Fort People

The Chinese-Indonesian experience does not fit conveniently into a general, all-encompassing description. Bhimanto Suwastoyo visits a centuries-old community in Tangerang.

The man sits nonchalantly on a wobbly plastic chair next to his home's open entrance. Bare-chested, with one foot on the seat and the other propped on a low bamboo bed, he slowly fans himself amid the torrid midday heat of Kebon Teki, a dusty village lying halfway between the Java Sea and the city of Tangerang.

Chickens and small children in rags run free in the yard that is shared with several other shacks. The man’s “castle” is a bamboo-framed house with plaited bamboo walls, a dirt floor and terra-cotta tiles. It is almost identical to the simple kampong houses found across Java.

The only marked difference is that above the entrance are a painted mirror and strips of paper with Chinese inscriptions, commonly used at prosperous shophouses and residences in Chinese towns to ward off evil and misfortune. Nearby, under banana trees and surrounded on three sides by similar houses, are several Chinese graves.

But Seng Wie, 51, appears to be Chinese in name only. He is dark skinned and squatly built, with well-toned muscles telling of years of hard work. The poverty of his simple surrounding is at odds with the usual stereotype of Chinese-Indonesians as well-off.

"I haven't had any work for the past two weeks. It's getting harder and harder to get a decent job now," he says.

Seng Wie is a hired hand, toiling for others to raise crops, especially rice, and receiving half of the proceeds.

"It is just enough for us to eat," he says.

The work is harder to find these days; he also does odd jobs, such as unloading bags of rice and cement from trucks, digging holes and other menial work.

His wife, Tan Se Moy, 45, pops her head out from behind the door. She helps supplement the family's income by selling banana leaves and coconuts. Sometimes it is their only means of support.

Two of their four children dropped out after elementary school; the other two may soon follow.

"Getting by is already hard enough for us, and schooling is something we can ill afford," Se Moy says.

Seng Wie’s family is one of thousands in the mostly poor community known as Cina Benteng (Chinese from the Fort), or Cibeng for short, who live in and around the town of Tangerang, just west of Jakarta.

Tjin Eng, 63, is a man well-versed in the history of the local community. He says their ancestors, traders and skilled craftsmen, came from China by boat and landed in present-day Teluk Naga, just northwest of Tangerang, around the 15th century. They gradually moved inland and were later allowed to live just outside the walls of a Dutch fort near the banks of the Cisadane River in what is Tangerang today.

"In the olden days, men travelled from China without their womenfolk. The journey would have been too hard for them," Tjin Eng says.

They married local women and their descendants adopted the local dialect found on the outskirts of what is today Jakarta.

Tjin Eng, who also is a warden of the Boen Tek Bio Chinese Confucian temple in downtown Tangerang, says members of the Cibeng community who live in Tangerang are mostly traders and shopkeepers who earn a modest living. Those living outside town, like Seng Wie, have a tougher life, working as casual farm laborers, fishermen and even pedicab drivers.

Still, they share deeply ingrained traditions, he says.

"They strongly cling to their traditions. They have many rituals which other Chinese communities no longer practice.”

Those traditions do not include speaking Chinese, though. For them, Tjin Eng says, Chinese would be “nothing but a hindrance to acculturation."

Thung Yu Lan, a Sinologist with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, said their successful assimilation into the local population set the Cibeng apart from other ethnic Chinese communities.

 "Just about the only things that show that they have Chinese roots are their belief and the Chinese traditions they maintain. They have intermarried with the local population and physically most of them are indistinguishable from the rest of the population, dark-skinned and all," Thung said.

Poverty shrouds the community, for young and old alike.

Tjiok Ai, a gray-haired and wiry man of 60, frets about not having had a meaningful job for the last 10 years. He lives with his daughter Iin, who is separated from her husband and earns her living doing laundry for a neighbor. Home is a small bamboo hut, the first dwelling encountered upon entering Kebon Teki from the main road.

"It is hard enough for young people to get jobs now, and for older people like me, it is really hard," says Iin, who is in her 30s.

"Everything is wrong. Jobs are scarce, and the price of everything is climbing higher and higher.”

"If I tell you all my problems, will it change anything?" Tjiok Ai suddenly interjects. He said that after a lifetime of odd jobs, he has almost nothing to show for his work. "Money just passes through my pockets."

To help feed himself and his daughter's family, he often goes into the paddy field at night to catch small fish and eels.

Ong Hai Cuan is more philosophical about his problems. Jobless for the past four years and dependent on his children, the 52-year-old always manages to smile.

"Whatever we get, we accept it with gladness. If not, we would go crazy," he says.

 "I have tried to look for jobs in factories or elsewhere, but nobody wants a man my age.”

His eldest son, a shop attendant, and his family now take care of him and in return he helps care for their infant daughter, a chubby, wide-eyed one-year old whom he holds in his arms during the interview.

Surprisingly, when asked to name the main problems in his life, his livelihood or poverty were not top on his list of priorities.

"It's garbage. Look, garbage is everywhere,” he says, pointing to the large open sewer in front of his house, filled with plastic bags, styrofoam and other materials. “Nobody will care until we are all drowning in garbage. Everyone just dumps everything anywhere.”

Minority or not, modern-day concerns appear to be the same for everyone.

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