On Publishing Sipit:
A Chinese-Indonesian Poetry by Yosephine Salim

A reflection on the ordinary Chinese-Indonesian experience, Widji Thukul, and the importance of rewriting forgotten narratives
by Fransisca Angela

Sipit by Yosephine Salim was published by Terang Press. In February 2026, we hosted a series of public programs. This writing is a reflection on how Sipit came about, along with notes from conversations during our programs at Margin Library & Third Space and POST Bookshop. All poems quoted in this article appear in excerpted form.

Amsterdam, March 2026

I first met Yosephine at our university radio campus in West Jakarta, back in 2012. I was in charge of reportage, while she was making mixtapes for each radio segment. During our introduction week, where students were gathered from different backgrounds and majors. I was immediately drawn to her and her slit-eyes (sipit), a familiar feature that signaled our shared identity as Chinese-Indonesians.

Both of us came from segregated education backgrounds: me from a Catholic school; her, a national plus school with students from multicultural backgrounds (Indian, Filipino, Indonesian). I was ashamed to admit that my first encounter in a multicultural environment that makes up Indonesia only began the day I enrolled in university. Yet, outside of university, when people first met me, they would often ask whether I studied abroad—the assumption being that my family could afford it simply because we are Chinese-Indonesian.

Being tied to a broader Chinese diaspora, those who are situated within the Chinese-Indonesian community have a very isolating experience. During the New Order, an authoritarian regime that lasted three decades, from 1965 to 1998. We were forced to change our names and were forbidden to celebrate our culture, language, and traditions in public. In the final years of the regime, waves of violence erupted, leaving deep scars within the community. Yet this history is rarely acknowledged, whether in institutional narratives or in everyday conversations.

Yosephine and I shared that same history of erasure, yet we were raised in very different environments. She lived and grew up in a home from which her family’s food-catering business also operated. In that home, she was exposed to different social, cultural, and class backgrounds from the family’s close-knit employees. That same home became a place where we spent our COVID isolation days together, with me working on her table and her on the bed, often rearranging some of her books. Downstairs, there always seemed to be people who cooked, cut vegetables, and ran the kitchen.

I was raised with a high level of tolerance. So, I observe from a distance. Living in Muara Karang, I'm surrounded by many Chinese-Indonesians from Medan, and sense tension and differences between them and Chinese-Indonesians in Jakarta. This prompted a self-reflection: why do I think differently?

On the other hand, I grew up in a Catholic upbringing where the sense of community centered on religious activities such as rosary prayers and choir gatherings. My mother encouraged me to only befriend other Chinese-Indonesians for safety, and I recalled my aunt’s constant reminder to be careful whenever I went out, even for a quick visit to the nearest convenience store. At six years old, I learned about the word ‘rape’ for the first time. I was made aware from an early age that my sole existence as a Chinese-Indonesian woman was to be exposed to harm.

At the height of the pandemic, Yosephine got a copywriting job at a startup company. During one of my visits to her house, she told me she had been writing behind her cubicle. She showed me a document with over seventy pages of poems that did not seem to have been written within a period of two months. Those poems would later become Sipit, first self-published in 2021 and then republished in 2026 by Terang Press, with seven additional poems, foreword by Maesy Ang, and a new design by Cleo TSW.

Sipit: initial drafts, 2021

While reading her poems, I recognized parts of myself in them. And as I flipped through the pages, I also recognized familiar stories I grew up with—of parents, aunties, uncles, cousins, as well as strangers on the street, domestic workers, acquaintances, and the high school friends you had lost touch with—told in the most human, simplest manner.

Putting Sipit Together
My early influence in storytelling came from stories told within the domestic spaces: by adults, from children’s books, on cassette tapes, and in family photo albums made by my mother. However, it was hard to find resonance between the stories told at home and those that I consumed outside the home: at school, on television, and in books. They did not match my reality, and I often felt that something was missing.

