From ‘Cina’ to ‘Kita’: memory curation and identity negotiation in a post-Suharto Chinese Indonesian association

This article examines how a historically marginalized Chinese Indonesian community negotiates belonging in post-Suharto Indonesia, drawing on ethnography with the Indonesian Jinjiang Hometown Association. It argues that the association functions as an agentive institutional site rather than a passive vessel of cultural preservation, simultaneously curating collective memory and regulating members’ identity performances. As ‘memory curator’, it manages historical trauma through heroization, securitization and legitimization; as ‘identity regulator’, it orchestrates national, ethnic and class performances through mechanisms including donation-based status hierarchies and linguistic norms. These are not two separate functions but interlocking stages of a single institutional cycle, here named ‘Connection-Translation-Empowerment’, in which memory work authorizes status claims and the resulting capacity sustains further rounds of memory work. Fieldwork evidence complicates any celebratory account of this cycle: the empowerment it generates is unevenly distributed across gender, generation and ethno-cultural lines, revealing the limits of the belonging the association claims to produce.