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The Admiral's Isles
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CHINESE FARMS: BANGKA
The Chinese in Indonesia are merchants and they're rich. That's not true, of course, but it's the assumption of many—a source of resentment that led to the pillaging of Jakarta's Chinatown in the 1998 riots. The Chinese certainly are neither on the island of Bangka, a two-hour ferry ride north of Palembang.
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On Bangka, Chinese farmers have been growing pepper and other crops for generations. Zheng He's men passed this way, primarily to fight a Chinese pirate who had been terrorizing the strait from a Palembang stronghold. And though there were already Chinese settlements there, as well as in towns such as Tuban in Java, the Chinese on Bangka were mainly drawn by—or imported for—work as tin miners in later centuries.
The impact of the tin mines is visible in the lifeless green pools that dot the landscape. The impact of the migration is visible on a rutted, auburn-hued dirt track outside Pangkal Pinang, where Cung A Siuk lives. There are a handful of houses out here. Cung says there used to be fewer. There is no news, either. She's never heard of the persecution of Chinese people in Java and Sumatra. John, the photographer, and I are the first white people she has ever seen, and she's 73 years old. "If I were scared," she says, "I would have closed the door and stayed inside." Her words are translated from the Chinese-Indonesian hybrid she speaks into Indonesian, then into English.
Cung is fourth generation on this island. She's a Confucianist, she says, and counts among her friends numerous Bugis and Buton people originally from Sulawesi. She lives now in the house she shared with her husband until he died a decade ago. It's big and sturdy, all faded wood except for the stone porch. She still grows pineapples and cassavas out back; she may be old but she has to work or she feels weak. Her husband, Ji Chiu, was first generation. He came to work the tin mines, a "sold piglet," as they were called, since they were sold by their parents with no real promise of return. She met him when she sold coconut cookies to the tin miners. They had five children, but twins died at birth.
She wants a TV to watch football and movies, but other than that she can't think of anything she would change about her life (and her friend down the road has a TV, so she's really all right on that score as well). Would that the lives of all migrant workers, of any generation, had such happy results. Wherever you go, you see people inventing jobs for themselves, selling bats at a roadside stand, for instance, or directing traffic for tips. On Bangka, men mine tin from the coastal seabed, employing motor-powered pumps to vacuum the sea floor onto patchwork floating trays in which they search for their prize. More often, a living wage, or the promise of one, is thought to exist elsewhere, which is why there is a constant stream of migrant workers flowing across Indonesia. Earlier, on the north coast of Java, among colorful, undulant boats sardined within a Tuban inlet, I met Lasmari, 47, who had worked for seven years in Kalimantan as a carpenter. He made decent money, but when he came home for a visit, he learned his son had died. Unwilling to leave his family again, he turned to the unpredictable fishing trade. His dark skin and curly hair dusted with salt from his last trip out to sea, holding the dried stingray tail he uses like sandpaper on the boat's many rough edges, he tells me that the youngest of his three children is only two years old, "so it seems I will work for the rest of my life."
Later, on the island of Madura, a short ferry ride from Surabaya—where Zheng He would have anchored his boats during his visits—I meet Ma'ruf. At 27, married at 15 to a 13-year-old girl, he still has a boyish face and a loose-limbed manner. He was born and raised on Madura but, unemployed, unmoved by the prospect of spending his life in the tobacco fields, he left for Sampit in Borneo several years ago and found work as a driver. Last February, long simmering tensions between the Madurese and the native Dayaks erupted. The Dayaks, in hand-to-hand, town-to-town combat, embarked on a rampage intent on exterminating all things Madurese. The killings began on a Sunday, Ma'ruf remembers. Houses were burned. Madurese were murdered indiscriminately, often brutally. Ma'ruf abandoned his home and his car and fled with his family to a hastily erected refugee camp. As he left, he saw his neighbor beheaded. In the camp, people were terrified and starving. One of his children was nearly attacked for a handful of rice.
Upwards of 100,000 Madurese left central Kalimantan. Ma'ruf is unemployed again, living with relatives on a wooded back road in the town of Rahayu outside Sampang. His wife and children are staying with her sister in a neighboring town. She has a recurring dream that the house is on fire and they have to get out. Ma'ruf doesn't have the nightmares, but he hasn't the faintest clue why it all happened. "I don't know," he says. "I don't feel anything at all right now. I just want to keep living."
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Photographer Fritz Hoffmann finds a country on the move
Indonesia
John Stanmeyer explores the jostling peoples, religions and cultures that define the country
India
The grandeur of Cochin and Calicut has long disappeared
Middle East
The cities that were once the center of the world now hover at its remotest margins -- but a few traces of their glory days linger on
Africa
In the 15th century, Zheng He's fleet went to Africa seeking exotic treasures. The Chinese still do
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CHINA: In the Wake of the Admiral
SOUTHEAST ASIA: Disunited Nations
INDIA: Misplaced Majesty
THE MIDDLE EAST: Arabian Twilight
