My name is Soe Tjen Marching.

Marching is not my husband's name or my family name, it is my name, given to me by my father. The name has often made me the butt of jeering laughter on the part of classmates. Even Soe Tjen was not a proper name in Indonesia back then. It was regarded as just a Chinese name, indicating that one was not quite ‘right’ there. With Marching, it was worse. And really, who else in the world is called Soe Tjen Marching?

What kind of a father anyway, would give his daughter such a strange name? Papa, when he died in September 1998, left me with the puzzle of who he really was and what really happened to him. I just knew him to be this tall dark man with a loud voice. When he was angry everyone would take fright. Even the dogs, the cats, the lizards on the wall. For he could hardly manage just to talk – he barked and yelled.

I was his favourite. At the same time, I was the one who was angry with him the most. I guess because I was aware that I was the favourite, I also had the opportunity and freedom to hate him more than my other siblings. This made our relationship difficult.

Just like the Chinese language that was not passed on to me, because the Chinese language was banned during Soeharto's rule, the story of my father remained a mystery for years. Out of fear for our safety, and to protect me, mama and my siblings did not want me to hear terrible things about papa, as I was the only one who had never seen him in prison.

My family told me all kinds of lies. Unfortunately none of them was a good liar. So, on one occasion when I overheard them saying that papa had been imprisoned, my sisters told me that the imprisonment was because his business partner tricked him. But sometimes they forgot the details, so the identity of the person doing the tricking changed from time to time. There were other stories, too. For instance: that my father was a journalist and he had written something that offended the government, but when I asked which newspaper he had worked for, they never replied.