The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  Survivors from different boats told us nearly identical stories of how they were abandoned. Crews returned from the on-water meeting and distributed extra servings of food and water, hinting that everyone would disembark in Malaysia soon. Then, in the evening of 9 May, the 578 passengers aboard Hasina’s ship watched in the twilight as a speedboat approached. Four men emerged and boarded their ship, stripping it of instruments and equipment as the entire crew made their way to the speedboat. When passengers began to protest, warning shots were fired. The Kachin, as he stepped onto the speedboat himself, told the Rohingya men on board to sail due west, then offered some consolation. ‘I didn’t destroy the engine,’ he said.

  Around the same time, the captain of a larger smuggling vessel nearby, carrying as many as 1000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis, also abandoned ship. He also fled on a trailing speedboat, after telling his passengers to sail at 220 degrees in order to reach Malaysia the next morning. But there is nowhere in the Andaman Sea where a heading of 220 degrees will point a ship to Malaysia. The captain was almost certainly directing them towards Indonesia.

  Wherever this ship was headed, it ran out of fuel the next day. Passing fishing boats gave some fuel and directed the Rohingya and Bangladeshis to Indonesia. The following morning, 11 May 2015, two Indonesian navy vessels arrived with water, dry instant noodles and biscuits, and returned later in the day to tow the ship towards Malaysia. ‘We gave them fuel and asked them to proceed,’ an Indonesian navy spokesperson told Agence France-Presse. ‘We are not forcing them to go to Malaysia nor Australia. That is not our business. Our business is they don’t enter Indonesia because Indonesia is not the destination.’

  The ship drifted for nearly two days until being approached near Penang on the afternoon of 13 May by two Malaysian navy vessels, which also provided food and water. Overnight, the Malaysians towed the ship back into Indonesian territory. When the Malaysians untied from the ship, multiple passengers remember the Malaysians giving instructions to stay put while they went to retrieve other boats in the area. Then we’ll bring you all to Malaysia, the passengers said they were told.

  The next day, Malaysia’s Deputy Home Minister, Wan Junaidi, acknowledged to the Associated Press that Malaysia had turned back both this ship and Hasina’s. ‘We have to send the right message,’ he said. ‘They are not welcome here.’

  *

  I speak regularly to Moy, another teenage bride who spent a month at sea trying to make it to Indonesia to join her husband. The groom’s family was originally from the same town as Moy but had fled the conflict and poverty at home to strike out across the sea for the Javanese hill station of Bandung, 150 kilometres south-east of Jakarta. Moy was sixteen when their parents arranged the marriage and barely seventeen when she boarded the ship that took her away from a civil war and also her mother. They exchanged letters for years after Moy arrived in Bandung, writing to each other until Moy’s mother died, having never again seen her only daughter.

  When nationalist Indonesians began suspecting Moy’s community of embracing a radical ideology, there was a fear that any links to home, including correspondence, would be used as evidence of subversion. So Moy burned all her mother’s letters. She has never told me about this herself, but I know because her eldest daughter remembers watching, and shared this memory with me because that is what mothers do with their children. Moy is my grandmother. She arrived in Indonesia by boat from China in March 1947, and she, too, knows something about not being welcome there.

  Often when I meet Rohingya refugees, they will shake my hand with one arm and with the other present scraps of torn papers with faded Burmese script documenting their residence in Myanmar, and their parents’, and grandparents’. It comes almost from muscle memory, an automatic reaction to meeting officials of any kind, as if to say, Look, I exist, I belong. And it makes me think of the tattered administrative forms with faded Dutch and Indonesian type that my family still keeps in plastic sleeves, decades after we all became Australian citizens.

  There is my grandmother Moy’s visa from the Dutch consulate in the south-eastern Chinese port of Amoy, now Xiamen, allowing her admission to the Dutch Indies, now Indonesia, dated 24 February 1947. Also in a plastic sleeve is a form signed by my mother on 10 July 1967, changing her name from the Chinese name she was given at birth to an Indonesian name no-one has ever called her by, pursuant to Cabinet Presidium Decision 127/U/Kep/12/1966, which stated ‘That replacing the names of Indonesians of foreign descent with names which conform to indigenous Indonesian names will assist in assimilation’.

