To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham

In early 1966, only the unhinged would have gone round Jakarta proclaiming “Hidup

PKI” (“Long live the Indonesian Communist Party”) – especially if they were ethnic Chinese. As a result, as the Australian scholar David Reeve recounts in his biography To Remain Myself, the historian Onghokham spent a few months staring at the wall of an army cell, before he was released as temporarily deranged.

The book is derived from many frank interviews and letters to Ong’s friends, such as Cornell University’s Ben Anderson and Monash University’s Herb Feith. Ong’s Surabaya family were Peranakan Chinese, who settled in Java in the 1700s and became rich from the sugar trade, their Chinese language forgotten and replaced by Dutch. Their preoccupations were business, food, gambling and storytelling. When Indonesia emerged from years of occupation and war in 1949, Ong was 16. They could have emigrated but opted to stay.

Ong elided his three Chinese names – Ong Hok Ham – into one and added Indonesian to his languages. As a student in Jakarta, he became an entertaining source of unreported news for Western scholars, diplomats and journalists. But by late 1964 he felt “dread”. The PKI was trying to redistribute land to peasants from big estates and Islamic schools. The Javanese, Ong wrote to friends, felt “the day of final reckoning” was imminent.

The day arrived, sparked by the coup attempt on September 30, 1965. The army put Ong into uniform to peruse a PKI archive for evidence of involvement in the coup. He found none, but he was touched by letters from “peasants, these little people, writing intelligent things about class”. He went back to Surabaya that December and saw PKI heads on stakes and canals choked with bodies. The “little people” were being slaughtered.

Inner turmoil added to his following breakdown. Ong had long felt attracted to men, but was a virgin until 30. He haunted Jakarta’s gay beats but yearned for steady, loving companionship. Doubly an outsider, Ong was “in struggle with the people who wanted to make ‘someone or something’ out of me, while I wanted to remain myself ”.

He went to Yale in 1968 and wrote a brilliant doctoral thesis on 19th-century Java that was richer in anecdote than social theory, returning to the University of Indonesia in 1975. Until his death in 2007, Ong lived as a prolific public intellectual and epicure.

Reeve is not uncritical: Ong was not the leading Indonesian historian of his era, although his life is an intellectual history of Indonesia’s formative years. This book is as piquant as Peranakan cuisine: Chinese livened by chillies, sweet soy sauce, coconut milk, palm sugar and the archipelago’s spices.

Asian Studies Association of Australia & NUS, 352pp, $57.50

How will the world end? If you’re a tech billionaire, you’re likely already imagining the grisly final act. When American Marxist media theorist, graphic novelist and early cyberpunk embracer Douglas Rushkoff is invited to speak to a group of five extremely wealthy men in a remote location, he encounters their fear, paranoia and preparations for the end of civilisation. One, after informing Rushkoff that he’s nearly completed his underground bunker, asks: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The event is the seemingly inevitable apocalypse. It could be through environmental collapse, social unrest, a nuclear attack, a rampant computer virus or deadly disease. What Rushkoff soon realises is that these billionaires, and many like them, subscribe to The Mindset, a philosophy that “allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused”.

It’s a belief that wealth and technology can insulate them from the rest of us – at least until they need to exit their remote location for essential supplies and fresh air.

In this compelling short book, Rushkoff both explains what the billionaire class are hoping to escape – such as climate breakdown and mass migration – and how unrealistic it is. Many of the richest people on the planet have no plan to successfully avoid any of it, despite claiming a divine right to live forever or to colonise other planets. They convince