Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for picking up
Dial A for Aunties.
This book is a love letter to my family—a ridiculously large bunch with a long history of immigration. All four of my grandparents came from China to Indonesia between 1920 and 1930, and when they arrived in Indonesia, they changed their Chinese names to Indonesian ones to avoid xenophobia. Chen became Sutanto. Ho became Wijaya. As they fully integrated themselves into Indonesian culture, so too did their offspring. My parents grew up speaking Bahasa Indonesia as a first language and Mandarin as a second language.
With my generation, my parents sent us to Singapore to avoid the nineties riots—clashes in Indonesia against the Chinese population. Fortunately, now Indonesia is a wonderfully diverse country in terms of race and religion, and we are afforded the kind of freedom our parents didn’t have. While in Singapore, my cousins and I quickly adopted English as our first language. Some of us (cough, cough, me) forgot how to speak Indonesian almost entirely. Whenever my parents visited, we struggled to communicate with each other.
The result of all this moving around is a mish-mash of languages. My family is technically trilingual, but each of the three languages we speak is broken in some way. I’m most comfortable in English, then Mandarin because I spent ten years studying it in Singapore, and then Indonesian. My parents
are fluent in Indonesian and Mandarin, and speak halting, broken English. When we speak to each other, the sentences are jagged and cracked, and we often struggle to convey what we’re trying to say. This is the price my parents have had to pay to ensure that my brother and I were safe and sound.
Some of the aunties in
Dial A for Aunties
speak the sort of broken English that my parents’ generation does. Their grasp of the English language is not a reflection of their intelligence, but a reflection of the sacrifice that they have made for us. They are, in essence, trilingual, and I am so proud of this heritage. I’m aware while writing this that I’m straddling a very fine line between authenticity and stereotype, and it’s my hope that this book defies the latter. It is by no means representative of the Asian community as a whole; no single book can possibly represent such a large community of individuals.
I hope that this book gives you a little peek into the fierce love with which my family raised us and protects us to this day.
Best,
Jesse