The Shadow Years

 

Listen, friend—because this is a story about ghosts. Not the kind that rattle chains or moan through walls at three in the morning, but the kind that live in daylight, written into law books and whispered through the corridors of power. The kind that can erase a people’s name, their festivals, their very right to remember who they are.

Indonesia, 1967. The New Order had come, and with it, a man named Soeharto who understood something fundamental about fear: that you don’t need midnight visits and unmarked graves to make a culture disappear. Sometimes all you need is a presidential instruction. Number 14, to be exact.

The document itself was innocuous enough—just words on paper, the kind of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that makes your eyes glaze over. But those words carried weight, and that weight came down like a hammer on the Chinese Indonesians who’d called this archipelago home for generations. Imlek—Chinese New Year, with its red envelopes and lion dances and incense smoke curling toward heaven—became contraband. Not officially illegal, mind you. That would have been too obvious, too brutal. Instead, it was regulated into nonexistence. Celebrate if you want, the instruction said, but do it where no one can see. Do it in whispers. Do it like you’re ashamed.

And God help you if you didn’t.

The terror wasn’t always loud. Sometimes it wore an intelligence officer’s badge and showed up at your theater rehearsal. Ask Nano Riantiarno about that. In 1988, this artist—and he was a hell of an artist, the kind who could make a stage breathe—wanted to put on Sampek Engtay. Just a love story. Romeo and Juliet with different names and a different ending, but the bones were the same. The bones were universal.

But the regime saw something else. They saw Chinese characters and a dragon symbol and smelled sedition in the incense that wasn’t even there. They interrogated Riantiarno like he was planning a coup instead of a play. Finally—finally—they let him stage it, but stripped bare: no Chinese writing, no incense, and that dragon? Keep it indoors where nobody walking past can see it and get ideas.

This was the machinery of cultural suffocation, and it ran smooth as silk for thirty-one years.

The thing about darkness, though—and I’ve spent my career writing about darkness—is that it makes you appreciate the light when it finally comes. And in 1999, after the Reformasi movement cracked the New Order like an egg, the light came in the unlikely form of a man named Abdurrahman Wahid.

Gus Dur, people called him. President Gus Dur, now.

His first order of business? He took Presidential Instruction Number 14 and he tore it up. Not literally, maybe, but close enough. He issued Presidential Decree Number 6 in 2000, and just like that, the legal architecture of suppression came tumbling down. The ghosts were being exorcised.

On January 28, 2001, Gus Dur showed up at an Imlek celebration at Senayan. A public Imlek celebration, with all the trimmings—the kind that would have gotten you disappeared twenty-four months earlier. And this former chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, this Islamic scholar, he stood there and said the quiet part loud: the discrimination stops here. Use your real names. Celebrate your heritage. You’re Indonesian, and that’s enough.

Then he dropped a bomb that nobody saw coming: “I’m actually pure Chinese,” he said, grinning. “It’s all mixed with Arab and Indian now, but my ancestors were full-blooded Chinese.”

You could have heard a pin drop in Jakarta.

There was a writer named Lan Fang who’d spent her whole life celebrating Imlek in secret, behind closed doors, always looking over her shoulder. When she was a kid, she only saw lion dances in kung fu movies—flickering images on a screen, as distant as the moon. Now, under Gus Dur’s presidency, those same lion dances were parading through the streets in broad daylight, drums thundering, the lions’ eyes bright and fierce and free.

She wrote about it later, in 2012, in a book she called Imlek Tanpa Gus Dur—Imlek Without Gus Dur. Because by then he was gone, his presidency brief as a summer storm. But the change he’d made? That was permanent. That was carved into the bedrock.

Some stories are about monsters. Some are about the people who fight them.

This one’s about both.

And like the best stories—the ones that matter, the ones that last—it’s absolutely true.