Traces/Echoes/Fragments of 印尼 in Fujian
Fragments from the myriad photographs I took while “tracing” 印尼 across Fujian.
I grew up knowing remarkably little about my grandmother’s family history.
My grandmother, Giok Lan 玉兰, later Lanny Utami, rarely spoke about where her family had come from, and there was no clear genealogy, village name, or substantial archival record I could follow. What I had instead were fragments, many of them passed down through my grandfather: that her family was part of a Hokkien-speaking lineage, had lived in Indonesia for generations, had been involved in sugar and shopkeeping in East Java, and that her parents’ surnames were Kwee (郭 / Guō) and Oei (黃 / Huáng).
I became curious about what kind of history could sit behind such partial memories.
That curiosity brought me to Fujian.
Across Xiamen, Quanzhou, Fuzhou, and Fuqing, I began photographing traces of Indonesia whenever they appeared. Some were historical and institutional: maps of maritime routes, old newspapers, identification documents, museum displays, certificates, plaques, and records of commercial organizations. Others were quieter: restaurant signs, menus, packaged food, references to Indonesian cities, and places where Indonesia remained present through everyday commerce and memory.
What interested me was how differently Indonesia appeared from one object to another. Sometimes it was a destination or trading partner. Sometimes it appeared through food, migration, institutional ties, or the residue of a life lived between places. I was surprised by how often it kept appearing, to the point that searching 印尼 in my phone gallery brought up hundreds of photographs from the trip.
I did not go to Fujian expecting to recover a complete lineage. I went because I knew so little. I went looking through a family story, trying to understand what might remain when so much of that history had become difficult to trace.
And once I began noticing, Indonesia seemed to surface everywhere: in archives, storefronts, objects, and small details that made the distance between Fujian and Indonesia feel much less absolute.
No single photograph could explain the relationship between Indonesia and southern China. But placed beside one another, these objects began to reveal how long, and how variously, that relationship had been lived.