Hello, my name is Jeanette Chaires. I’m 21 years old and was born in Riverside, California. I’m a third generation Indo/African American and have lived in southern California my entire life.
My Oma was born in Makassar on the island of Celebes (now Sulawesi). My grandfather on my mother’s side was also born in Indonesia and was also Indo, but as he has not been present in my mother’s life or my life, I know very little about him. My mother is Indo and my father is of mixed African American descent. He and my mother divorced when I was very young, so he is not a large part of my life. My life mainly centers around my mother’s relatives, though I still have contact with my father’s family.
My great grandparents, on my mother’s side, lived in various places in Indonesia. They were forced to leave Indonesia after Indonesia declared their Independence. They moved to the Netherlands in 1956 and settled in Den Haag. The climate in the Netherlands was too cold and they soon immigrated to the United States where the climate would suit them better.
In 1959, my great grandparents and their three children immigrated to Norwalk, California, where they made a good life for themselves. My great grandparents worked very hard and bought a home for their family. They also opened a very popular Indonesian restaurant named Rumah Sate in 1967. They owned and ran it until my great grandfather’s death in 1987. I remember hearing so many wonderful stories about the restaurant and how they had so many friends in the Dutch Indonesian community who would come to visit and socialize with them. The food was always delicious and the atmosphere was warm and inviting. My mother spent many nights at the restaurant in the back kitchen while her mother was working as a waitress in the front and the rest of the family cooked the traditional Indonesian dishes.
As I grew up, I learned that I had such a rich and unique background. I tried to learn the Dutch language and took many courses that enlightened me about my Indonesian heritage. I don’t know too many Indos that are both Indo and African American, but I have run across a few people and I always enjoy getting to know them. I also enjoy socializing with people from the Indo community and I try to do it whenever the opportunity arises. Just yesterday, my mom and I had a great day at the Dutch Festival in Long Beach.
My best friend is my Oma. She doesn’t sit home and knit scarfs or make quilts…not that there is anything wrong with that…but rather she is very trendy and totally enjoys living life to the fullest. Anyway, I moved back into her house, my childhood home, because I want to share as many moments as possible with her. My Oma is my guide, my light, and our relationship is so special that absolutely nothing has come between us. We live here with her new husband, who is also Indo, and we are truly a very happy family.
I am very proud of my Dutch Indonesian heritage and I hope to incorporate more and more of this rich culture into my life. Someday, I hope to have children and I plan to teach them to appreciate all the sacrifice that our ancestors have made to give them this amazing life. Thank you!
My name is Adam de Boer and I am an American painter, with Indo ancestry, currently living and working in Los Angeles. For the past seven years I’ve travelled throughout Indoneisa to investigate my Eurasian heritage and surf, most recently to Yogyakarta on a yearlong Fulbright fellowship. My current work employs imagery and traditional crafts from the region as a way to connect my artistic practice with those of his distant cultural forebears.
My work invokes my Dutch-Indonesian cultural legacy to address broader themes of cultural hybridity and representations of interpersonal and international power dynamics. Growing up in a diverse community in Southern California as a first-generation American, I took my mixed-race identity for granted. Many of my generation, whose families are cultural hybrids, adapted with an almost unconscious fluidity to their new American identities. Perhaps this adaptation stemmed from the residual pains of immigration and the pressures of conformity felt by our parents. Regardless, our awareness of the grief and dislocation that birthed our multicultural identities was largely ignored as we assimilated to middle-class American life.
I’ve recently been endeavoring to revive the memory of my dormant cultural history and aesthetic traditions nearly erased by this assimilation. This exploration of my Indonesian heritage addresses the trauma of the Indo legacy, asking what this particular history means, and what an understanding of it could mean more broadly for contemporary global culture. For the past six years, I’ve studied the traditional crafts of my Javanese forebears— wax-resistbatik, leatherwork, and wood carving—while pushing the aesthetics of these crafts beyond their traditional boundaries. I also quote from the vernacular of Java’s built environment of tiled floors, volcanic stones, and bamboo walls. Through this practice, with its embodied tension between traditional handmade craft and contemporary painterly experimentation, I attempt to perform the dislocation and, ultimately, the necessary resolution, of my hybrid identity.
