who banned private trade in the late 1300s. Unable to go home to China, these men settled in ports along the north coast of Java. They learned Javanese and married local girls. In the mid-1700s the local rulers of at least four cities in Java were of Chinese descent.

The Chinese also brought skills that local rulers needed. Princes and sultans, admiring the merchants’ business acumen, often appointed them as harbour masters, customs officers and tax collectors. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, followed suit. They used ethnic Chinese islanders to collect an unpopular rice tax that funded the company’s many skirmishes with local sultans and princelings. The colonial government, wary of allowing the large ‘native’ population to grow rich, later gave the small Chinese minority a monopoly on opium dens, pawnshops and gambling houses.

The Dutch also sold the rights to run big businesses – mining gold in Kalimantan and tin in Sumatra, farming sugar in Java and tobacco and pepper in Sumatra – to well-established Chinese merchants. Rather than hire locals, these bosses shipped in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers from the Chinese mainland. This new wave of immigrants did not need to integrate as the traders had done. By the start of the twentieth century, there were over half a million people of Chinese descent in the Dutch East Indies, half of them outside of Java. Many of them lived in a bubble of Chineseness, speaking the language of their home province in China, recreating the dishes, the prayers and the marriage rites of their ancestors and working, working, working.

In Singkawang, Melanie and I stumbled on a ceramics factory that has an old-fashioned ‘dragon kiln’, a sort of humped tunnel eighty metres long, ending in a beehive-shaped furnace. The design, which the workers say originated in Guangdong province in southern China, is ancient, though this latest kiln was not built until the 1970s. Walking into the kiln, I saw hundreds of pieces all lined up, dipped already in glazes of indistinguishable rainy-day greys. Once there are 1,000 pieces ready to go, the door will be bricked closed, the kiln fired up and fed with logs. Twenty hours later the brown sludge will have brightened to oranges and browns, to greens and bright blues, and the pots, statues and ornamental dragons will be ready for market.

In the back of the yard was a brick factory. A young man with the lanky build and fine features of northern China appeared from the banks of a small pond down below with a wheelbarrow full of newly dug clay. He kneaded it a bit, then hived off large chunks and slapped them down in front of two women who were standing at a table. Each took a handful of the clay, pressed it down into an oblong mould, dragged a metal blade over the top to smooth it off, then smacked the newly ‘printed’ brick down on the table. That would earn its maker sixty rupiah, about seven cents. The women said they could do between 300 and 400 day.

I had seen this brick-making once before, in South Sulawesi. There, the women making the bricks had hands made stumpy by leprosy. Sitting with them had been the factory owner, a pretty young ethnic Chinese woman in a pink tracksuit. That was the natural order of things in most of Indonesia. Here in Singkawang, it was ethnic Chinese women doing the work and earning less than two dollars a day.

I was shocked, in the way that a visitor in the colonial era would have been shocked to see a Dutchman cutting cane in the sugar fields. And I was suddenly very aware of how completely I had absorbed indigenous Indonesians’ stereotypes about the
babahs
, as Chinese traders are sometimes called, though never politely. All Chinese are canny businesspeople, the stereotype holds, hard-working and deeply clannish. Though they are generous in supporting their own kind, they are always willing to wring an extra rupiah out of an indigenous Indonesian. As a result, they grow rich.

‘I worked for the
babahs
for years’, said an Indonesian businessman I had met earlier on my travels, in eastern Indonesia. ‘I watched, I learned. Especially, I learned to work hard.’ In the end, though, he felt there was a vacuum at the centre of their lives. ‘Everything is only for money, money, money. From morning to night, money, money, money. Eat, money, sleep, money, die. But in the end, I wonder what for?’