Now 85, Oei Hiem Hwie, was sitting on an old sofa on his veranda, pasting newspaper clippings into a folder when The Jakarta Post visited him at home on Sept. 13. The former political prisoner during the New Order era, who goes by Hwie, now runs a library called Medayu Agung in southeastern Surabaya.

He had dreamed of the library for decades, even before he was imprisoned without trial in 1965 and shuffled between various prisons until he was released in 1978.

"My hands are shaky already. Lately, I’ve been struggling with vertigo. My speech is slurred and my movements are slow. Seems like it’s true that age doesn’t lie," Hwie said.

His library is a collection and archive of the books he feels will help the succeeding generations avoid the same pitfalls of the kind of authoritarian government under which he and many others suffered.

Historical heritage

Prior to his arrest, Hwie was an active member of the Indonesian Citizenship Consultative Body (BAPERKI), an organization with a membership composed entirely of Chinese-Indonesians and targeted by the New Order due to its close ties to the nation’s first president, Soekarno.

Many of his fellow BAPERKI members were executed in 1965, and Hwie lived thinking that he would soon suffer the same fate. So he began hiding books and newspaper clippings in the space beneath his roof. Sometime in late 1965, however, security troops came to his house and burned most of the books and clippings they found, though they didn’t find his entire collection. Then they took him to prison.

"It broke my heart. [Those materials were] Indonesia's historical heritage. They burned it just like that, as if [the books and clippings] didn’t have any value," Hwie recounted.

Before leaving for prison, Hwie told his sister about the other hidden books and newspaper clippings that the troops hadn’t found. His sister left the materials where they were for decades until Hwie returned in 1978. By then, more than half his collection had turned to so much dust, mostly due to termites, but his dream of opening a library remained intact, though it would take another few decades to come to fruition.

Scary beast

Hwie's time as an extrajudicial prisoner resulted in a life filled with bitterness and harassment. It ensured that his library was something that remained in the far-off future.

“The stigma against political prisoners is appalling. People thought of me as a cruel person, as if I was a monster. I was shunned like an infectious disease,” he recalled, his lips quivering.

“I had a hard time getting a job, too. And for years I had to hang around at my sister's house in Malang because no company wanted to accept me as a worker. On my ID card was the code ET, meaning 'ex-Tapol' [ex-political prisoner]," Hwie said as he showed his old identity documents and prison release order.

Hwie compared former political prisoners of the New Order to cattle that had been released from their pens but still shackled. There still remains strong stigma against the ex-Tapol as stooges of a cruel regime and irreligious.

"I wasn’t completely free at all. There was no effort to restore the name and pride of former state prisoners. People saw me as a cruel and scary beast. It drained me so much to the point I felt small,” he said.

Once, a neighbor held a feast and distributed food parcels in the neighborhood. Arriving at Hwie's residence, the neighbor opened the door, threw the food in and immediately fled in fright.

“I had mixed feelings. It was funny and sad at the same time. He looked at me as though I were a ghost, like I wasn’t human,” Hwie said.

New opportunities

In 1985, one of his close friends Tjio Wie Tay, who came to be known as Haji Masagung, asked Hwie to be his personal secretary at Gunung Agung, one of the biggest bookstore chains in the country.

“He said something like, 'Hwie, if this keeps going on, you can't grow. That’s why just join me, OK?' It struck me, because I met him when I was working as a journalist. That means [it was] more than 20 years ago,” Hwie recalled.

“I asked [him], 'Who told you about my situation?' He said that wasn’t important. It turned out that the person who made the recommendation was my friend [Pramoedya Ananta Toer].”

At Gunung Agung, Hwie regularly bought books with the money he made, adding many titles to his collection and eventually gathering enough to start the Medayu Agung library in 2001.

The library currently has more than 5000 books and clippings from various newspapers, including Chinese-language newspapers published in the 1960s. It is a public library, and most of its visitors are students looking for old newspaper articles as references.

Hwie said a collector once offered Rp 1 billion to buy his entire collection of books, clippings and photographs. He declined.

“The life span of mortals is limited and I won't live forever, right? Money will not save me from death, nor can it replace this country’s long history. Because of that, I decided to donate the entire collection [of my library] to the next generation. This is a happiness that cannot be measured in money for me,” said Hwie.

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