The
“Impossible Position” Beneath Tropical Moonlight
During the
two years I have spent living in Yogyakarta, the landscape that has come to
define my daily life is one woven from tropical humidity and the drifting smoke
of burning trash in the early morning air.
Last year, on
the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, I sat outside a small restaurant owned by
my fellow Taiwanese acquaintance, Pranoto. As he turned skewers of satay over
the charcoal fire, he carefully checked with his Indonesian wife, Siti, about
several mooncakes they had specially ordered—filled with lotus seed paste, red
bean paste, and salted egg yolk. On the table beside us sat a serving of Gudeg,
the traditional Javanese jackfruit stew his wife had prepared for him.
On the
surface, the scene appeared to embody the warm harmony of cross-cultural
integration. Yet sitting there that night, I was overcome by an inexplicably
deep sense of existential dislocation.
In an era
that celebrates globalization, mobility, and transnational belonging, my
everyday observations in Yogyakarta have instead revealed something far more
complicated and unsettling: the condition of being Taiwanese in Indonesia
increasingly resembles what cultural studies might describe as an impossible
subject position. This predicament is not the result of personal
maladjustment or isolated individual experience. Rather, it emerges from a
structural fissure produced jointly by historical erasure, geopolitical
struggle, and the asymmetric flow of global capital.
The traces of
this condition appear everywhere in daily life: in unstable linguistic labels
that resist classification; in fractured cultural landscapes; in the
invisibility of subjects beneath the spectacle of commodities; and in the
stubborn persistence of embodied memory against historical violence. Looking
back on the essays I have written over the past two years about life in
Yogyakarta, I find myself trying to name these quiet wounds through the lenses
of cultural studies and sociology—to identify the structural gravity concealed
beneath the apparent warmth of ordinary life.
The Politics
of Naming: Being Named, or Being Defined?
One of the
most persistent forms of confusion I encounter in Yogyakarta comes through
language itself.
At times,
local Indonesian friends casually—and sometimes jokingly—refer to me as being
“from China.” I do not necessarily experience this as a direct political
insult. Yet every time it happens, I find myself trapped in a labyrinth of
signification.
Within the
historical evolution of the Indonesian language, the naming of ethnicity and
geopolitics forms an extraordinarily sensitive and unstable discursive network.
This immediately recalls Michel Foucault and his classic formulation of discourse
and power. Foucault argued that discourse is never merely a system of
language. It is a mechanism through which institutions classify, regulate,
exclude, and define subjects, thereby exercising social control at the micro
level of everyday life.
As I
attempted to untangle the various labels used in Indonesia, I gradually
realized that every term carries the sediment of historical power relations:
|
Label
|
Historical
and Discursive Context
|
|
Cina / Orang Cina
|
A colonial-era category inherited from Dutch
racial segregation policies. After the anti-Chinese violence of 1965, the
Suharto regime institutionalized the term as the official designation for
ethnic Chinese, embedding it with strong connotations of discrimination,
exclusion, and political suspicion.
|
|
Tionghoa /
Tiongkok
|
Derived from Hokkien pronunciations of
“Zhonghua” and “Zhongguo.” Following the democratic reforms of the Reformasi
era, these terms gradually re-entered public and official usage as part of
attempts to restore dignity to Chinese-Indonesian communities.
|
|
Cindo
|
A contemporary colloquial abbreviation of
“Chinese-Indonesian,” often associated with younger urban generations and
popular culture.
|
|
Taiwanese /
Chinese Taipei
|
Technocratic geopolitical labels born from
international compromise. In Indonesian media such as Kompas, usage often
shifts fluidly between “Taiwan” and “Chinese Taipei” depending on whether the
subject concerns sports, economics, or politics.
|
As a
Taiwanese person living in Yogyakarta, I found myself surrounded by this
historical structure in profoundly disorienting ways.
Inside the
registration system at Gadjah Mada University, my nationality appeared with the
annotation “province of China.” During a graduation ceremony, I became “Chinese
Taipei” on a presentation slide. The emcee introduced me on stage as being from
“Taiwan,” while the certificate itself identified me as “Taiwanese.”
Watching
these labels slide ambiguously between noun and adjective forced me to confront
something I had never fully articulated before: as a Taiwanese expatriate in
Indonesia, I was not constructing an identity so much as being absorbed into a
classificatory system that I had never participated in creating—a system marked
by the residue of colonial history and geopolitical compromise.
