Fourteen years ago, I asked my father about my last name, “Rusli.” I wanted to know about its origin and if it was common in Indonesia, the country where my parents are from.
He wasn’t sure about the meaning, he said, half shrugging, but it didn’t matter. Rusli, he explained, wasn’t our family’s real last name. It was changed during the era of president Suharto, when the ethnic-Chinese were pushed to adopt “Indonesian-sounding” names.