Termination Shock

In 1951, Hendrik, at the age of fourteen, was given an opportunity to be “repatriated” (though he had never been there) to the Netherlands. He seized it, bidding a fond farewell to the Kuoks (who by that point had moved on to New Guinea) and traveling alone halfway around the world. He got off the boat in Rotterdam and was greeted by volunteers who settled him in a town in the southern part of the country, Zeeland. There he became a ward of an orphanage attached to a local church. He enrolled in a trade school, where he was found to have a knack for technical drawing.

Two years later, the unlucky combination of a high tide, a low pressure system, and a big storm sent a surge of water down the North Sea. It burst through flood control works in the Netherlands, England, and other countries that had the misfortune to lie in its path. Thousands died in the floods. In the Netherlands, which suffered by far the most fatalities, the disaster had the same historical resonance as did 9/11 for Americans. It led to a vast program of flood control infrastructure-building. Hendrik, however, missed out on all that, because, in the wake of the disaster, he moved to America. A Dutch Reformed church on the southern fringes of Chicago had agreed to sponsor him. He was hired as a draftsman by a steel mill just across the border in Indiana. Once he was established, with a job and a house, he sent a telegram to a Kuok in Taiwan, which in due course made its way to New Guinea, and a year later he was married to Isabella (“Bel”) Kuok, a childhood sweetheart with whom he had been maintaining a long-distance relationship. Willem was their first child. Later they had three more.

The household, in the suburban no-man’s-land between the South Side of Chicago and the heavy-industrial powerhouse of northwest Indiana, was Americanized, but Willem grew up bilingual in English and Dutch. From time to time the family would make weekend forays into Chicago’s Chinatown, but Bel spoke the wrong dialect and so it was a foreign place to her. Willem did learn how to read many Chinese characters, albeit in the traditional form still used in Taiwan.

He held dual Dutch and American citizenship. In high school he went to the Netherlands for what was supposed to be one semester. In effect, though, he had never returned. His great-aunt Alexandra and his aunt Mina had ended up in The Hague. They were happy to have him in their home, and he was happy to be in a place where his complicated ancestry was not considered remarkable. In The Hague, he was just another Indo. Not only that, but there was also a community of Chinese-Dutch in the area who had more in common with the Kuoks, including some mutual acquaintances and business connections in Southeast Asia. And, finally, there were openly gay people, and Willem was gay. So after that, when he went back to America, he did so not as an American coming home, but as a Dutchman crossing the sea to pay a visit to his foreign relatives. High school led to university, and that led to grad school at Oxford, and a Ph.D. in foreign relations, specializing in the intricacies of the world that the Kuoks still, to this day, lived in.

So much for the first half of Willem’s life (or so he’d conceived of it in the days when he’d imagined that life was basically over at sixty). Returning to the Netherlands after a brief postdoc stint in China, he’d got caught up in politics and surprised himself by getting elected to a parliamentary post. He was a member of the center-right party that was almost always part of every governing coalition and that accounted for many cabinet members. Re-elected a few years later, he found himself with a junior cabinet position relating to defense. And this developed into a career that accounted for much of the “second half” of his life. For decades he had reliably been re-elected and served in various posts mostly related to intelligence, foreign affairs, or defense. His name had been mentioned from time to time as a possible minister of defense or even prime minister, but he had never really sought that level of responsibility. Not until 2006 had there been an openly gay cabinet minister, so there was that.