Word: bangka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...CHINESE FARMS: BANGKA The Chinese in Indonesia are merchants and they're rich. That's not true, of course, but it's the assumption of many - a source of resentment that led to the pillaging of Jakarta's Chinatown in the 1998 riots. The Chinese certainly are neither on the island of Bangka, a two-hour ferry ride north of Palembang...
...Bangka, Chinese farmers have been growing pepper and other crops for generations. Zheng He's men passed this way, primarily to fight a Chinese pirate who had been terrorizing the strait from a Palembang stronghold. And though there were already Chinese settlements there, as well as in towns such as Tuban in Java, the Chinese on Bangka were mainly drawn by - or imported for - work as tin miners in later centuries...
...really all right on that score as well). Would that the lives of all migrant workers, of any generation, had such happy results. Wherever you go, you see people inventing jobs for themselves, selling bats at a roadside stand, for instance, or directing traffic for tips. On Bangka, men mine tin from the coastal seabed, employing motor-powered pumps to vacuum the sea floor onto patchwork floating trays in which they search for their prize. More often, a living wage, or the promise of one, is thought to exist elsewhere, which is why there is a constant stream of migrant...