As a teenager, searching for fragments of erased history, I learned about poet Widji Thukul from his autobiographical film Istirahatlah Kata-Kata (Solo, Solitude). The film educated me about his vocation, escape to Pontianak, and enforced disappearance in 1996 under the New Order, a regime that felt distant, though I lived towards the end of it as a child. At that moment, I realized the state’s fear of words and language.

sajakku adalah kata-kata
yang mula-mula menyumpal di tenggorokanku
lalu lahirlah ketika kuucapkan

sajakku adalah kata-kata
yang mula-mula bergulung-gulung
dalam perasaan
lalu lahirlah ketika kuucapkan

sajakku adalah kebisuan
yang sudah kuhancurkan
sehingga aku bisa mengucapkan
dan engkau mendengarkan

Widji Thukul

When Yosephine showed me drafts of her poems, it was a flood of images and memories; words became a series of visuals, sounds, and rhythms as I read them. It was liberating to feel how ‘freeing’ it must be for her to write these texts. “Can those be considered poems?”, she asked me jokingly.

In 2022, while reorganizing written mementos from friends, I revisited Yosephine’s gift of postcard sets made from her collages, titled “Kelahiranku” (My Birth). Different images emerge, accompanied by short texts from Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Yosephine had always been creating and combining visual elements with words, even before Sipit was born. Her own distinct way of storytelling was present since the day she cut and pasted images from different resources and gave them new meanings through collage.

Kelahiranku, digital collages by Yosephine Salim (2015)

Yosephine once shared with me that Orhan Pamuk, who writes from within the locality of his roots in Turkey, was one of her literary influences. She said she was fond of Pamuk’s poetic language and the way he weaves layered stories across family, life in urban cities, and faith.

In our recent chat, she sent a video of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, a place she hopes to visit. The museum, which is an extension of his novel of the same name, displays hundreds of everyday objects tied to the characters, tracing a story of love and loss across social divides. It asks visitors to reflect on the question of, “Can objects hold memories?”

Learning about Widji Thukul and exploring Orhan Pamuk’s layered storytelling later helped me recognize the depth in Yosephine’s work. Mirroring Thukul’s poem above, her poems emerge from accumulated experiences, despair, and hope. She also weaves personal and collective narratives in her works, just like Pamuk.

Publishing Sipit: From Self-Publish to Terang Press
About five years ago, after talking to Daud Sihombing (publisher of Petrikor Books), who agreed to help us produce Sipit‘s first DIY edition, Yosephine and I sat at a cafe in Bintaro. We laid the pages side by side on a square table, trying to see how the text flows, just as one would sequence images to make a photo story.

At the time, I was beginning to explore visual language and visual literacy by participating in alternative photo storytelling programs, through funding by Angkor Photo Workshop and Magnum Foundation. This interest in the interplay of image and text eventually shaped Terang Press’ bookmaking approach.

In Sipit, Yosephine tells stories about Jakarta’s working class, writing them inside the 9-5 cubicle; about gentrification in coastal neighborhoods built on reclaimed land; about grief by returning to her memories with her twin sister, Yessica Salim; about her relationship with her mother, and the gradual process of acceptance. Through writing about her life, musings, and how she navigates both the exterior and the interior, Yosephine opens a space for readers to see their lives reflected in her poems.

What emerged from the session was a structure built around two movements: Keluar (Outward) and Masuk (Inward). We found that the poems in Sipit mirror the way Yosephine writes, responding to both the external world, which mostly revolves around North Jakarta, and the intimate home, a space she continually returns to.

For Sipit’s first edition, Yosephine’s poems were paired with the collages she created. They were then printed using a three-color risograph and bound with an open spine. The initial run of 150 copies has sold out, and over the years, our dear friend and the owner of POST Bookshop, Maesy Ang, has gently reminded Yosephine to bring Sipit back.

For the second edition, we invited designer Cleo TSW to re-arrange the collages and poems and give the book a more refined edition. Coming from Singapore, she would understand a few Bahasa Indonesia words that share the same meaning as in Malay.

We discussed adding visual elements beyond collages to the book, and Cleo responded by adding a trellis accent in the two chapter titles, which mirrored Yosephine’s collages. She also enhanced the cover, adopting a color-block approach and signifying Yosephine’s self-portrait illustration in a smaller scale. The collages are still placed beside some poems as per Yosephine’s wish, and Cleo suggested creating a visual juxtaposition by putting two collages side by side, which was implemented in the chapter dividers.

