George E. Fowler described Kwee Tek Hoay as 'autodidact, businessman, newspaper contributor, polemicist and social critic, historian, visionary, lecturer on theosophy and mysticism, novelist, poet and playwright.'

Kwee was born in 1889 in Bogor, from a Fujian trader and a peranakan Chinese mother. While he went to Chinese schools, he was fond of Western languages and a fervent reader of western literature.

His articles were widely published in peranakan Chinese media and covered subjects from politics and education to philosophy and women's issues. His fiction, however, crowned his oeuvre, with The Rose of Cikembang as his most popular work. The story has been made into a movie and staged in theatres as recent as a decade ago.

Chinese Indonesian authors, writing in Low Malay, were very productive since the mid 19th century: some 800 authors produced over 3,000 works including novels, essays, poems and plays. However, as literary or High Malay officially evolved into what is now known as Indonesian, this genre fell into oblivion.

Henk Maier, literature professor at Leiden University, wrote in The Nyai, the mother of all people, that 'hardly any of the many Malay-language publications were kept by the Dutch, who are world's best archivists. Malay newspapers were not thought to be worth shelving, and Malay books were not acquired by libraries, the keeper of civilization [...]Wiggers, Kommer, Francis, Kwee Tek Hoay: these are names that are barely known in present-day Indonesia. Erased. Forgotten.'

There have been efforts to re-introduce these works to current Indonesian readers, like the Gramedia series of 'Kesastraan Melayu Tionghoa dan Kebangsaan Indonesia' (Malay Chinese literature and Indonesian nationality).

Earlier this year, Kwee Tek Hoay was selected as one of the 33 most influential writers in Indonesian literature by the Documentation Center for Literature HB Jassin in Jakarta.

' Linawati Sidarto

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