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Onghokham: An individualistic reflection of his times
Some people's lives reflect the times they live in and the late scholar Onghoknam was one such individual, who also epitomized Indonesia's unique, pluralistic and diverse legacy through his own.
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Australian historian David Reeve of the University of New South Wales (left) and British historian Peter Carey of Oxford University (right) on Nov. 21, 2018 attend a discussion of a book by the late Indonesian historian Ong Hok Ham, which tells the history of Madiun, a city once torn by the rebellion of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1948. (The Jakarta Post/Nedi Putra AW)
Don’t you love biographies, especially when they reflect the times they live in?
One recently published title is To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham (NUS Press, June 2022), a fascinating biography by David Reeve.
Onghokham, or Ong Hok Ham in the original Chinese spelling, was a well-known social historian, public intellectual, bon vivant, epicurean, party-lover, eccentric, alcoholic and gay man.
Known as “Ong” to his friends, Onghokham had a life spanning 74 years from 1933 to 2007 that reflected the times he lived in. The chapter titles alone hint at this: Childhood; War, Revolution and Education; Becoming Indonesian, Becoming Chinese; Turning to Java; Breakdown and Jail; In America; The Peak of His Career; In Retirement, and The Legacy.
Born during Dutch colonial times in Surabaya to an upper-middle-class Chinese family, he had aristocratic blood from his mother, whose maternal lineage was from the Chinese gentry, as well as from officers of the colonial Dutch civil bureaucracy. He was multicultural, with his mixed Chinese, Javanese and Dutch background, who later became internationalist. And his life spanned several historical periods: the colonial era (both Dutch and Japanese), the Indonesian Revolution, Sukarno’s Old Order regime (1945-1966), Soeharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998) and the Reform era until his death in 2007.
In some ways, his life evoked that of royalty. While Ong had only one house and it was no palace, his antique Javanese joglo house in Cipinang Muara, East Jakarta, with its open-air bathroom, was the regular venue for his famous parties attended by people from all walks of life: Indonesian and foreign academics and intellectuals, members of the press and diplomatic corps, artists, celebrities and of course, friends.
May 1 is Labor Day, but for Ong’s friends, it was his birthday and a noted event in Jakarta’s social calendar, when a motley crowd of friends would congregate at his joglo, where they would do anything but work.
