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As a daughter of Indonesian Chinese migrants, I grew up acutely aware of transnationals’ pressures and effects of marginalization, be it linguistic, cultural or ideological. My second GRF-funded project is an ethnography of Indonesian Chinese family networks in Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Transnationality research has emerged in the past 20 years in cultural anthropology, population studies, economics, social and cultural geography. A sociolinguistic approach can provide unique insights into the micro social relations of these people in transition and complement the often quantitative approaches to transnationalism and globalization. Ong (1999) exposes needs for observing the environs concerning transnationals, arguing that if “we pay attention to the transnational practices and imaginings of the nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his flexibility, we obtain a different picture of how nation-states articulate with capitalism in late modernity”.
Wang (2009) reports “nearly half a million Indonesian Chinese ‘returned’ to China in the 1950s and 1960s, motivated by new Chinese nationalism after 1949, and by Indonesian policies aimed at marginalizing ethnic Chinese. ‘Return’ meant re-embracing Chinese ethnicity, culture, and a political decision to join the new Chinese nation. However, their journey to China turned out to be painful and traumatic due to the Chinese state’s refusal to recognize them as ‘one of us’. They were turned into an isolated group excluded from ‘the People’”. Because of the disappointment in their experience in China, more than 250,000 returned Indonesian Chinese left for Hong Kong and Macao along with their families in the late 1970s once China loosened its control over these “returnees”(Godley and Coppel 1990). They are “a minority community in transition” (ibid), as they were yet again, marginalized as new immigrants in Hong Kong.
This study investigates the transnational journey of a network of Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong and their family and friend connections in China, Indonesia, and Singapore. These Indonesian Chinese retain distinctive language and cultural practices. They are typically multilingual in varieties of Huaqiao Guoyu (Overseas Chinese Mandarin), Indonesian languages such as Bahasa Indonesian and Javanese, Chinese dialects such as Chiuchao, Hokkien, and Hakka. They listen to and dance with Indonesian folk songs, wear Indonesian attire, enjoy Indonesian and Peranakan/Nyonya food, maintain close kinship ties with Indonesia, and have an ambivalent attitude towards their national identity.
Funding
Funding
Completed 2018. Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council General Research Fund (GRF), Principal and sole Investigator. “Indonesian Chinese as rootless transnationals: a sociolinguistic ethnography of their 60-year journey from Indonesia to China and Hong Kong.” HKD 378,836.
Completed 2013. University of Hong Kong Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research, Principal and sole Investigator. HKD 80,590.
Publication
Publication
Chen, K. (2016) "The transnational journey and multilingual repertoire of an Indonesian Chinese couple in Hong Kong: the story of one family, three places, and multiple languages” In Li Wei (ed.) Multilingualism and the Chinese diaspora. pp.237-254. Routledge Critical Studies of Multilingualism. UK: Routledge.
Presentations
Presentations
Chen, K. 2021 “Transnational Hong Kong: the stories of places, times, and people”. Sociolinguistics Symposium 23. June, 2021, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Chen, K. 2021 “Chronotope and the idea of home among transnational returnees in Hong Kong”. Special Session, the language effects of im/mobility, New Waves of Analyzing Variation-Asia Pacific 6, February. National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Chen, K. 2021 "Transnationality and language worlds of a family of Indonesian Chinese" Public lecture, Ministry of Education Bay of Bengal Countries Research Centre, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.
Chen, K. 2018 “Bewildered Hong Kong: multilingual practices, language ideologies, and identities”. Sociolinguistic Symposium 22, June 2018, Auckland, New Zealand. ,
Chen, K. 2017 “The voices of self in transnational narratives of Indonesian Chinese women in Hong Kong”. British Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference. August 2017, University of Leeds, UK.
Chen, K. 2017 “The view from the periphery: the voices of self in transnational narratives”. In panel “Voices from the Periphery: power, language ideology and interactional regimes in multilingual settings”. 18th World Congress of Applied Linguistics. July 2017, Rio de Janeiro.
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