The book cover’s color was inspired by a secondhand Chinese book Yosephine found, which faded colors and texture add significance to how she imagined this second edition would be. On the cover, we also added a Chinese translation of Sipit as a nod to the uniquely Chinese-Indonesian experience of not understanding Chinese language.

Left to right: Sipit, first DIY edition (2021); Sipit, second edition (Terang Press, 2026)

Reading Sipit Out Loud
A week prior to the launch of Sipit’s second edition, I was overseeing the printing process when photographs of Ibu Wiwin Suryadinata circulated online. In one of the images, she was sitting in a courtroom, holding a black scarf with the words Lawan Pemutihan Sejarah, which translates to Oppose the Whitewashing of History, printed on it. In another image, she was being hugged by an elderly woman, who seemed to provide comfort.

Ibu Wiwin is the mother of the late Ita Martadinata, a 17-year-old activist who was killed three days before she was scheduled to testify before the UN about the rape and mass violence towards Chinese-Indonesians during the May 1998 Tragedy. She appeared in court for the first time in 28 years to testify about her daughter’s brutal murder in 1998, in response to a June 2025 statement by Minister of Culture Fadli Zon, in which he denied the occurrence of the mass rape due to a lack of evidence.

The timing felt uncanny. In the middle of preparing Sipit, these events revealed to me what happens when history is denied and the urgency of writing narratives that have been forcibly excluded and erased. Those images of Ibu Wiwin stayed with me in the days leading up to the launch.

That afternoon on 15 February, we teamed up with Margin Library & Third Space, a community library that welcomed us with open arms, for the spoken-word launch of Sipit. We began the event with a collective reading of the book.

Maesy Ang went first, reading the foreword that she wrote for this second edition. She stood in front of the mic’s stand, facing the audience with her back to the corner shelves in the library, as the projector screen glowed with the words Selamat Datang Kembali, Sipit. (Welcome Back, Sipit).

Sipit arrived at my small bookshop during the pandemic, with neither a book discussion nor festivity, yet it brought a lasting impression. Like Yosephine, I am also a cici (from the Chinese term jiě jie, meaning ‘older sister’) who grew up in North Jakarta, even though I spent half my life in South Jakarta, with choices and environments that further distance me from the place I grew up in.

Then, Yosephine began the spoken word by reading Oriental Set, the book’ first poem, which speaks about the universal experience of navigating one self between two identities.

Betapa susahnya menjadi perempuan penuh setengah—
setengah Tionghoa, setengah Indonesia,
setengah kaya, setengah cantik,
setengah tinggi, setengah kurus,

setengah saleh, setengah baik,
setengah,
setengah,
setengah!

Afterwards, Yosephine’s eldest sister, Yashinta Salim, took the stage. Standing before the audience, she shared a message that instantly warmed the room,

I feel so happy and excited to be here celebrating my sister’s poetry book. I think my excitement might even exceed what I felt on her wedding day.

It was the kind of comment that only an older sister could make, half-teasing, half-proud. Yashinta continued by reading Nasi Kuning Weker Pagi, a poem that touches on the sounds, smells, and sensory details of a house that doubled as her mother’s catering kitchen.

Aku tidak perlu lagi weker pagi
karena aku ini langganan suara blender
yang berputar setiap subuh hari mengaduk-aduk
bumbu nasi kuning Ibu dari bawah kamar tidurku

ggrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrr ccrrrrr ggrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrr ccrrr

Masuk melalui sela-sela jendela—
Aroma minyak tempe orek, ayam bakar kecap,
sambal terasi dan kentang balado teri
ikut menyapaku selamat pagi

The afternoon flowed through two movements reflected in the two chapters within the book, Keluar (Outward) dan Masuk (Inward). Continuing the afternoon, Bageur Al Ikhsan, a writer, read Mengunjungi Mba Ani I, which recounted Yosephine’s memories of visiting Mba Ani, her family’s domestic worker who had cared for her since infancy, in her hometown.

