“In the eyes of Taiwanese people, no matter how good your Mandarin is, perhaps until you reach the level of an academic, you are still seen as an outsider,” he says.

Chandra’s experience would sound familiar to many Indonesian Chinese living in Taiwan, but the reasons for his disorientation run deeper than most expat “fish out of water” stories.

When Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, seized power in 1966 it marked the beginning of the New Order – a regime under which Indonesia’s Chinese were forced to assimilate into native Indonesian society. The Chinese-language press was shut down, Chinese secondary schools were closed and ethnic Chinese organisations were banned. Importing publications in Chinese was forbidden, and the teaching of Chinese also outlawed.

This, Chandra says, left Chinese Indonesians feeling disconnected from their roots. Now 37 and a radio announcer for Radio Taiwan International’s Indonesian-language service in Taipei, he regards his identity as paradoxical. “When I am in Taiwan, I am considered a foreigner. But when I go back to Indonesia, I am also considered a foreigner,” he says.

Siew-Min Sai, a Taipei-based historian and editor of the 2012 book Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, Religion and Belonging, says the Suharto regime was explicitly anti-Chinese. “The thrust of New Order assimilation policy was to discipline and punish Chinese Indonesians,” Sai says. “Their Chineseness had already been predefined as not native, hence alien, to Indonesia.”

As a result, Chinese Indonesian migration to Taiwan boomed. According to the National Museum of Taiwan History, most migrants from Southeast Asian countries who moved to Taiwan during this decade were Hakka Chinese from Indonesia fleeing persecution. Almost 30,000 Chinese from Indonesia settled in Taiwan between 1982 and 2007.

“When I explain my background to colleagues, they’re very sympathetic,” says financial journalist Antonia Timmerman. “But it doesn’t bring me closer to being accepted as Chinese.”

Timmerman, 27, relocated from Jakarta to Taipei for work two decades after Suharto fell from power, in September 2018. Like many Chinese Indonesians, she does not have a Chinese name. At secondary school and university she spoke English.

“When I arrived I felt ashamed: I’m ethnic Chinese and my family is Chinese, but I couldn’t speak Chinese,” she says. “I also didn’t know much about Chinese traditions. I felt detached from my identity.”

Hoon Chang Yau, author of Chinese Identity in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Culture, Politics and Media, published in 2008, says some of the legacies of Suharto’s policy are still deeply embedded in the psyche of Indonesians. These include racial stereotypes and the “subconscious native/non-native division that is still largely embedded in society”.

“Even though the official classification of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ has been annulled, such differentiation still continues in various areas … however, these are slowly changing, as the Chinese are now more actively participating in politics and in exercising their citizenship rights.”

Even though Suharto and the New Order government are long gone, Sai says, the effects of the assimilation policy are still being felt today.

The reverberations were felt again in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, last week, when anti-Chinese sentiment spread on social media amid unrest following the announcement of presidential election results. The incumbent, Joko Widodo, was accused by opposition supporters of selling out the country to China.

Chinese Indonesians have been migrating to Taiwan because there is a feeling that having shared Chinese heritage will enable them to fit more easily into the society, says Chiou Syuan-yuan, an assistant professor of sociology at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Indeed, Chiou notes, from 1950 to 1986, president Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) administration had a policy of welcoming Chinese Indonesians to the island.

“The KMT was isolated politically at that time,” Chiou says. “They had to gain the support of overseas Chinese to strengthen their legitimacy.”

As a result, ethnic Chinese from outside China were actively encouraged to move to Taiwan. Historian Joan S.H. Wang writes that Taiwan’s government created language and educational programmes for overseas Chinese communities that would encourage support for the self-governed island as “the free Chinese alternative to communism and as a free world partner in the defence against communist expansion in Asia”.

It was a policy that benefited Iman Yang when she moved to Taiwan to study Western literature in 1974.

“When I first arrived, everything felt so different because I was from Malang, a small city [in East Java],” Yang says. “Taiwan seemed so modern. New buildings and toll roads were going up everywhere. And it was so much safer than Indonesia.”

Lest we forget: graphic novel on Jakarta anti-Chinese riots of 1998

But her upbringing left her with some key disadvantages. Yang grew up the youngest of 12 children, and at home the family spoke the Hakka dialect. She was still in primary school when, in 1965, Suharto loyalists ordered Chinese schools to close and banned the teaching of Chinese.

Yang says that for seven years she spoke only Indonesian and Javanese.

Studying at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Yang found it hard to keep up. “My tones and accent were completely different,” she says. “We were expected to know Taiwanese history and classical Mandarin proverbs. I was unable to understand during lectures.”

Despite this Yang graduated, and found work at a trading company in Taipei. She married a Taiwanese citizen in 1988 and in 1992 opened an Indonesian restaurant in Taipei’s Daan district. It has since become popular among homesick Indonesian and Taiwanese diners alike.

Hoon says younger Chinese Indonesians have a “significantly different” attitude towards their identity compared to those who experienced the Suharto regime and the earlier era of Sukarno, who led the struggle for independence against the Dutch.

“Some of the older generation of Chinese Indonesians are trying to recover the Chinese cultural and linguistic heritage that was lost during the New Order regime,” he says. “But the younger generation are a lot more global in their identity, especially in urban areas; their Chineseness is very cosmopolitan, and very different from the older generation.”

Setefanus Suprajitno, associate professor of cultural studies at Petra Christian University in the Indonesian city of Surabaya, says: “Indonesians who move to a majority Chinese country don’t necessarily anticipate problems. They’re surprised when they find the culture isn’t the same.”

Suprajitno says that many Chinese Indonesians who migrate to Chinese-majority countries have a hard time fitting in.

“Even those who are knowledgeable about Chinese culture find that it doesn’t make them Chinese in the sense it’s understood in Taiwan,” he says. “Their preconception of Taiwan is very different to how it turns out to be in reality.”

Timmerman continues to take Mandarin classes two days a week and practices with her local friends.

“My first instinct is to say ‘I am an Indonesian’, but then I realise my Indonesian-ness is complex. ‘Native’ Indonesians might describe their identity more easily; it takes me two or three paragraphs to describe mine,” she says.

While Chandra now has permanent residency in Taiwan, he says he will always be Indonesian.

“It’s simple,” he says, “I am an Indonesian who happens to have a Chinese cultural background. You can’t choose your background – you were born that way.”

“Chinese people like to wander. But wherever we go, we are considered immigrants,” says Yang. “But I am also proud to be an Indonesian living in Taiwan. When I hear our national anthem I still get goosebumps.”