Book Review: ‘Tjong’

Tjong (2022) is Herry Gendut Janarto’s second novel and takes as its main character a totok (Chinese-born) Chinese Indonesian, Tjong Kei Lin, born to an impoverished family in Guangzhou, China. In the first novel Yogya Yogya (2020), the main character, Gayuh is a peranakan Chinese (locally born), the son of a lower-middle-class family in Yogyakarta whose ethnicity emerges only in the home. The character Tjong Kei Lin, born in 1912, emigrates to Indonesia (Namyong) as a teenager to work for his stepfather and dies in Indonesia in 1980.