Yap Lip Keng, prominent Indonesian Chinese and grandpa's friend

Grandpa died when I was 10. Since he spoke mainly Hokchia language and I spoke mainly Indonesian, we hardly got to know each other well. As a result I only knew him through my father's stories.

Growing up in grandpa's house in Surabaya, our family friends consisted of those whose elders had come from the same village in Fuqing (Hokchia) in the Fujian province. For some reasons, Hokchia immigrant-entrepreneurs became quite successful in Indonesia, including the once-richest-man-in-Indonesia Lim Sioe Liong, Chairman and CEO of Maspion Group Alim Markus , and the founder of Indonesia's top 3 kretek cigarette maker Gudang Garam, Tjoa Ing Hwie. None of them were close friends of our family; even though grandpa did alright, we were not rich.

One of my grandfather's close friends was Yap Lip Keng, a Kuomintang activist prior to World War II and later the Republic of China's consul to Surabaya. I was able to find the profile of grandpa's friend in a book (to be exact, in a Google Book's snippet) on Prominent Indonesian Chinese written by Leo Suryadinata, a professor at the National University of Singapore. Born in China, Yap and grandpa would be those classified as totok by Mr. Suryadinata. My generation, because of Suharto's ban on Chinese schools and language since 1966, could not speak Chinese fluently and went to Indonesian schools. We mixed with the children of peranakan Chinese and some - like I - fell in love and married them.

Just before we got married, family members discovered that Yap Lip Keng's niece (the daughter of his brother Yap Lip Hong) had married my mother-in-law's cousin, a doctor in Banjarmasin. There was a sigh of relief on both sides, since even though culturally we came from totok and peranakan backgrounds, we were already considered "family" (yi jia ren). This was a far cry from my grand-uncle's almost violent rejection two decades earlier, when his daughter wanted to marry a peranakan boy, even though he was a university graduate and a relative/descendant of the famed Oei Tiong Ham, Southeast Asia's richest man in the early 20th century. (They married anyway.)

Nowadays, practically all of Chinese in Indonesia are Indonesian citizens, speak mostly Indonesian, and despite the looser regulation governing the celebration of Chinese culture, identify themselves as Indonesian first, and Chinese second. We are all for practical purposes, peranakan.