Authentic Series: The Story of

Liyuzheq22

The Story of the Girl from Malang
In Indonesia, we have a famous saying,” Tak kenal maka tak sayang” or translated as If you do not know about it, you won’t be able to love it. Let me introduce myself a little bit, my name is Glady, or my full name is Glady Fabiola Tanusaputra. I am 23 years old, was born on November 9th, 1996. I am the first kid in the family, I have one younger brother, he is still 8 years old. We have 14 years age gap. I am from Indonesia. For those who do not know, Indonesia is an island country in Southeast Asia. The capital is Jakarta. But, I come from a small cold city, named Malang in East Java Province. My father is from another island, called Sulawesi. He is from another city called Palu, where Tsunami hit back in 2018. My mother is from Malang. They are both are Chinese descendant, which makes me Indonesian born Chinese.
My father family is from Fujian and My mother is from Guangdong. Well, they both cannot speak Chinese. My grandparents used to speak Kejiahua or Hokkien for my fater’s side. The reason why my parent’s generation cannot speak Chinese well, during 1960’s Indonesia was led by a dictator who forbid anything Chinese related. In 1998, there was a May 1998 riot, which resulted in rape and killing of Chinese-Indonesian. It was a horrible time to be Chinese-Indonesian. Not until 2000’s, the Chinese Indonesian got the rights to celebrate Chinese New Year or used the language again. Today, everything is a little bit better for the Chinese Indonesian, even sometimes we still get the racist attack from the locals or being seen as ‘foreigner’ inside our own country.
Moving forward to the future, my parents got divorced when I was in high school. Now, I live with my mother, my brother, and my aunty. I went to Jakarta to study Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and graduated back in 2018. During my study in university, I was a very active student and competed in lots of Model United Nations. Model United Nations is a simul