  Without context, this regulation and all our family forms appear benign. The photos of my mother attached to them show her in smart dress and well-coiffed hair, making the kind of scarcely perceptible smile permissible in official photos; a little wider and they could be from my high school yearbook. The transition from Chinese to Indonesian citizenship and nomenclature could seem like the natural assimilation of an immigrant community.

  But here is the context: from the beginning of Dutch rule in Indonesia, Chinese who had immigrated there since the sixteenth century were eliminated from the body politic, most violently in 1740, when Dutch authorities ordered a bloodletting in Jakarta that killed as many as 10,000 Chinese. After Indonesian independence in 1949, the Dutch policy of categorising ethnic Chinese as ‘foreign orientals’ was effectively continued through legislation that barred them from doing business in rural areas. To continue their trades, Chinese Indonesians were confined to urban ghettos like the one in Bandung where my mother grew up. In some cases, they were violently expelled from rural areas, as when thousands of Chinese Indonesians were killed in 1965 and 1966 for being suspected Communists. My mother remembers hiding with her siblings in the bathroom one afternoon as mobs descended on their home. When my mother finally emerged, the family car was missing. It had been rolled down a hill and torched.

  The smoke combusting from that car, curling from my grandmother’s letters, still signals to me today, in the fires that have consumed Rohingya villages as recently as late 2016, but also in 2012, when an orgy of intercommunal violence in Rakhine State disintegrated whole villages and led to a surge of Rohingya taking to the seas. ‘There were no fire brigades, no rescuers,’ one Rohingya man once told me. ‘Villages were just burnt to ash.’

  No-one came to put out the flames of my mother’s family car, either. Instead, in 1967, Indonesian president Suharto signed the Basic Policy for the Solution of the Chinese Problem. Public displays of Chinese literature and culture were prohibited. The importation of anything bearing Chinese characters became contraband, which is when my grandmother burned all the letters from her dead mother. And when Cabinet Presidium Decision 127 suggesting Chinese Indonesians should adopt Indonesian names did not prove persuasive enough, Suharto dispensed with any pretence. ‘Indonesian citizens of foreign descent who still use Chinese names’, read his Presidential Decision No. 240 of 1967, ‘are urged to replace them with Indonesian names’.

  By the end of that year, my mother had left Bandung for North Sydney Girls High School, cramming enough Shakespeare in one year to earn admission to the University of Sydney. She went on a student visa; her family never sought asylum per se, but if they ever had, and if I were the one assessing their claims, as I have for hundreds of asylum seekers, I would have had no qualms recognising them as refugees, defined under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees as individuals with a well-founded fear of persecution on account of, among other things, their race and nationality. The tattered forms we keep in plastic sleeves are not benign records of integration into Indonesian society; they were the bureaucratic tools of discrimination. When I showed the documents to my mother recently, including one registering her when she was six years old – in the photo, she has a bow in her hair – for no obvious purpose, she asked, indignantly and rhetorically, ‘Why did we always have to sign all these forms?’

  Those are nearly the exact words Rohingya say to me, also indignantly, also r
hetorically, every time the Myanmar government makes them apply for new documents or turn in old ones, or register their identities or participate in verification exercises. Intentionally or not, the terminology of exclusion has been recycled: where Chinese Indonesians used to be required to carry around a Proof of Citizenship card to get a passport or register their marriages, Rohingya are now being required to apply for a Nationality Verification card to travel to the next town or fish or go to school. Even if the Myanmar government one day genuinely seeks to recognise them, the Rohingya have lost all trust in processes, which only ever end badly for them. They sit on plastic stools in a dirt courtyard in Maungdaw and ask me, ‘Why should we have to apply for citizenship?’ And they could be my mother or my grandmother, my aunt or my uncle, sitting outside their house in Bandung fifty years ago, asking the same question.

