As he does every year, ethnic Chinese Indonesian Purnama celebrated Lunar New Ye...
JAKARTA - As he does every year, ethnic Chinese Indonesian Purnama celebrated Lunar New Year on Saturday at a dinner with his extended family of more than 50 in Jakarta where they exchanged traditional red envelopes containing money.
At the dinner, he and his immediate family were at a table where all the food was halal, while the rest of the tables featured non-halal dishes for the non-Muslims. But the difference in the food was not a big deal for Purnama. Chinese Indonesians make up less than 5% of the 260 million people in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country. Chinese Muslims number around 131,000 out of 2.8 million ethnic Chinese, according to a 2010 census.
It was not until 2000 after the fall of Suharto that President Abdurrahman Wahid lifted a ban on celebrating the Lunar New Year.
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