Dewi Anggraeni wrote this book because she saw that many things which did not fit the ethnic Chinese stereotype in Indonesia were rarely brought to the public's attention, as they were not easily 'slotted' into the existing neat categories. "I wanted to break some of the issues I deemed important out of the editing 'black hole' and present them as the core contents of a book, because they were very significant not only for others to understand, but for the ethnic Chinese to understand what was happening to, and around, themselves".