Using imagery informed by my Californian upbringing and education, I appropriate and mutate Javanese craft traditions, incorporating traditional designs to make hybrid representational forms. The relationship between the craft and representational elements can be viewed from different, and often conflicting, vantages. It’s my intention for these conflicts to serve as a symbolic gesture toward the historical reality of the post-colonial condition. Rather than calling for a pat resolution, I hope my work encourages sustained engagement with cultural difference and injustice as an antidote to the racist and xenophobic neo-imperial agenda of late capitalism.
My Oma was from the small city of Klaten and grew up on a tobacco plantation, where her father was a book keeper. My Opa was from Jogja and his father was in the dutch army, with his mother being his fathers servant. The Indonesian part of our family is Javanese (Orang Jawa) with the Dutch or European part being mostly a mix of German, French and English (and a little bit of Dutch), and one of my distant great grandmothers being Raden Adjeng or daughter or a Sultan.
My grandparents lived a happy childhood of abundance and privilege. That all changed during the war, when they were stripped of their possessions and rights and placed in internment camps; where they were nearly starved to death. Both of my great grandfathers died from complications due to imprisonment, as POW’s under the Japanese. My grandfather was at Changi in Singapore, which had a very low survival rate and a reputation for brutality towards its prisoners. He survived, and went on to meet and fall in love with my Oma in Jakarta after the war.
Once married, and after two children, my grandparents immigrated to Holland. They were not fond of the country, as it was very cold and the native population was prejudice of their dark skin. They decided to try their fate elsewhere.
They immigrated to the US in the late 1950’s with about 5 children, a motorcycle and $100 to their name. They chose the city of Costa Mesa in Southern California, as they were told that the climate was most like their native home of Indonesia. They were sponsored by the church and luckily, as a skilled and trained electrician, my Opa was able to find work right away. They continued to grow their family until they had nine children in total.
My father went to fight in Vietnam in the 1970’s, and having never really recovered from the war, was unable to be a parent to me. My grandparents filled in where he lacked. Especially my Oma who took me over the summer, winter and spring breaks from school –providing much needed, cost-free childcare to my mother. Through all the time spent, my Oma and I developed a very strong bond to each other. We often spent lazy summer days sitting on her porch or lying in her bead snuggling our gulings and listening to the doves she kept in her back yard cooing. Indonesians have a thing for birds.
She would tell me about the carefree times of her childhood. It was a world that seemed so far away, but that I could only imagine in my wildest dreams. I became obsessed with Indonesia. Every school report, project or essay was written about this far away land that I was somehow distantly connected to. There were so many beautifully romantic and exotic stories that it would take an entire book to collect them all with words to describe. I can only say that it inspired with me a love and appreciation for my culture that has no bounds. One day, I will put these stories to paper. I also learned to cook the cuisine of our culture and attended events with her, such as the indo festival. She would often give me old relics of her past such as jewelry, art work, or wood carvings. I treasure these pieces to this day and look forward to passing them down to my children.
After college I spent a year in Indonesia, living and working as a journalist and English teacher. I was able to go back to my Oma’s childhood home and explore her neighborhood. I walked through her home, looked down into the well where they drew their daily water, stepped on the grass of my Oma-Oma’s old tennis court, stood over the dried pond where the little neighbor boy had drowned, stood under the massive tree that Oma used to climb. I felt the walls that encumbered her most treasured childhood memories of life before the war. I was able to make this pilgrimage twice and in one visit, bring with me three of my Tante’s and a cousin. We even met a lady selling vegetables on the side of the road that knew my Oma as a child. So many things that I had questioned in childhood, made sense once I lived there –Just weird quirky things, like moth ball smells, words and expressions, cultural nuances. I will never forget that year, as one of the best and most wonderously amazing experiences of my life.
Fast forward to three years ago, when I lost my Oma and shortly there after, my father –both to cancer.The family disbanded shortly after the loss of our matriarch. At this time, I was just barely beginning to start my own family and I was perplexed with a heavy sadness that I could not provide the exposure to my culture for my children. Shortly before the losses, I had began seeking out online and in social media, to find other sources of our culture in the local area of Southern California. At that point, I became familiar with the Indo Project. I met Jeff, Michael and Jamie shortly after and we all instantly clicked over food, culture and dirty jokes. We began organizing casual meet ups and gatherings, mostly centered around food. Now we have large, formalized, and organized gatherings! Its been a pleasure watching this develop and most importantly being able to expose my children to the wonderful things that inspired me as a child. I want to thank SoCal Indo for providing this opportunity for myself and my family. Whenever we are all together, it brings such comfort…. and it feels like the warm embrace of home.