  The parallels only go so far; my mother’s family were free to move around Indonesia, run gold shops and trading businesses and, ultimately, obtain Indonesian citizenship. My mother went to proper schools and had proper enough documents and wealthy enough parents to go to university in Australia. Were Chinese Indonesians victims of institutional discrimination? Yes. Did they suffer as much as the Rohingya do today? Not even close.

  More to the point, my family’s old documents, that paperwork of racism, are fifty, sixty, seventy years old. And even those – birth certificates, school transcripts, visas – elude the Rohingya today. In 2017. Most Rohingya children have no record of their births. They are not eligible to apply for passports, from Myanmar or any other country. The visa my grandmother obtained at the Dutch consulate in Amoy in 1947 is what Hasina, the Rohingya child bride, could only dream of seven decades later, as she vomited without end and drifted in and out of consciousness in the Andaman Sea.

  *

  Hasina made it to land in a relatively uneventful fashion. After being turned back by the Malaysian navy, her boat fortuitously drifted almost right to the shore of northern Aceh, in Indonesia. On 13 May 2015, Acehnese fishermen helped disembark the boat’s 578 passengers, and they were eventually sheltered in a kind of refugee camp outside the city of Lhokseumawe, which is where I met Hasina.

  Understanding what happened to the other ship, the one that sailed 220 degrees to nowhere, is a Rashomon-like exercise of conflicting interests and narratives – though it also ended up in Indonesia. To start with, it is impossible to know how many people were on the ship. Most estimates range between 800 and 1000, but there is no passenger manifest, just best guesses by starved individuals who had been at sea for months. Because the smugglers were treating the passengers as sunk costs, there was no need for a passenger count.

  There are some things most of the passengers agree on. Other than about forty people who were on the ship from the time it set out from the Bay of Bengal in March 2015, everyone else was transferred to it from one of three different boats. The ship was dark grey, with at least two levels each above and below deck. And not long after the transfers were complete, the captain shot dead a Rohingya man sitting near the ship’s bow. He was wrapped in a longyi, given funeral rites and thrown overboard. No-one really knew why, but some Rohingya told us it was superstition: an offering to the sea to indulge its mercy.

  The captain and crew abandoned ship several days after the shooting. That is when a scramble for what little drinking water remained erupted into a fight to the death between Rohingya and Bangladeshis, who began slicing crowbars and axes at each other and at the ship. The Bangladeshis acknowledged that some of them punctured a hole in the hull, but accused the Rohingya of keeping all the water for themselves; Rohingya said they were saving it for the children. Some said the Bangladeshis sabotaged the boat because they wanted to bring everyone down with them. Others said the Bangladeshis were irate that the Rohingya had told naval authorities there were Bangladeshis on board, which the Bangladeshis believed ruined their chances of being rescued. Rohingya said only Rohingya were killed. Bangladeshis said Bangladeshis were also killed.

  The ship was badly damaged in the fight and eventually sank, though Acehnese fishermen again came to the rescue, ultimately bringing 820 Rohingya and Bangladeshis to safety on 15 May 2015. Because no-one knows how many people were on the boat to begin with, there is no way to know how many people died in the fighting or drowned, but based on interviews my team and I conducted, we counted at least fourteen, not including the man shot by the captain.

  The survivors were brought to a shelter near the city of Langsa, in eastern Aceh. Many had gaping wounds across their backs and torsos. We registered sixty women and 217 children, some whose parents had drowned. One three-year-old girl, Shahira, was dying from tetanus.

  At the time, Tony Abbott was asked about the Rohingya situation. Abbott, who originally came to Australia by boat from Britain, became Australia’s twenty-eighth prime minister in 2013 after promising to ‘stop the boats’ of refugees and asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by sea. Any who made it to Australian waters were remanded, indefinitely, to ‘offshore processing centres’ on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and the tiny island nation of Nauru, 4000 kilometres from Sydney. But the Rohingya rescued in Indonesia had neither come close to nor been on their way to Australian waters. So, Abbott was asked, might Australia resettle some of them?

  ‘Nope,’ Abbott said. ‘Nope, nope.’

