Connections/Dutch

My name is Merantine Hens, I'm the managing editor in Education. I'm gonna be talking about Dutch.

I am in fact a Dutch citizen. I was born to Dutch parents, not in Holland, but in Asia. I grew up speaking Dutch, but I definitely have an accent.

And people in Holland will do a little bit of a double take when I speak to them: "Hmm, you're not from around here are you?" But, I have enough of the Dutch in me.

There's a Dutch personality or character, the traditional Dutch work ethic, but there's also this desire to enjoy.

Then there's always the classic Dutch frugality, or whatever, cheapness.

Being straightforward and blunt, even. And that's actually what I really like about Dutch people: they just tell it like it is.

Rembrandt, his self-portrait. There's a little bit of a worried look. I understand that he was rather in debt toward the end of his life. He's one of these quintessential household-name artists.

It makes me proud of Holland. It's this small, small country, and yet has produced these great names, in terms of the art world. Vermeer.

Very good friends of my parents often had a carpet displayed on their dining table and I thought that was strange. We never did it in our house, but later on realized that

oriental carpets were displayed that way, almost like a trophy. In Holland

people tend to have their curtains open until fairly late. You can see right into their living rooms. There's a quality called gezelligheid and it means, sort of, coziness and being comfortable in your home. It's very difficult to translate.

So when you're walking down the street and you look into people's houses, you get that feeling of what you might project to be in that house, that gezelligheid.

Then you have someone like Jan Steen. I chuckle at this one because it reminds me of my mother exclaiming at the messy rooms of my sisters and me, "Een huishouden van Jan Steen," that it looks like 'a household of Jan Steen.' And that's something that a lot of Dutch people say.

When I'm on a train riding from the airport to The Hague, where my mother lives, it's very much about fields and a flat landscape. I can't say enough about how these clouds hang, you can almost touch them in the sky.

And it often rains. There's just a lot of water everywhere: canals, but also the

sea. These boats and the wind, like you could sort of smell the sea air, reminds me of being in Holland during the summers, spending time with my cousins who had a boat.

Well, what could be more quintessentially Dutch? Tulips. Tulips make me happy. It doesn't matter what color they are. I always buy them when it's spring. It's almost like they're dancing with this butterfly and this grasshopper.

I only lived two years out of my life in Holland, and while I identify as Dutch, most of my childhood was spent in Japan.

My mother loved Japanese art and our house was filled with Japanese woodblock prints and screens

so it's very much part of my aesthetic. In Japan, there's this

longstanding Dutch connection. For many years, the Dutch were the only foreigners that the Japanese had any contact with.

I have a daughter who was born here in New York, and I've tried to instill in her this Dutch heritage. But in terms of teaching her Dutch, I have failed miserably.

New York has such a deep-rooted Dutch history. I live in Brooklyn, originally that would have been Breuckelen. You know, there's Haarlem, Coney Island – I think was originally Conyne Eylandt – Staaten Eylandt.

Growing up outside of Holland I have, probably instilled by my parents, a need to connect with Holland.

It's hard sometimes to know where you are at home, so I'm finding my place

wherever I go.