Hello, my name is Jace Barton. I am 19 years old and was born in Wichita, Kansas. My Oma, Virginia Astrid Davis, was born in Holland but moved to America with her family to better the lives of our family and future generations to come.
Growing up I was always teased at school for having squinty eyes, people would call me chink or ask me all the time if I was Asian; this put me into a shell and made me hate my face. Even in high school after the Asian jokes stopped, I was still being teased. I loved my culture and wanted to tell everyone what I was. Many people told me I was just a white American and that I need to stop pretending to be something I’m not, since I was born in America.
The story of my family is one that I will always cherish. My great Opa, Henricus Martinus Peeters, or Henk for short, was a retired sergeant major for the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. My Oma was born and raised in Solo, Indonesia. She was the daughter of a Dutch-Indonesian mother and a Dutch father.
After the World War II was over, Indonesia gained its independence from Holland. My Oma, Hetty had to leave with her mother and sisters to live in Holland, a place unfamiliar to them. My great Opa had perished as a prisoner of war in a Japanese prison.
My Opa had been held for four years as a prisoner of war in a Japanese prison camp. He was sent home on the same ship as my Oma and her family. My Opa and Oma met and fell in love. They married and had two children while living in Holland for 7 years.
After much consideration, they decided to move to America and become citizens of the United States. Hours upon hours they worked to learn English and be the best parents they could be to their children: My Oma, Virginia, my Uncle Henk, and my two aunts, Anita and Tania.
My Oma and aunt Anita’s lives were changed drastically after coming to America. Going to school was hard for them, they were constantly teased for having dark skin and hair and for speaking Dutch. This prompted them to stop speaking Dutch and to be more American in their day to day lives. As more generations were made in our family, we lost the Dutch tongue in our households. While the heritage is not as apparent, it still resides. My aunt Tania always has hagelslag in her home, something I loved eating as a child and even to this day. My Oma and aunt Anita always love telling me stories of Holland and our heritage.
I know now that as a young adult it is my job and passion to bring our heritage even more so into the family: The language, the food, everything that makes us Indo’s who we are.
The past generations as well as the new may feel as though our heritage is dying, but not on my watch. I will always make sure people know what I am and where I come from, my family did not sacrifice their entirety to have their heritage forgotten and left to the books.
I was asked what it’s like growing up Indo, and while I may not have been raised in a complete Indo household, I still think that I am one of many amazing and diverse people who will not be forgotten and will thrive for many more generations. I am proud to be Indo.
Hi! My name is Christiaan Verbeek. I’m 23 years old and I was born in San Diego CA. I’m half Indo and half Italian. My father was born in Bali, Indonesia in 1934. My Opa was from Rotterdam and went to Indonesia during the war where he met my Oma who lived in Meester Cornelis on Java.
Growing up Indo gave me mixed feelings. I grew up not really fitting in. Where as other kids could say “I’m full German, I’m full Filipino, I’m full etc” I never had that option. I felt there was nothing I could claim that was 100% mine. That I 100% belonged to that place or tradition. Our family was thrown into Japanese concentration camps and after my dad and his family got sponsors to come to America as refugees, he never talked about home any more. I was raised an American and I spoke English. I grew up not knowing any of my fathers story except for his hatred towards the Japanese (we still do not buy Japanese cars or products in my family). One common thing however, and the thing I latched on to the most as my main source of what I identified what I was, was my dads love for all things tropical. When he got asked what he was he would always say “Pacific Islander”. So that was it, that’s what I was. I was Pacific Islander. I took hula lessons, I grew up in the Pacific community, I’m a Tahitian drummer, and the proud owner of a pacific island drum business where we hand make and sell traditional pacific island instruments all around the world (that’s where my Bali artisan blood comes in haha)
As I dug more and more deeper I found how incredibly similar our customs are to other islands in the pacific, how similar our languages are, and I learned about this great migration of an ancient people who conquered the largest ocean on the planet with a simple canoe, who’s roots stem from Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. I researched the languages and found words in bahasa are the exact same with the same meaning as words in Hawaiian and Samoan. That tattoos in Samoa came from designs on pottery from Indonesia and other islands. I was so proud to know that this was in my blood but “indo” was still not in my vocabulary. Even when I would say “yea I’m indo” I would get “is that like Hawaiian or something??” So I tried “im Indonesian” for awhile but it just didn’t sound right, then I tried “I’m Dutch” but that didn’t work for me either. So I gave up. I said I was Hawaiian, or half Samoan, anything to get off the subject.
