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About the Author

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?
Alberta Natasia Adji is a Chinese-Indonesian writer from Surabaya, East Java, who currently lives in Perth, Western Australia. Before coming to Australia, she has published two novels in Indonesian language, Youth Adagio (2013), which is a young adult romance fiction, and Dante: The Faery and the Wizard (2014), a young adult fantasy fiction, a few short stories of coming-of-age genres in Jawa Pos, an Indonesian national daily newspaper based in Surabaya.

After coming to Australia, she continued to pursue her academic interests and successfully completed her PhD in creative writing from Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, in 2023. The Longing is her main component of her doctoral project and her first novel to be published in English. She was awarded the 2023 School of Arts and Humanities Research Medal by ECU for the quality of her doctoral research thesis. Two edited excerpts of The Longing have appeared in Meniscus and New Writing. She has also published her short fiction works in The in/completeness of human experience (Special Issue of TEXT-Journal of Writing and Writing Courses), which was later published as The Incompleteness Book (2020, Recent Work Press), and The Incompleteness Book II: Writing Back & Thinking Forward (2021, Recent Work Press) as well as refereed articles in various academic journals.

In 2024, she published an academic book, Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape, by Palgrave Macmillan. She enjoys food, detective novels, lengthy fantasy stories, nature walks and Studio Ghibli movies. Connect with her on Instagram: @albertanatasia.

Authors

The Longing