XU XI: (Photo by Paul Hilton)

“‘Marry your own people,” my mother always told me. For Christine Go, the problem was defining just who her “own people” were. As an “overseas Chinese” girl born before World War II in Dutch-ruled Indonesia, her choices were limited. And as an educated, independent-minded teenager who traded cows in Javanese village markets, she did not meet many people she was willing to call “her own”.

Christine was my spinster aunt Caroline’s life-long companion. They lived together in Hong Kong and bickered like an old married couple until my aunt passed away in 1993, following which Christine returned to Indonesia. Their common language evolved into a kind of Indonesian-English; the one Chinese dialect they both spoke with some fluency was Cantonese, although their accent was obviously non-native. As wah kiu in Hong Kong, which was what locals called the “overseas” Southeast Asian Chinese, they were almost a breed apart, and lived a life that was unlike the local Chinese who comprise 98 percent of the city’s population.

In our “global” era, “Canadian” can equal “Chinese”, in nationality if not ethnicity, and in culture if not blood. Yet Asia today retains much of the racism that divides even people of the same race. Christine’s life, which spans most of the 20th century, exemplifies the odd balance of survival and discriminatory instincts among those who are themselves oppressed.

In colonial Indonesia, the Chinese were often the intermediaries between native Indonesians and the Dutch, particularly in commerce and local governance. “The Chinese,” she says, “thought they were better than the Dutch. Yet on the other side of the brain, they wanted to be Dutch. Meanwhile, Indonesians called us belanda-belandaan meaning that we Chinese pretended we were Dutch.”

The Go family lived in Purworejo, a village in Central Java, where they ran a dairy and slaughterhouse. This gave them status and wealth. Dutch customers were amply supplied with cheese and milk; during the Japanese occupation, their family remained unharmed because they could provide meat to Japanese troops.

“The Chinese are difficult,” her father asserted, when training Christine to purchase cows on his behalf. “They go round and round and think about things you never think of. Buy from the Indonesians. They give you a better bargain.”

Years later, as a translator at the Indonesian Consulate in Hong Kong during the 1960s and 1970s, Christine was to encounter other distinctions. When visa applicants were processed, the local staff called out each group by colors — blue was Europeans (the terminology for all Caucasians), yellow meant Chinese and red was reserved for Communist Chinese.

She was sent to a Dutch Catholic girls school, the preferred choice for the elite Chinese. As a result, Christine is competent in Dutch, English, German, French and Indonesian, but illiterate in Chinese (she understands but does not speak Hokkienese, the dialect of many Southeast Asian wah kiu).

“The Catholics were more progressive in education,” she says, “but they didn’t subscribe to mixed marriages. None of the Chinese or Dutch girls wanted to marry Indonesians.”

Yet she herself saw something else.

“Boys had full Chinese names, but we girls were only ‘daughters of Go’. I didn’t want an arranged marriage, I wanted to be the one daughter to keep her father’s name.” Christine never regretted this decision not to enter the “marriage market” as she calls it. Perhaps she was remembering the cow trade she knew so well. In her more reflective moments, however, she says she was the only daughter with a “non-Chinese appearance” in the family. “I’m dark and ugly, and have a flat nose.” She had suitors, nevertheless, but knew it was because of her father’s money.

The remarkable thing about Christine is her lack of self pity. Perhaps it was due to her living in Asia where discrimination and divisions are tolerated, even encouraged. After World War II, she came to Hong Kong with my aunt, and took her language skills to an administrative career at the Indonesian Consulate from which she refused to retire, until forced to, when almost eighty.

Christine had been a teacher in our family’s home in Tjilatjap (Cilacap), a village near her own, when she tutored my other aunts. Caroline attended boarding school in Singapore, and they met when she came home on vacations.

“I liked Caroline right from the beginning. We were both not pretty so we’re quite okay together. When we met, I decided, I can handle this one.” She laughs as she recalls her younger friend. “Caroline didn’t want to remain in Tjilatjap. She said it was too old fashioned and people couldn’t get as much education as in Hong Kong. I found it hard to decide whether or not to go with her at first, but I trusted her and told myself, if she can why can’t I? So I went.”

