Joining bits and pieces: a Chinese Indonesian mother–daughter collaborative witnessing as a resource for writing an autobiographical novel

ABSTRACT

In this article, I as researcher and my mother as collaborator present small stories about our own and my late grandmother’s lived experiences during the New Order and Reformasi eras in Indonesia. Both perform a collaborative witnessing, which is a form of “relational autoethnography” that enables researchers to focus on and evocatively tell the lives of others through conversation and shared storytelling as a source that informs my life writing practice. Collaborating with my mother, this article is a reflection on how I, as a young Chinese Indonesian woman writer, capture and negotiate my family’s hybrid identities as double minorities through writing an autobiographical novel on my late grandmother’s and my mother’s lived experiences as well as my own.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational relationship
• Chinese-Indonesian women
• collaborative witnessing
• life writing
• autobiographical novel

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to Ratna Djun, our late grandmother and mother, who was and has been instrumental in the development of both our hybrid identities and subjectivities as Chinese Indonesian women. This article forms part of a PhD thesis that addresses the development of a novel derived from intergenerational lived experiences of a Chinese Indonesian family. We thank Dr Ffion Murphy and Dr Marcella Polain for their support and encouragement for Alberta’s doctoral project, which inspired us to write this collaborative essay. We are deeply thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their patience, understanding, and guidance on the multiple drafts it took to develop this article. We especially appreciate being advised to focus on our subjectivities as the generators of stories, which better suits our rhetoric aims. The article was written by the support of an ECU (Edith Cowan University) Higher Degree by Research Scholarship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberta Natasia Adji

Alberta Natasia Adji is currently a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University, Australia. Adji’s current research explores how the writing of an intergenerational novel can reveal the importance of writing family history and multiplicity of the writing self. She has recently published her short fiction in New Writing, Meniscus, and The Incompleteness Book. She has also published refereed articles in Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Women: A Cultural Review, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Life Writing, Prose Studies, and others.

Wanwan Tjitrodjojo

Wanwan Tjitrodjojo lives in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. She holds a degree in pharmaceutical science.