ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the historical development of Indonesian Chinese from early days to the time when the massive return to China occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. It includes the personal narratives of an Indonesian Chinese couple, Lee and Tan, who made their journey from Indonesia to China, and then to Hong Kong. The chapter focuses on the couple's respective multilingual repertoire and the development of their own and their family's generational linguistic shifts. It presents a preliminary sketch of two relatively new varieties of Chinese spoken by Indonesian Chinese: Huaqiao Mandarin and Siantar Mandarin, and connects the transnational journey of Indonesian Chinese in the last few decades to the understanding of Indonesian Chinese identity in Hong Kong. When Lee considered what subject to study at the university, it was the first time she realized her background as an overseas returning Chinese was stigmatized in the pre-cultural revolution China.