  By the time Shahira was taken to a doctor, it was too late, anyway. It was too late also for the Rohingya teenager who showed up at our office in Kuala Lumpur last year past the point of rescue, afraid he would be turned away by a local hospital. It was too late, again, for sixteen-month-old Mohammed Shohayet, fleeing more recent violence in Rakhine State, photographed dead on the banks of the Naf River in December 2016. He lies prostrated like Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy found on a Turkish beach a year earlier, only Mohammed lies on mud, not sand, with his arms up by his head instead of down by his side, yellow shirt instead of red, shoeless instead of sneakers unstrapped.

  *

  There are at least 14,000 Rohingya in India, one of the few countries where Rohingya can obtain a kind of legal status in the form of long-term visas. Several thousand have come to Hyderabad, which is 30 per cent Muslim, looking for steady work and a tolerant community. With earnings from scrap-collecting and masonry, they have stitched together a cluster of makeshift settlements – a slum, really – conjoined by the alleyway where I sat on the morning of 9 November 2016, watching the US election returns come in on my iPhone.

  I had just come from meeting the leaders of one of the Rohingya settlements and was on my way to meet the leaders of another. My main task was to understand how the most recent Rohingya arrivals to India had made their way from Myanmar, but whenever I have held these meetings with Rohingya communities, everywhere from Bangladesh to Malaysia, they invariably evolve into discussions about what can be done to finally give the Rohingya people a home.

  I try to be optimistic. I explain that the United Nations continues to advocate for the Rohingya inside Myanmar and across the region. The international community, I say, is determined to keep Myanmar on the path towards openness, to ensure that the tide has turned for good and will, however slowly, eventually lift the Rohingya in its wake.

  I sometimes want to tell Rohingya to look to my family for hope that progress comes, even if it takes seventy years. For the Rohingya who have risked everything and taken to the seas, I want to tell them my grandmother set out on a boat in 1947 and now lives in a care home in Sydney with Chinese-speaking staff serving Chinese meals, funded by the Australian government to provide dignity in old age to a people successive Australian prime ministers once called unequal and inferior.

  To the Rohingya who remain in Myanmar, I want to tell them how, even though I look very much Chinese, when I meet Indonesian officials in Jakarta they embrace me with their delighted voices when I tell them my mother is from Bandung. All the anti-Chinese legislation and regulations from my mother’s childhood have been repealed. Chinese New Year is now a pub
lic holiday. In Jakarta, where 10,000 Chinese were once slaughtered, a Chinese Indonesian became governor in 2014: Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known more commonly by his Chinese nickname, Ahok.

  Some Rohingya accept that line of thought; they have no choice but to be optimistic. Many do not. Not for the first time, an elderly Rohingya man openly wept to me that morning in Hyderabad, presenting his own life, lived entirely on the run, as evidence that the world would never care. I was in no position to disprove his despair, but until that morning I had always believed in what I said, even if many of the Rohingya I spoke to had not. I work for the United Nations; for me, the justice towards which the arc of the moral universe bends is the justice of diversity and inclusion, born of looking out rather than turning in.

  But sitting by the side of that alley in Hyderabad, watching as Donald Trump was elected President of the United States – I felt like a hypocrite, like I was lying when I said that things would ever get better for the Rohingya, or that the international community would keep trying to help Muslim refugees like them. Donald Trump is President of the United States because there are millions of Americans who feel forgotten and are fearful of their race being wiped out. Try telling that to the Rohingya.

  *

  The many Rohingya who have completely and justifiably given up hope would not be convinced by my family’s better fortunes in Australia or Indonesia. They would remind me that ethnic Indonesians looted and raped Chinese in the streets of Jakarta in 1998, nineteen short years ago. They would WhatsApp me the conspiracy theories of a Chinese fifth column that have gone viral on Indonesian social media. And they would show me the half a million Indonesians who demonstrated in November 2016, protesting not the policies or politics of governor Ahok but his race and his religion, believing Indonesians should not be ruled by a Chinese Christian. The next month, Ahok went on trial, not for corruption or embezzlement but for blasphemy, accused of insulting the Qur’an.