My
subjectivity was being fragmented and rearranged according to the shifting
winds of international politics.
Here,
externally imposed language became an invisible prison of identity, confining
the individual within the ashes of history.
Fractured
Roots: When Cultural Inheritance Becomes Hollow Form
Every Lunar
New Year, the Chinatown district of Ketandan in Yogyakarta transforms
into a brightly illuminated festival space. During the 2025 celebrations, I
visited the area with local friends during a cultural event that stretched from
the ninth day of the lunar calendar through the Lantern Festival.
Yet amid the
noise of drums and gongs, what I witnessed felt strangely hollow.
People in the
streets performed cosplay inspired by characters from old Hong Kong adaptations
of Journey to the West. Loudspeakers blasted Andy Lau’s Lunar New Year
songs, while even the theme song from the Taiwanese drama Meteor Garden
drifted through the crowd.
The spectacle
reminded me of sociologist Paul Connerton and his concept of social memory.
Connerton argues that collective memory survives through the interplay between
bodily practices and commemorative rituals. When state violence severs a
community’s linguistic and textual continuity, the ritual shell may eventually
return, but the deeper cognitive framework that once sustained it may already
have undergone irreversible rupture.
This rupture
is deeply visible in Indonesia.
After decades
of cultural suppression and forced assimilation during the Suharto era, many
Chinese-Indonesians under the age of thirty have completely lost the ability to
read Chinese characters or speak Mandarin. The imposing statue of Guan Gong
standing in Ketandan functions less as a living cultural figure than as a
detached visual totem stripped of textual context.
As my local
friends wandered through the festival, I suddenly realized that I—the
outsider—had become the only person there capable of explaining the meanings of
the couplets, the origins of the deities, the rituals of incense worship, or
the practice of divination through moon blocks.
This strange
form of cultural “presence” revealed something far more unsettling.
Chinese
culture in this space does not fully exist as a coherent living structure. What
remains is a lively illusion jointly produced by historical trauma and
contemporary consumer spectacle.
Structures of
Invisibility: Not Misunderstood, but Absent
Inside the
upscale Pakuwon Mall Jogja, long lines often form outside the Taiwanese bubble
tea brand Xing Fu Tang. The storefront prominently displays the slogan “Taiwan
No. 1.” Across Yogyakarta’s countless warung—small local eateries—and
cafés, teh susu boba (bubble milk tea) has become a recognizable symbol
of middle-class consumption.
Yet whenever
I casually ask local residents, “Do you know that boba comes from Taiwan?” the
answer is usually blank confusion.
Many do not
know where Taiwan is located on a map. To them, ASUS and Acer exist as
de-nationalized global tech brands. Even the semiconductor mythology
surrounding TSMC is understood merely as an extension of American AI narratives
and NVIDIA.
This bizarre
condition—an excess of symbols paired with the disappearance of the
subject—immediately recalls anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and his theory of global
cultural flows. Appadurai argues that globalization is not the
homogenization of culture, but rather an uneven system of circulation in which
certain symbols are permitted to travel while certain subjects are
systematically erased. What circulates globally is never determined by the free
market alone, but by geopolitical structures and capital itself.
Taiwan’s
condition in Indonesia represents this asymmetry with painful clarity.
Bubble tea,
ASUS laptops, and TSMC chips are all allowed to circulate transnationally. Yet
“Taiwanese” as a historical and cultural subject is systematically erased from
Indonesia’s cognitive map through geopolitical filtering mechanisms.
Within
Indonesia’s collective imagination, only two legitimate coordinates seem to
exist: the geopolitical giant of Tiongkok (China), and the local
category of Tionghoa/Cindo (Chinese-Indonesians). Taiwan, as a distinct
historical subject, remains almost entirely absent.
This creates
a striking contrast with the way cultural studies often discusses cultural
appropriation.
For
appropriation to occur, the appropriated culture must first possess sufficient
visibility and recognizability as a subject. Only then can dominant groups
extract and commodify its symbols.
But Taiwan in
Indonesia occupies an even stranger position: it lacks sufficient visibility
even to be appropriated.
