In Hoa Kiau, Pramoedya begins to address racialism while interrogating the notion of Indonesian identity. He locates the 1960 regulation in historical context, thereby stressing its continuity with racially based policies of Dutch colonial rule. Not merely a history of the Chinese Indonesian community or a simple defense of it, his book created a language which disturbed contemporary assumptions about nation and community. Though his career on the schoolbench was curtailed and apparently difficult, Pramoedya has made himself a considerable historian and critic as well as a formidable writer of fiction. His fictional and non-fictional works have long been informed by issues of pedagogical experience, by the coercions and resistances, humiliations and enlightenments that accompany processes of learning.
Authenticity is revealed as a matter of what one has taken to heart and made one's own.
He challenges intellectuals who through education and position have become complicit in a system that reproduces privileged knowledges, received opinions and official facts. He does so by demonstrating how to win a degree of independent agency in one's acquisition of knowledge. Precisely because he is politically ostracized and his writings are banned, Pramoedya's life and work have come to represent the potential for intellectual autonomy in contemporary Indonesia.