That changed in mid-May 1998, when rioting broke out across Indonesia triggered by an economic downturn; the country’s ethnic Chinese were its prime targets because of the concentration of wealth in Chinese hands. Rani recalls climbing the water tower at the family’s home in Jakarta and seeing smoke rising from a burning shopping centre nearby.

The family fled to Bali, east of the main island of Java, which they felt would be safer, and returned to Jakarta a week later once the situation had cooled down. A year later, Rani’s parents sent her to boarding school in Perth, Western Australia.

Rani, who has degrees in the dramatic arts and social work, has lived in Australia ever since, and is now based in Melbourne, but she has never forgotten the events that forever changed her perception of her home country.

Her Chinese Whispers project began as an immersive installation-based performance. Launched in Australia in 2014, visitors walked through a labyrinth of white cloth, featuring newspaper clippings about the May 1998 riots. Wearing headphones, they would hear Rani talk about her identity, her thoughts about the riots, and the voices of Chinese-Indonesian women interviewees in Australia sharing their own experiences with her.

“My goal in making the maze was to make the audience feel they are going through the journey with me,” Rani says. “And that journey was meant to be done on your own, just like meditation.”

To translate the project into a graphic novel, Rani, as lead artist and producer, sought help from collaborators including illustrator Cindy Saja. An Indonesian national with no Chinese heritage, Saja says she was inspired by “The Boat”, an interactive online graphic novel based on Nam Le’s short story of that name, adapted by cartoonist Matt Huynh and produced by SBS Australia.

It tells the story of a 16-year-old Vietnamese refugee sent off alone by her parents after the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese communist forces, which marked the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Huynh used a brush pen, Chinese ink and watercolours for his illustrations.

“Chinese Whispers” also features the voices of Rani’s interviewees, such as writer Dewi Anggraeni and human rights activist Karlina Supelli.

In the first chapter, Origins, Rani focuses on her cultural background as an Indonesian with Chinese roots, and tells the stories of her interviewees, who also migrated from Indonesia to Australia. She asks them how they came to be in the country and whether they identify as Chinese, Indonesian, Australian or otherwise.

In the second chapter, Becoming Witness, Rani muses that, even after so many years have passed since the riots, she still wasn’t sure if it would be OK to ask other Chinese-Indonesian women about the chilling events of May 1998, during which more than 1,000 deaths and some 168 rapes were reported. She asks, “How can we talk about this?” and “Why is there still so much secrecy?”

In the third chapter, Digging Deeper, the sound of breaking glass evokes the looting that took place, while a voice actor whispers the word “Cina” in a menacing tone.

Supelli tells Rani in the audio that she remembers a mother and her daughters were raped by a mob. “Based on eyewitness accounts … one or two of the girls were thrown into a fire,” she says.

The violence, Rani says, “brutally violated Chinese-Indonesian women” and many people were burned alive as a result of fires deliberately lit in several major cities.

Rani shares the view of some historians that the politicisation of Chinese identity in Indonesia stems from the racial segregation imposed under Dutch colonial rule.

The Netherlands colonised the archipelago, which it called the Dutch East Indies, in the 17th century. It was administered by the Dutch East India Company until 1800, and remained under Dutch government control until 1942.

The fourth chapter of “Chinese Whispers”, Inheriting Hate, elaborates on the theme of colonialism and its connection to anti-Chinese sentiment. Rani says she learned at university “how this hatred was something that was nurtured” and that “the Dutch divided the hundreds of ethnic groups in what is now called Indonesia into three very basic categories”.

European people were at the top of the hierarchy with the Chinese in the middle and “natives” at the very bottom.

The Dutch took advantage of the resentment that so-called natives felt towards the Chinese, and even encouraged it, she says. One of the earliest and largest anti-Chinese incidents occurred in the country during the Diponegoro war (or Java war) between 1825 and 1830, which pitted Javanese islanders against the Dutch authorities.

The Chinese became targets in the conflict because the Dutch had given them the right to collect tolls and other taxes, putting them in a position of relative privilege.

Illustrator Saja was nine years old when the 1998 riots broke out and remembers her family stockpiled sacks of rice at home because “they were worried about the situation at that time”.

When Saja agreed to the “Chinese Whispers” collaboration, Rani sent her a script and audio file. Saja listened to Rani’s audio clips eyes closed, in order to imagine scenes from the riots.

“There was an intonation in the voice narration from Pramesti that was very sincere in describing the doubts of a little girl who questioned her identity, and her emotional state in this work also made my soul sad,” she says.

In the fifth chapter of the novel, Unity, Rani expresses her fear that if racial hatred and resentment remain unexamined, “the potential for something like the May 1998 riots to happen again will still be present, lying there like a sleeping monster”.

Supelli tells Rani that under Suharto, whose New Order government ruled from 1967 to 1998, people were not allowed to openly discuss race, ethnicity or religion. She uses the metaphor of a volcano to describe how decades of tensions between ethnic, racial and religious groups “were allowed to build to the point of near eruption”, and the May riots were “one such eruption”.

Many illustrations Saja created for “Chinese Whispers” were symbolic, she says, including silhouettes of a tiger (1998 was the Year of the Tiger) and jasmine flowers falling into black water.

“Jasmine is a typical Indonesian flower. Its white colour symbolises purity … The scene [of flowers falling into dirty water] depicts the victims of rape,” she says.

Saja admits she experienced qualms about whether she could complete her illustrations for the graphic novel.

“The theme [of “Chinese Whispers”] was still considered sensitive, and I worried how the public would view it once the work was published.”

Rani says she is often asked if she fears the project could spark a backlash or expose her to threats.

“[It is] my contribution as an artist … The point of performing arts is that it is an art discipline that tells stories,” she says. “So I feel my contribution is to tell stories about [the riots].”

The sixth and final chapter of “Chinese Whispers” is called Prayer, and Rani says the novel is itself a prayer – an act that can be done privately or with others, in order to remember and acknowledge that the riots happened.

The novel ends with a question: What else do we need to face and begin the healing?

“The reality is there are still many parties who deny [the occurrence] of the ’98 riots, especially the violence against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese and the violence against Chinese-Indonesian women,” Rani says.

“For me, we cannot heal what we will not face, because that scar will always be there.”