The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results‘Yang Mulia’: A tale of family secrets and the shadows of May 1998
Originally published as The Majesties, Tiffany Tsao’s novel explores the secrets of a wealthy Chinese Indonesian family against the backdrop of Jakarta’s May 1998 turmoil.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Butterfly effect: The Indonesian edition of The Majesties, titled Yang Mulia, features a striking cover of monarch butterfly wings, a motif that extends onto the inner flaps. The design echoes the novel’s themes of migration, transformation and family ties across generations. (JP/Sylviana Hamdani)
L
iving as a Chinese-Indonesian in Indonesia has never been easy, even for the very wealthy. They are often perceived as insular, stingy and cold toward those outside their circles. Unfortunately, some of these stereotypes are not entirely unfounded.
In The Majesties (2020), recently published in Indonesian by Gramedia as Yang Mulia (2026), American writer of Chinese-Indonesian descent Tiffany Tsao tells the story of the Sulinados, a wealthy Chinese Indonesian family whose behavior appears to reinforce some of these stereotypes. Beneath their privileged lives, however, lie secrets and personal conflicts shaped in part by the country's turbulent political history.
“The political always affects the domestic. The two have to be interwoven in the novel, as well,” Tsao said in an interview on Oct. 30 at Gramedia's head office in West Jakarta.
Set against the backdrop of Jakarta in 1998, the novel follows a family in which much is left unsaid. Feelings are rarely expressed openly and appearances must be maintained, while tensions beneath the surface continue to build.
“The political always affects the domestic. The two have to be interwoven in the novel, as well.” — Tiffany Tsao, author
Secrets beneath surface
The novel opens with the mass poisoning of 300 guests at a birthday party. Guests retch, vomit and writhe in agony as a joyful family gathering turns into a scene of mass murder.
More from The Weekender
In between the kingdoms of the well and sick
In a clarifying Third Place between illness and recovery, life becomes both stranger and clearer than it's ever been.
Machines Without a Beating Heart?
As electric cars reshape the driving experience, enthusiasts wrestle with what makes a car special: the roar of its engine, the quirks of an aging machine, or the memories we leave behind the wheel.
FX Harsono revisits Indonesia’s unresolved past in Ambang/Threshold
The veteran artist reworks familiar images of violence and discrimination to confront a history that continues to shape the present.
