“Aserejé” became a phenomenon in Europe and Latin America in summer of 2002. The all-girl group Las Ketchup from Spain became overnight superstars, and the song became popularly known as “The Ketchup Song“. The song was re-made in Chinese by an all-boy group Comic Boyz [可米小子], who also became overnight idols in the Chinese music scene after releasing the song as their debut song. This version was released not more than four months after the Spanish song.

This is the original song by Las Ketchup.

This is the Chinese version, “Hey Hah!”, by the boy band Comic Boyz.

This year, it appears that someone finally has the chance to bring back Indonesia’s pride in women’s badminton.

Maria Kristin Yulianti is the only player not from China in the semifinals of the women’s singles event, soon to face Athens gold medalist Zhang Ning. Despite being a relative newcomer to the badminton scene, she has defeated Tine Rasmussen of Denmark, one of the world’s best players. Maria Kristin carries the hopes of Indonesia for her to become the next Susi Susanti. Since Susi’s retirement in 1997, only Mia Audina has made a strong appearance for Indonesia in the event before she moved to the Netherlands.

From watching her matches, she has a playstyle like nothing I’ve seen before. Her shots are well-placed though laidback. Said one newsmagazine of her match against Rasmussen: “Her nonchalant game was surely the most appropriate way to control Tine’s attacking play.” She manages to set the pace of the game despite her opponents’ attempts to speed it up. She also takes her own mistakes lightly without getting frustrated. After losing the first game of the quarterfinals to Indian opponent Saina Nehwal, Maria Kristin took control of the match and won two straight games to seal her position in the semifinals.

She will face Zhang Ning, Chinese gold medalist at Athens, on Friday at noon Beijing local time. Indonesia and her fans are counting on Maria Kristin’s slow pace of the game to frustrate Zhang and defeat her once again as she did at the Indonesia Open earlier this year.

Coverage of the Passion World Tour stop in Jakarta is starting to flood the Internet. Photos and videos are being uploaded. It’s really amazing to see them all. 7000 students gathering at an indoor stadium. They had apparently oversold tickets and had to schedule a new location for the event.

More videos inside the cut.

A short clip that makes you feel the energy in the room. Everyone was moved to praise God.

Chris Tomlin can be heard singing How Great Is Our God in Indonesian towards the middle of this next video.

The official blog entry to recap the event was also posted recently with some photos from the event. There are already over 700 comments! I’m now waiting to listen to the podcast of the tour’s stops in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta.

Let Your glory fall in this room
Let it go forth from here to the nations
Let Your fragrance rest in this place
As we gather to seek Your face
—David Ruis, 1993

The Cathedral (left) and Istiqlal Mosque (right) decorate the skyline of central Jakarta, down the road from each other.

For years, I’ve struggled in finding a way to reconcile these three parts of my identity. I grew up in a Catholic family and went to a private Catholic elementary school, just like many other Chinese families who wanted their children to have a better education than the one provided by the government. Christianity provided the freedom that was stripped away from the Chinese due to legislation. For the younger generation, any sense of identity of being Chinese is faint if non-existent.

To someone outside Indonesia, it may seem inconceivable that a country with more practicing Muslims than any other nation in the Middle East or other countries in the world would have such a passionate group of people devoted to God. But in truth, Indonesia is proud of its tradition of religious freedom, something that is held sacred here. The fact that religion remained unregulated drew more and more Chinese to identify themselves with this group.

“Of the estimated five million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, well over 70 percent are now Christian. The ebullient and staggeringly rich charismatic churches are thriving by spreading a message of personal confidence and material success that seems to hold special appeal for young Chinese.”
—International Herald Tribune, April 27, 2006

There are census data of Christians and of people with Chinese descent, but oftentimes this kind of data is skewed because some choose not to disclose the information due to fear of reprisals. It is the lingering effect of decades of persection. Therefore, it is even more difficult to accurately determine the fraction of Chinese people who are Christian. Persecution, however, is not the general theme in the lives of Chinese and Christians. Most of the violence seen in news reports are caused by agent provocateurs.

“I keep telling [my parents] it’s not just about Christianity. I’m investing my time for this new generation, so it can be awesome.”
—Joe Sentoso, minister, Jakarta Praise Community Church (JPCC)

For my dad and most of his siblings, being Catholic is a step away from the Buddhist practices of my paternal grandparents. Although we still pay respect to our ancestors through Buddhist customs, we don’t do that in our own household. Several years back, while visiting another city, we visited a Buddhist temple with my grandparents. While there, my mom reminded my siblings and I that we pray to God the Father, not to the boddhisattvas.

Sometimes I think to myself whether I’m part of this new generation of Christians from Southeast Asia. Catholicism is not the same there as it is in the United States. The fundamental difference comes about from the varying experience of the two peoples. Denominations are more distinct in the United States, while they generally are not in Indonesia. I have the teachings of a Catholic, yet my recent experience has been that of what my mom would call an emotional Christian, full of passion for Christ.

I’m in as much an identity crisis as the rest of my generation, torn by the modern world and the traditional practices.

The Passion World Tour is making a stop in Jakarta on August 5. They’ve already visited Manila and Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta will cap its Southeast Asia tour. They have even gone to the extent of making a version of the event information page in Indonesian.

Passion is a movement made up of young people who have abandoned the idea of living simply for themselves and are daily giving everything so the world can see Jesus more clearly. Passion is about the glory of God, inspiring a wave of students to taste and see that He is good and to do something now to change the world in Jesus’ name.

The Facebook event for the tour already has over 800 attendees for the Jakarta venue. Given that most Indonesian students don’t own a Facebook account, there are likely many more who will attend the event. But why would Passion choose a place like Jakarta? The website expressed its reasons for choosing the cities they did.

We’ve discovered that every major city in the world is a university town, most home to hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions of students. So, Passion is off on a crazy journey to the cities of the world in 2008, uniting university students around the globe in a story so much bigger than our own.

As the booming capital city, Jakarta is a center of higher education in Indonesia. Many of my childhood friends now go to private and public universities in and around Jakarta. These centers of learning are also slowly catching up to the pace of higher education in many other countries. Universities have always been in the leading role of reform in Indonesian history. In 1928, youth nationalists drafted the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda) to promote a unified country, 17 years before independence was achieved. Seventy years later, student uprisings also started the events which led to the resignation of Suharto (pdf), who had been president for over 30 years. Since then, the student community has received a lot of attention as education continues to improve.

Since I won’t be able to make it to the event, I look forward to reading about it, just like I’ve been reading about the Manila and Kuala Lumpur events.