As an academician who teaches American literature and researches Indonesian literature and cultural studies, I have been accustomed to switching fields and exploring new territories. Yet, to write a chapter in a book on Southeast Asian Studies scholarship is like trespassing into somebody else's terrain — an awkward condition, which is not unfamiliar in my personal as well as professional history. I have internalized this disciplinary interpellation of asking myself “what right have you to be here”. I remember my days as a graduate student at Cornell in the early 1990s, sneaking into James Siegel's and Benedict Anderson's famous Southeast Asian studies seminars, while writing my dissertation on the Representation of Otherness in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s. “You really don't need this course”, said Professor Siegel, who was keen in keeping his class list rather short. Nevertheless, I stayed.

Years after returning home, I found my credentials once again questioned. It was during a recess in one of the meetings of the Majlis Bahasa Indonesia/ Melayu and Majelis Sastra Asia Tenggara — a three country (Malaysia-Brunei- Indonesia) intergovernmental body founded to promote Malay language and literature in the region. A Brunei representative looked at me rather closely, politely asking whether I am of Chinese descent. When I answered that I am a Peranakan, he went on to say, “But you must surely be a Moslem, right?” He was quite incredulous, when I answered negatively, confusing his understanding of what it required to be a national representative of a Malay body.

The list of similar experiences is uncannily long. Imagine strolling into a solo painting exhibition in Balai Budaya, one of the most prestigious art galleries in Jakarta in the 1970s, to see a pictorial expression of anger against “the way the Chinese-Indonesian abuses Indonesian language”. (With no other guest around, the artist, from Surabaya, offered generously to lecture me on the subject, seeming quite aware of my physical ethnic affinity with the group he was attacking.) Once, in the mid-1960s, I went to a traditional arts performance with my sisters, where we found ourselves among crowds who, every half-hour, stood up and shouted unfamiliar patriotic yells, looking suspiciously at three timid girls who were awkwardly glued to their seats.