Thing could be better

I live in a country where discrimination is a way of life. Right from the time when I was in kindergarten, people around me already making sure that our differences are known to us.

I used to live in a medium size town in Indonesia. I went to the public school, but this is not just a public school as such; it is a special public school that will accept only student like my ethnic group. By the way, I am from chinese ethnic group and I live in Indonesia. For somebody who has no idea where is Indonesia and how many people live in that country, I will give you some ideas of the country.

Indonesia consist of more than 10,000 islands; big and small islands...... The majority big islands are inhabited, but a lot of the smaller island are left empty with nobody live in that place. The total population of the country is around 250 million people, which consist of more than 100 local ethnics. By local I mean the ethnic group who claim to be the indigenous inhabitant of each area. Among these many different kind of ethnics, Chinese is a very minor group. There are only about maybe around 3% of the total population.
90% of the people in Indonesia lived in 5 major islands with Jawa is the island with the most population. Total population of Jawa is around 170 million people.
Indonesia is located on the South East part of Asia. To be exact, it is located South of Singapore and Malaysia and on the equator.

One of the main problem for the Chinese in Indonesia was despite the low number of population, we are the one who is making the economy of the country running. I would say that the chinese businessman are controlling around 70 to 80% of the economic activities in the country. This has been the case since before I was born, so we just accept thing as it is, no question asked.
Unfortunately, because of this economic disparity, the chinese in Indonesia has been subjected to a lot of discrimination act. There have been countless attack against the chinese community with no clear reason except that the local indigenous people are just attacking the chinese. During my life time of around 40 years, I've seen this kind of incidents happened at least 10 times, with different size of riot involved in it. I would say, that every 25 to 30 years, we will have a major riot against the chinese.

Now, supposed you will say... if you know that you are the minority and yet you have more money that the majority of the people, then you should do something for the population so that this kind of riot will not happen. That is true and unfortunately, most the time the riots are not triggerred by the act of the chinese community. The chinese community are being used as a scape goat. In fact the government are know to have done this kind of thing on purpose.
There were 2 major riots happened during the last 30 years and both were using chinese as a target. The first one happened in 1965 and it was caused by the communist trying to wrestle the power (so the government was saying) and the last major one was in 1998 and it was caused by the economic crisis in Indonesia.
There is very little that the chinese can do to prevent the attack except to leave the country. During both incidents, there were major exodus by the chinese population to leave Indonesia.

Of course after this kind of riot, the government is pretending that they will change something and try to help the chinese community. However, this kind of insincerity is just lip service and most of the time will last only a year or two. After that honeymoon period, then the government will introduce more discriminative regulations against the chinese.
Even until today, the chinese community is forced to have a special ID card to show to the police that they are the citizen of Indonesia.