My fathers family lives in Long Beach and in Holland so I grew up not knowing them. Maybe once a year at gatherings but that only made me feel more secluded, as I was this Pacific Islander kid with these random brown skin people speaking Dutch. It wasn’t until 2010 when in saw that KNVB was in the World Cup where I was like “wait, some of those guys are Dutch and indo like me” and the spark finally went off. I bought the jerseys, I was rooting for them in every game! I would hear my dad talk to his sister every night on the phone in Dutch just in awe as I craved to learn what he was saying. I YouTubed Dutch songs that I still listen to today. Dad shot me down a few time by saying “don’t you know that the Dutch HATED the Indos when we went to holland because we are dark??” So once again, I was Pacific Islander. Once again I gave up. As time went on, I finally got to a point where I had enough. I needed to know if there was others like me, if there were more Indos and what it was like to be an indo. I got mad I couldn’t find Indonesian t shirts so I made my own. I made my own “indo pride” decal sticker for my car next to a sticker of the Indonesian islands. I contemplated getting a Dutch lion tattooed on me. I was going nuts. I was mixing my pacific island upbringing and putting an indo twist on it “bringing the pacific culture back to my dads islands” as I liked to say. I rode that wave for quite some time, of course stirring up controversy along the way. It wasn’t until a few months ago where I happened to stumble upon some Indonesian music from Maumere that sounded very similar to the island tunes I grew up with, only finally dad could understand them. I kept searching and downloading songs, listening to them everyday singing in their dialect and in bahasa until I finally stumbled upon real INDO music. Indo People singing in Dutch and Indonesian about growing up being indo. Something re wired in my brain and it finally clicked. I am indo and I knew it all along. I grew up being an American Pacific Islander but really I was an Indo kid doing everything with an indo twist. Finally after 23 years I was proud to be Indo.
So the question was, what’s it like growing up Indo? It’s pretty awesome. To be a mix race which in turn is a culture all it’s own. I am NOT Indonesian, I am NOT Dutch, I am Indo.
Aloha, my name is Charles Pieters and I was born in Alkmaar, Netherlands in the 60s, I have one sister and a brother. My father left Batavia now called Jakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to go to Netherlands and was settle in by the Dutch government in a small town called Schoorl, Netherland with my 1st Opa and Oma. My 1st Opa passed away a year later and my Oma remarried to my 2nd Opa. I never met my 1st Opa on my dad side but remember 2nd Opa very well while I was in Netherlands. My Oma and 2nd Opa finally moved to Alkmaar and settle there with my father and his six brothers and two sisters. My father met my mother who is also Indo in Alkmaar where they had me, my brother and sister. I still remember going to catholic school where the nuns and teachers where very strict. We left Alkmaar in 1969 and settle in a town called Concord, California. When I came to the US, I did not speak or understand English at all but had great teacher, I still speak and understand Dutch but to read it or write I have a very difficult time. I use google translation, lol My parents’ divorce when I was young and my father raised me, my brother and sister as a single parent. He was very strict but always had his support and insuring we always had a good life. My father has taught me a lot as I was growing up. He always told me you must always do your best son in whatever you do, don’t disgrace our name and be proud that you are Dutch Indonesian (Indo) After I graduate high school, I join the United States Army at age 17 for a two year enlistment and station in Germany. I went to Alkmaar every month to see my family in Alkmaar since it was only a four hour train ride. It was so great seeing the family again and eating Indo food. I wanted to leave the Army as soon as my enlistment contract was over but the Army and my father convince me to reenlist. I started to go to some Army Leadership schools, travel all over the world and started to like it, instilling leadership into my young life at the time. Well, what turn into a two year enlistment end up being 31 years of active duty military service and I achieved the rank of Command Sergeant Major, which is the highest rank you can achieve as an enlisted Soldier in the military. I retired at age 47 from the military in 2010 here in Hawaii and started to work for Disney on the island of Oahu as a driver taking guest from Waikiki to the resort where I work. Disney found out I had some Leadership and ask me to be a Manager/Leader here at this awesome & beautiful resort called Aulani a Disney Resort & Spa. I’m living my dream by being in paradise but I miss my Indo food, Life is good. I’m proud to be an Indo Charles
