As they found out later, Mother Greta, while climbing over a wall topped with broken glass, cut her hand. The wound became septic and she died. Sister Mina at that point became, for all practical purposes, the daughter of Aunt Alexandra. They made it to a better-protected site in Batavia whence the British evacuated them to a camp in Australia.
That was a much better situation than what faced the Kuok clan during the struggle for Indonesian independence, which consumed most of the second half of the 1940s. The port city where they lived became the focus of a lot of fighting, including aerial and naval bombardment. Their family compound, after being heavily damaged, was expropriated. So they moved to a plantation up in the hills where they had business dealings going back several generations. This area later became the locus of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare. Some Dutch commandos parachuted in and used it as a base of operations for a few days until new orders came in over the wireless and they abruptly departed. Indonesian freedom fighters, who had been watching all this from only a few hundred meters away, then moved in and conducted what were known euphemistically as “reprisals.” The only females who survived the reprisals were those who had the presence of mind to flee into the jungle at the first sign of trouble. Hendrik, who put his tree-climbing skills to good use, saw some of the reprisals from a distance and still refused to talk about them. He, a few girls, and “Rudy” Kuok, a relatively senior member of the clan, escaped with
the clothes on their backs and eventually found their way to an enclave on the coast that was still under Dutch military control. Hendrik at this point stopped claiming to be Eng Kuok and identified himself as Hendrik Castelein, a Dutch boy, and told the whole story. They were evacuated by ship to the Dutch base at Ambon, a predominantly Christian island to the east.
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.