Adventurer Agustinus Wibowo: A journey home
- By Rory Howard
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E-mail China.org.cn, May 8, 2015
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"I remember that I spat in the street and my mum hit me. 'Indonesians spit! Not Chinese!' She said." This idea was quickly shattered when he arrived in Beijing and saw many people spitting in the street. China felt less like the home he had envisioned.
"They charged me the same prices as they charge Americans," Wibowo says. He felt like an outsider amongst the people of his ancestral land, and he lacked a sense of belonging, since they weren't willing to accept him.
But then he developed a similar feeling about Indonesia. One day, when he applied for a visa, he discovered that due to mistakes in his paperwork, he was not an Indonesian citizen and was technically a stateless person.
The story behind this is the persecution of the Chinese under the former Suharto regime in Indonesia. "Chinese-language books fell under the same category as pornography and ammunition on the customs declaration form you filled out on the plane," Wibowo recalls. As he relates the stories of his journeys to his mother, he tries to piece together his origins and discover where he belongs. Does he reach a conclusion? Wibowo is on a constant journey that he wants to tell his reader about, even when he is in a place the reader might call home.
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