Sekejap setelah tubuh kami berdekap
Senyum di wajahnya meruak-ruak penuh semarak
Bercampur haru-biru sebab pintu memori antara kita seketika terdobrak

Aku,
sang bayi kota yang ia asuh dan kasihi selama 17 tahun lamanya
Kini berdiri di hadapan keriput dan kampung halamannya
Nampak dewasa,
Datang,
penuh luka-luka

In Keluar (Outward), we ended the first chapter with Christian Soegiarto reading Surat Pengunduran Diri, which reflects on the reality of Jakarta’s working class.

Sehabis lemak, keringat, debu, caci, dan dengki berdekapan sana-sini
Kuturun dari bus pukul sebelas malam lagi
Semua mulai kehilangan saturasi
Jalan raya mengantuk
Kucing-kucing merangkak mabuk
Tiang-tiang lampu kota mengangguk-angguk

Lalu mereka
Meredup lalu menyala
Meredup lalu menyala

Christian Soegiarto reading Surat Pengunduran Diri at Margin Library & Third Space, 2026

As we navigated to chapter Masuk (Inward), we were slowly brought into Yosephine’s internal reflection of grief and acceptance. This was portrayed through the poem Masuk Ke Peti, which Yosephine herself read.

Satu per satu
Mereka pergi
Namun minyak wangi yang tercecer di telapak tangan ini tak kunjung pergi

Mengingatkan tubuhku yang lemah ini
Bahwasanya suatu hari nanti
Aku pun akan naik, membeku dan masuk ke peti

The private and intimate experience of death was captured in its truest sense in this poem. It instantly brought me back to the half-empty perfume bottle my grandmother owned, which I keep to this day. Masuk Ke Peti reminded us that sometimes, the clothes we wear and the scents we carry hold more of who we are than we do ourselves.

Between Forgetting and Remembering 1998
Beyond the everyday, there were also poems in Sipit that captured the collective amnesia experienced by the generation born just before the New Order ended in 1998. Charlenne Kayla, a writer and researcher born in the 2000s, read one of them titled Bayi-Bayi 98.

Kasih obat tidur saja
Katanya

Dua bayi kembar kemudian terlelap dan bangun-bangun dewasa

Tidak buta sejarah
Lebih banyak bungkam

dan sedikit buram saja

Dua bayi kembar yang bangun-bangun dewasa
Tidak ingat rasanya dicekik detik-demi-detik
saat nyawa dipertaruhkan di atas identitas keluarga

I noticed her voice shaking as she read the poem. Charlenne later said she experienced the poem differently when reading it aloud to an audience than when reading it privately. The poem felt more emotional, as if it had more weight when read out loud.

Charlenne also shared that even though she did not experience 1998 directly, the trauma it caused her parents definitely felt in the way they raised her, especially in the many restrictions and ‘should-nots’ she received as an eldest daughter in a Chinese-Indonesian family.

Even though I was born after 1998, when I read the poem for the first time, I could relate to how deeply embedded the collective amnesia from May 1998’s tragedy is at both the personal and national levels. My family and friends rarely talk about the tragedy and prefer not to. I think it’s mainly because talking about the riot feels uncomfortable and tends to perpetuate sentiments between ethnic groups. The conversation among my peers often does not address how the violence and repression were structural.

However, Yosephine’s poem does not revolve solely around trauma or violence. The acknowledgment and remembrance of violence that occurred was layered into the passages between the streets and the homes, the public and private. It expands the nuances of what it means to be Chinese-Indonesian.

As Maesy Ang writes in the foreword:

I appreciate how Sipit tells a collective experience without trying to become the representative of a community.

This sentiment echoed across the spaces where we hosted our programs. At the launch, Lizzie Chan (founder of Jakarta Poetry Slam) read the poem Buah Dada Itu Merepotkan. After her reading, she turned to the audience and said:

I feel offended whenever conversations about Chinese-Indonesians immediately turn to 1998. My life is colorful, and I am so much more than the trauma people project onto me and my community.

As a Chinese-Indonesian who grew up in Medan (often called Medan Lang, meaning ‘a person from Medan’), Lizzie observed how experiences of erasure under the New Order differed across Indonesia. In Jakarta, many in the community live with a profound disconnection from their roots and traditions, whereas in Medan, not being able to speak the Hokkien dialect might get you weird stares. Because of that, Lizzie attempted to hide her Hokkien dialect after moving to Jakarta. Experiencing this contrast led Lizzie to appreciate the unique cultural dynamics amongst Chinese-Indonesians.

