ABSTRACT
May 1998 is remembered as a time when Chinese Indonesians were targeted for violence, and mass rapes were reported particularly in Indonesia’s capital city Jakarta. As a consequence of the violence, many Chinese Indonesians fled the country and resettled across the globe. Situated in the broader literature on memory with insights from human rights studies, this chapter focuses on how gendered and racial violence is remembered and commemorated in a situation of both temporal and geographical distance. In particular, through providing an ethnographic account of the May 1998 commemoration in the context of the Chinese Indonesian diasporic community in Melbourne, Australia. We pay particular attention to the work of Chinese Indonesian women artists and writers, who try to counter dominant narratives that silence the systematic gender-based violence towards ethnic minorities, and the challenges they encountered in raising past injustices.
