The purpose of this research is to analyze and study Chinese Indonesian writer Huang Dongping’s novellas.
There are 23 chapters in the two novellas, “People away from their native country” and “Bosses and workers”, which were written by Huang Dongping. The two novellas were written in 1980s to 90s. They mainly describe the life and vicissitude of the Chinese society after Indonesian government’s forbidding Chinese language, Chinese schools, and promoting Sinophobia in 1965. The novellas depict the misery and excruciation that the Chinese Indonesians had been through. By his novellas, Huang condemns the cruel exploitation and suppression from the colonial government, imperialism, and the local dictator.
The research is based on academic thinking and finds that Huang’s novellas have an edge of realism. They describe the bottom of society, the separated ones, and the wounded. With his literary touch, Huang wrote the history of the vicissitude and misery that the Chinese Indonesian society had been through under the colonizers and aliens. Huang reveals and condemns the cruelty of Sinophobia, the exploitation and suppression of Capitalism, and the corruption of the wealthy expatriates. Huang Sympathizes the suppressed women, Chinese intellectuals, and the underclass including Chinese and local people. His unique creative art is able to be unaffected by preceded writers. He blazed a trail by applying mechanically in a creative way. The themes, artistic skills, and cultural recognitions of his works show the transformation from “Chinese perspectives” to localization, which are the trace of the oversea Chinese literature transforming into ethic Chinese literature. Huang’s novellas verify the cause of Sinophobia and the origin of the misery that the Southeast Asian Chinese had been through for a hundred years, which manifest the literary and historical value of these twenty-three chapters. They are the sequels or addendums of the “songs of the expatriates” series which become the vital segments of Huang’s literary achievement.
In my personally opinion, Huang’s novellas are the important historical sources for both Indonesian Chinese history and family history. Therefore, they have the value of reference and research.