The Tionghoa peranakans of the East Indies have demonstrated the full power invested in the act of writing. During the Dutch imperial colonization of the East Indies, the Tionghoa peranakans found a tool to retaliate against the colonial policies that literally segregated and marginalized them. From the creation and monopolization of the bahasa Melajoe Tionghoa to the publishing houses, the Tionghoa peranakans appeared to have had a political agenda which their large quantity of works suggest. Their fiction novels indicate that they retaliated, criticized, overturned established colonial “truths” and propagated anti-colonial sentiments in disguise. The retaliation that was carried out was non-violent and bore no bullets. It was played out on pages with writing as their ammunition. Exploiting either the romance or detective genre of novels, the Tionghoa peranakans’ endeavour allowed their message to come through the semiotics of implication. This devious manner of retaliation of the Tionghoa peranakans extended even to freeing these ancestors of diasporic Chinese migrants from the suffocating oppressive past which they inherited from their Chinese ancestors. The subaltern Tionghoa peranakan women wrote themselves to freedom from Chinese patriarchy while the men attempted to free themselves from established perceptions of their debauchery and hedonistic pursuits. This paper records the evidence to the claims above based on the critical analyses of 5 novels with original themes that were written by the Tionghoa peranakans of the East Indies from 1903 to 1912.