Plight of Chinese-Indonesians reflected in story of once-thriving bookstore now demolished, but fondly remembered

A bustling hub of readers the 1950s, the Liong Bookstore in the Indonesian city of Semarang also published two wildly popular comics

A descendant of its Chinese-Indonesian owners has teamed up with a Romanian curator to launch an online exhibition about the store

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The Toko Buku Liong, or Liong Bookstore, in 1994 before the once-bustling Indonesian bookstore owned by a Chinese-Indonesian couple in the 1950s was illegally demolished. Photo: Lie Djoen Liem

Published: 12:15pm, 22 Sep 2020Updated: 12:22pm, 22 Sep 2020

Surrounded by sheets of corrugated iron, the tall metal building frame is a desolate reminder of a life that once thrived here – one of reading and writing, books and publishing, comics and magazines

The Toko Buku Liong – or Liong Bookstore – once stood on this site in the Indonesian city of Semarang, in Central Java province. Next to beautifully preserved neoclassical buildings dating from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries in the Kota Lama, or Old Town, the former bookstore was illegally demolished more than 20 years ago.

Daniel Lie made the trek to Semarang from his home in Brazil to find the shop and publishing house run by the Lie family grandparents before they fled Indonesia in the 1950s. Born of a Chinese-Indonesian father and a Brazilian mother, Lie is a transgender, non-binary artist who prefers gender-neutral pronouns such as “they” and “their”.

“I was born and raised in Sao Paulo, very far from Indonesia,” Lie says. “I had very little information about the country. So coming to Indonesia was very important.”

Daniel Lie (right) with Romanian curator Adelina Luft, who teamed up with Lie to hunt for information about the bookstore’s past.

Lie’s grandparents, Lie Djoen Liem and Ong King Nio, owned the Liong Bookstore and publishing house in the 1950s. They sold books and magazines in four languages, and published the wildly popular comics Wiro Anak Rimba Indonesia (Wiro, the Jungle Boy of Indonesia) and Dagelan Petruk-Gareng (Petruk-Gareng’s Comedy, a humorous take on traditional Indonesian puppet shows).

In 1959, the Chinese-Indonesian couple suddenly closed the successful business, left everything behind and migrated to Brazil. They spent the rest of their lives in South America, but never talked much about why they left their homeland. “It seemed necessary for them to forget a lot of things,” Lie says.