In Hong Kong, she was to acquire another moniker, jaap jung meaning mixed breed, a pejorative used by local Chinese for Eurasians. “I was always a foreigner there,” she says, despite her residence of over forty years. “But I’m glad I went.”

As a child in Hong Kong, I loved Christine like family. She used to spin tales about a girl called “Black-socks-and-white-shoes.”

“Why did she wear that?” I asked.

“Because she wanted to,” Christine would reply. “Now listen, this girl climbed trees, ran around, played with and even led all the boys when her daddy wasn’t watching. During her period, she even swam, although she was told not to. She did whatever she liked, even smoking cigarettes.” Here she would take a drag of her filtered Kent, the brand she smoked from the time I first knew her until she was in her seventies, when the doctor made her quit. “Anyway, whenever Black-socks-and-white-shoes did anything naughty, she never got caught.” She narrated this part with an air of great satisfaction. “Never?” This idea thrilled my six-year old self. “Never,” Christine declared. It wasn’t till I was older that I realized she was talking almost entirely about herself. The only piece of fiction was the footwear.

Hong Kong proved the place Christine finally chose to do what she wanted. Being Chinese or Indonesian was moot; what mattered was that she and my aunt lived a long and happy life together without interference. They both had careers, were able to travel, saw “exciting and new things”, a bigger world than would have been open to them had they never left home. It was the path of her ancestors, the Gos who sailed from southeastern China many generations earlier to the shores of Indonesia. Even her family’s secret no longer signified: a great grandfather had taken a second wife or mistress, a Eurasian, with whom he had several mixed-blood offspring. This outcast branch banished themselves to Holland, although their existence was whispered about throughout her childhood.

She attributes her independence to her mother.

“I think I was her favorite,” she says, “because I was the only girl who had something to say.” Her mother came from a poor family who struggled to build their dairy business. Christine learned that her desire for independence would only be gained through hard work. When she approached her parents about leaving Indonesia, the argument that won was that “in Hong Kong, I can earn more.” Besides, Christine’s future in Indonesia was limited to teaching; despite her commercial abilities in the cow trade, only her bothers would inherit the business.

 ***

The multiple meanings of “Chinese” in Christine’s life reflect her particular experience in Asia’s historical evolution. Ironically, it was in British Hong Kong, the colony that never gained independence, where Christine felt more free. “I am Indonesian, not Chinese,” she used to say of herself there. “Well, that’s what he locals say.” And then she laughs, because her time in Hong Kong was unfettered by anyone’s conventions.

In yet another twist of fate, the girl who wanted to keep her father’s Chinese name by not marrying was forced to adopt an Indonesian one in 1968, a result of the anti-Communist wave which affected Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent. Yet she almost never refers to herself by it, except in banking or legal matters. She is Christine Go, the daughter of Go Wai Tik, the man who taught her to trade cows for profit.

In 2001, the year that the chronologically accurate call the real millennium, Christine Go turns ninety. She does not have much more of a corporal life ahead, and her mental life is slipping slowly into the zone of old age, although she can be remarkably lucid in conversation. I ask about freedom of choice and the meaning of majority opinion, since her life strikes me as one where choice and an unwillingness to buckle to convention led to a kind of fulfillment.

“Choice or your own opinion only matter,” she claims, “depending on environment or circumstance. You can’t change environmental opinion. I know my choice not to get married was right. You have to look out for yourself. The only thing is, it’s not really necessary to be against anyone.

“Look at me, I have this ugly brown skin. Only who says brown is bad? Or like the nuns who baptized me when I was young. I didn’t have to choose. Were they right or wrong? I don’t know. I don’t even know if there is a difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

“The Dutch have an old saying, ‘in de stade haven,’ meaning ‘may we arrive in the correct harbor’ or, in other words, that things may work out. You can’t change those things that happen to you, just like you can’t change opinions of those around you. All I know is that because I do choose, I’ve done what I like.”

Fighting words, while accepting the vagaries of fate, from this one “Chinese” life.

Afterword: Christine Go died in the summer of 2001, shortly after her ninetieth birthday.

___________________

Xu Xi is a Chinese Indonesian author born and raised in Hong Kong. She has taught MFA in creative writing courses at universities in the US. This essay appeared in her collection of stories and essays, Overleaf Hong Kong (Chameleon Press, 2004).

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