Dutch | Indonesian
I identify as Dutch, hetero and a spiritual agnost. My mother is Dutch, my father was born in Java, Indonesia. It still took many years before I grew full awareness of my mixed ethnicity. At age 16 I moved to Assen, lived on my own and finished my high school degree. In this area of the city, there is a large group of ‘Indo-Dutchies’. So, when I moved here, I got in touch with the culture for the first time. After I graduated from high school and went to university, I moved back to Groningen and started taking dancing classes. There were A LOT of people with the same background in my dance school. That was the first time where I felt the urge to discover my roots and travel to Indonesia as well and meeting my family, brothers and sisters of my father. When I was 21, I packed my bags and went to Java and Bali for a month. It was the most enlightening thing I’ve ever done in my life. During that same period, I started writing for HoezoIndo.nl. It literally means ‘Why Indo’, or, ‘what do you mean, Indo?’. The founder of this platform, Armando Ello, he and I met years before at a photoshoot. He started this platform to bring Dutch people together with an Indonesian background (and vice versa) and bring awareness for their stories. There are so many people who has family history in Indonesia because of WWII, but the older we get, and the more generations that passes, the more the stories and connection with it disappears. As I’m growing older, I’m starting to see more and more upsides of being mixed-race. Besides from being genetically blessed (getting tanned very easy, and my greasy skin that used to give me pimples as a teenager is preventing me from getting wrinkles for the next 40 years), it just makes you different, in a broad sense. Something to stand out in the crowd. Not only on the outside, but you always have a story to tell.
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