This form of
structural invisibility is more difficult to confront than simple
misunderstanding, because one cannot clarify a concept that does not
meaningfully exist within the other party’s cognitive framework.
As a result,
both transnational capital and expatriate individuals are pushed toward a form
of pragmatic self-simplification. In order to avoid political complications or
commercial risk, we voluntarily soften—or even conceal—our Taiwanese identity,
allowing our symbols and culture to circulate detached from their historical
origins.
In the
process of pursuing economic opportunity or personal goals, we unknowingly
participate in the institutional production of our own invisibility: a quiet
form of self-erasure that leaves no visible bloodstain.
How the
Individual Carries Structure: The Stubbornness of Memory
Yet none of
these geopolitical structures, historical traumas, or forms of invisibility
remain confined to academic abstraction. Eventually, they descend—heavily and
mercilessly—into the sensory life of actual human beings.
I think again
of Pranoto, who chose to settle permanently in rural Yogyakarta after fleeing a
deeply traumatic family history in Taiwan.
Living beside
a Javanese cemetery, he rationally lists the advantages of staying in
Indonesia: more living space, less academic pressure for his children, the
fulfillment of his childhood dream of spending his days fishing.
His attempt
to construct an entirely new life through reason once again recalls Connerton’s
concept of embodied memory. Connerton argues that the most persistent
form of memory is not cognitive memory stored in the mind, but memory embedded
in bodily habit, sensory reflex, and muscular response. Such memory does not
require conscious recollection. A familiar smell, sound, or spatial arrangement
can suddenly trigger it, bypassing rational control and erupting directly
through the body.
The cruelty
of trauma lies precisely in the fact that it never requires permission from
reason.
Pranoto
rationally decided to leave Taiwan behind. He rebuilt his life, formed a new
family, and became the owner of an Indonesian restaurant. Yet his body
continually betrays this narrative.
Whenever he
rides his motorcycle with his six-year-old son, Hartono, across the Lempuyangan
overpass and hears the thunder of trains passing beneath it, his body begins
trembling uncontrollably. Passing by Tugu Station plunges him into prolonged
depression.
Bridges and
railways—symbols tied to trauma in Taiwan—return with terrifying precision
inside Indonesian space itself, completing a transnational pursuit of the body.
Then came the
night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
In the
courtyard beside the Javanese cemetery, Pranoto burned dried leaves and trash,
attempting to recreate childhood memories of watching the moon with family
members and burning paper offerings for ancestors. Through tropical wind,
flickering firelight, and drifting smoke, he tried to translate a vanished
homeland into Indonesian space.
But memory
erupted with violent force.
His face
suddenly stiffened. Staring into the flames and smoke, he quietly claimed that
he could see his deceased parents smiling at him.
In that
moment, the tragedy of human existence revealed itself with devastating
clarity:
A person may
rationally declare, “I have already left Taiwan. I am now an Indonesian
restaurant owner.” Yet the body and the senses may completely betray that
declaration at certain moments in time and space.
The elevated
railways of Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn moon crossing national borders, the
emotional textures of dialects that cannot be fully translated into
Indonesian—all of them remind him that culture and trauma are never simply
luggage one can discard at will. They are structural burdens already fused into
flesh and memory, inseparable from the body itself.
Gazing into
Melancholy at the Border
Night has
fully settled over tropical Yogyakarta.
Smoke from
burning leaves drifts slowly along the edge of the village cemetery, blending
together the sweetness of lotus paste and salted egg yolk, the charred
fragrance of satay, and the dryness of ash.
And yet this
seemingly peaceful Mid-Autumn story offers no final answer to the question of
identity.
In an age of
accelerating global mobility, the question “Where are you from?” appears
increasingly weightless within the narratives of multinational capitalism and
personal freedom of movement. But for those who truly cast their bodies into
foreign lands—those who stand at the unstable border between worlds—the
historical gravity and existential cost behind that question become
increasingly impossible to evade.
Cultural
theorist Stuart Hall once argued that identity is never a fixed essence, but
always a process of production—something continuously negotiated, challenged,
and repositioned within the intersections of history, culture, and power.
For
expatriates living between worlds, however, this process is never abstract.
It is lived
physiologically.
Identity is
not a problem to be solved once and for all. It is an ongoing condition that
must be endured repeatedly through the body and through memory itself.
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