Bageur Al Ikhsan, a writer who moderated the book’s discussion at POST Bookshop, reflected on a similar thought. He shared that if he had read Sipit ten years ago, he would probably have wondered:

Where are the stories about the violence of 1998?
Where are the Chinese traditions?

He spoke about his own process of unlearning, recognizing how he once framed literary works primarily through the author’s identity and social position. He reflected that the expectation that someone from a particular ethnicity or geography should only speak about their own ethnic experience is itself a product of colonial thinking.

Selamat Datang Kembali, Sipit! Book discussion at POST Bookshop

Going Beyond Rupture and Trauma
Towards the end of our discussion at POST Bookshop,
Maesy put forward a question about joy:

How about Chinese-Indonesian joy?
What does joy mean to Yosephine and readers in the bookstore?
Is there still room for language, born from a community that was imposed to erasure and oppression, to talk about joy?

To which Yosephine replied that for her, the joy of being Chinese-Indonesian often comes from food and the act of sharing food. But for the rest of readers, the question remains open.

Maesy, who is currently at the start of her personal exploration of Chinese-Indonesian joy, will continue the journey by returning to the archives, connecting with those interested in the same question, and opening up POST Bookshop for such conversations. Both Maesy and I reminisced about our first meeting at MET Glodok, along with Yosephine and Charlenne, where we sat in a round table to discuss Sipit’s second edition. That meeting, too, felt like Chinese-Indonesian joy for Maesy.

The day after our event at POST Bookshop, I headed back to Amsterdam. As I find my footing again in a land that separates my body from my mother tongue, I awoke one morning to a notification on the Terang Press account. It was a post tagged by our reader, Sahnaz M, who followed both editions of Sipit and attended our book launch event. She shared photographs of the drawer in Margin Library & Third Space, where we put a framed photograph of Yosephine holding Sipit’s first edition at POST Bookshop. In her post, she shared a reflection on Sipit.

As an outsider, my first encounter with the truth of the Chinese descendant community’s social standing in Indonesia came through the lens of conflict and violence. Beyond rupture, what does healing look like? How does transnational justice unfold in a society where wounds are both public and intimate? What does everyday reconciliation mean in practice? Ultimately, how do we learn to coexist—honestly, critically, and respectfully?

Reading Sahnaz’s reflection reminded me of the importance of amplifying stories like Sipit. The months spent in Jakarta, preparing the book and hosting programs, reminded me of the importance of working collectively to continue writing and speaking about erased and forgotten narratives, as well as violence, beyond singular communities. This journey also further convinces me that talking about everyday life from the locality of our own position matters.¹

It is a way to recognize that oppression is structural, and that we share a responsibility to keep talking about it and making it visible to those who might not be aware of it, amidst ongoing state censorship. It is a spirit we hope to carry forward in Terang Press’ future publications and programs.
Written by Fransisca Angela
Edited by Charlenne Kayla Roeslie

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Sipit is available online via our website as well as in select bookstores:
POST Bookshop, Margin Library & Third Space, Taksu Book Cafe, Kios Ojo Keos, TOS! Art Bookshop

Terang Press is a small imprint based between Amsterdam and Jakarta. We approach bookmaking with visual language and tell stories within Asian diaspora communities. We also occasionally publish articles, making room for slower, and intentional approach to writing.

Heartfelt thanks to Yosephine Salim, Cleo TSW, Jefta Mikola, Maesy Ang, Teddy W. Kusuma, Charlenne Kayla Roeslie, Bageur Al Ikhsan, Shinta Lay, Lizzie Chan, Thomas Felix Hanasili, Danu Izra Mahendra, Reisky Handika, Margin Library & Third Space, POST Bookshop, readers, and bookstores that have supported Sipit second edition and public programs.

Photographs by Fransisca Angela and Danu Izra Mahendra
¹ Reflection and notes on Yuk Hui’s response to a question during his Sonic Acts 2026 lecture, in which he challenges the East–West philosophical divide and instead advocates returning to the situated locality of one’s own position.