Lim's son-in-law, Harman, who married her eldest daughter Meylan and lives next door, said the majority of residents have lived in the area for generations. Many bear little physical resemblance to their Chinese ancestors, their deeply tanned skin and rounded eyes making them look like indigenous Indonesians, who make up more than 90 per cent of the population.

But that still hasn't stopped the harassment, which remains a continual problem at the local level despite the repeal of discriminatory national laws against Chinese-Indonesians more than a decade ago.

'During elections, we are really taken advantage of, and we are forced to vote for certain local leaders,' Harman said, after initially being reluctant to talk.

Lim and Tjo even have problems in getting national identification cards, which prevents them from getting marriage certificates and other legal documents. 'We applied for ID cards and family cards again, but it has been 18 months and we haven't got them yet, although we asked repeatedly,' Lim said, looking deeply troubled.

Identification cards cost 30,000 rupiah (HK$25), which is a day's pay for a labourer. And corrupt local officials can demand up to five times the going rate for such documents.

Such is life for this seemingly forgotten group of tens of thousands of Indonesian descendents of Chinese who don't have citizenship and are basically stateless.

Their plight is a sad chapter in contemporary Indonesian history dating to 1955, when Indonesia and China signed an agreement that allowed Chinese people in Indonesia to hold dual citizenship.

In 1959, both countries agreed to a repatriation process for 140,000 Chinese who chose to return to the mainland. However, in 1965, Jakarta accused Beijing of supporting an aborted coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party. Diplomatic ties with China were frozen, abruptly halting the repatriation process and leaving 100,000 people stranded.

Most of those people and their children remain either stateless or are considered foreign nationals in the country of their birth. Indonesia's Ministry of Justice and Human Rights has estimated there are tens of thousands of stateless people in Tangerang, a district of West Java's Banten province, bordering the capital.

'There have been a few naturalisation processes since the 1980s, but they only reached a few thousands people, as the announcements about it were not spread properly,' said Eddy Setiawan, co-ordinator of the Indonesia Civics Institute, an NGO. Funded by a group of Chinese-Indonesian businessmen, it has helped 3,564 people get Indonesian citizenship confirmation letters, while 105 more are being processed.

Setiawan said Indonesia's stateless are caught in a vicious cycle of inherited discriminatory regulations, public ignorance and local government corruption. 'Those people are culturally Indonesian, and based on existing laws, as long as they are born and live in the country and do not hold other citizenship, then they are Indonesian citizens. So why do they have to obtain citizenship certificates?' he said.

The issue was inherited from Indonesia's Dutch colonisers, who divided society into three groups: non-Christian indigenous people, Christians and Chinese. The policy was continued under the late Indonesian dictator Suharto, who was president from 1966 to 1998.

Even after former president Abdurrahman Wahid lifted bans on public celebrations of Lunar New Year and Chinese-language newspapers, among other restrictions, the notion that Chinese-Indonesians are somehow not equal remains entrenched, especially among grass-roots society. As a result, poor Chinese-Indonesians are regular targets of discrimination and extortion.

Setiawan said applying for a citizenship document is a bureaucratic nightmare, with applicants needing letters of confirmation from their neighbourhood unit, a succession of local government offices up to the minister of justice and human rights, and their local court and the police. It's an open secret that navigating through each level of the bureaucracy requires paying a bribe.

'Many ... are poor. The bureaucracy and extortion then makes them reluctant to try to obtain documents. But as a result, they can only work in the informal sector. They are also in constant fear of being arrested, which forces them to move a lot and hide,' Setiawan said.

He noted that the government has issued regulations on eradicating discrimination based on race and ethnicity, as well as policies making it easier for stateless people to obtain citizenship papers. But lower-level government offices, empowered by Indonesia's regional autonomy system, have kept bureaucratic obstacles firmly in place.

Setiawan said his organisation has discussed the issue with the Chinese embassy, but diplomats said they can only help those holding Chinese passports.

Yauw Boen Tji, 48, has known the bitter taste of bureaucracy for the past 20 years while waiting in vain for his citizenship application to be approved. He finally concluded that the system was propagated by government officials to enrich themselves.

His parents arrived in Surabaya, East Java, in the 1950s and never left, but right up to when they died a few years ago, their status had only changed from stateless people to foreign nationals. He's also considered a foreign national, meaning he has to obtain a visa and permit to work in the country of his birth.

'My birth certificate stated that I am of foreign citizen descent and my ID card states that I am a foreign citizen,' said Yauw, who works at a church in Jakarta. Since the 1980s, he's continually applied for Indonesian citizenship to no avail. He obtained a passport in 1989, as he had to attend a church seminar in Singapore, with the word 'stateless' in capital letters denoting his nationality.

'Singaporean immigration let me into the country, but when I used the passport again to go to Malaysia, I was denied entry,' Yauw said. He said four of his siblings who applied with him received citizenship papers, but for unknown reasons, he and another sibling did not.

When Indonesia and China restored diplomatic relations in 1990 after 23 years, Yauw obtained a Chinese passport because he had to attend other church conferences abroad. He tried other avenues, both legal and illegal, to get his Indonesian citizenship confirmation letter, spending hundreds of dollars, but remains a foreign citizen.

Until a few years ago, Indonesia applied the jus sanguinis principle, in which a child's citizenship followed that of their father. Because Yauw didn't want his children to also be considered foreigners in Indonesia, he didn't register his marriage. His three children's birth certificates are marked 'Children born out of the wedlock'.

'I'm so desperate. I get really emotional when people ask about my citizenship status. I don't want to be a Chinese citizen. I was born here in Indonesia; I've lived here all my life. I don't have any connection with my relatives in China any more,' he said, eyes glistening with tears.

Every time he reads about a new government policy concerning stateless and foreign citizens, he inquires about it through his local government office, but is usually told that the guidelines don't exist yet.

Azhari Syihabudin, former head of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights' citizenship sub-directorate, claimed it's not difficult to obtain a citizenship confirmation letter.

'The bureaucracy has been cut short. All you have to do is apply to a local civil registry and population office. As long as he does not have a foreign passport, I think it would be easy,' he said.

But Haidir Amin Daud, the ministry's director general of legal administration, admitted that obtaining or changing citizenship was a bottom-up process. 'We issue citizenship confirmation letters if there is a request from a local administration office, as the party that holds applicants' data,' he said.

Regarding the troubles of many people in facing the bureaucracy in local offices, or even obtaining ID cards, he curtly replied: 'We'll look for the solution.'

After nearly 50 years, Indonesia's stateless ethnic Chinese continue to wait for that solution.