The Longing

A story of love, loss, turbulence, and mended relationships narrated from the eyes of a young woman who traces her family history from to 1950s to the 2010s in Surabaya, East Java

"This novel is both an act of remembrance and resistance. A necessary novel for our time." -Okky Madasari, Indonesian novelist and sociologist

It is in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, in the 1950s, when Ah Lam is married off to Cheng Lei, the son of a wealthy merchant, to help improve her family's situation as she is of age. Once settled in Surabaya, Ah Lam soon finds herself dealing with an abusive husband while raising her young children and running her own small restaurant to make ends meet during the extreme political and economic hardship of the 1965-66.

Meanwhile, Ming Zhu, Ah Lam's daughter, befriends a wealthy Muslim Javanese entrepreneur family and falls for Arya, an aspiring scholar, whom she later marries despite her parents' disagreement for their different cultural and religious backgrounds under the authoritarian New Order regime in the 1970s.

Ming Zhu and Arya have fraternal twins, Fajar and Dido, and get divorced as the conservative Islamic culture grows. Dido, as the female twin and a Peranakan woman, faces gender and cultural challenges as she is torn between her hybrid ethnicity and cultural roots while growing up in the disorienting Reformasi era and the May 1998 riots. She becomes a documentary filmmaker as her way to make sense of the current political upheaval and her own conflicted identity.

As the country is unravelling even further, how will these three generations of women find what they need when intergenerational trauma and family memories haunt their lives and ties to others?