On holiday breaks, Jeff stays in Berkeley while others go home to visit their families. He is invited to have Thanksgiving dinner at the house of the Dutch consul, and doesn’t find it at all odd when it’s just him and the consul at a candlelit table, or when the consul plays jazz and pours him a brandy afterward, and sits next to him on the couch, where he asks Jeff to tell him about himself. It isn’t until the consul leans in with a hand on his knee that the pieces connect and an awkward stammering of misunderstanding occurs. This is the naiveté of Jeff Eerkens in his first years in America.
If naive, he is also determined, working doggedly through his bachelor’s degree, transferring to the engineering program as planned. By then, however, he has other plans besides aeronautics. He enrolls in a master’s program in chemical engineering. But while he is in that program, UC Berkeley announces a brand-new Ph.D. program: nuclear engineering. Jeff is immediately intrigued. He’s thought about the nuclear bombs a lot. He wants to know everything about how they work, and how nuclear energy can be harnessed for other uses. The first year, foreign-born students are banned from the classified program. But by the second year, it is declassified. He applies and gets into Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in nuclear engineering, a member of their second graduating class.
My father and I have discussed at length the fact that his interest in nuclear energy probably comes from the fact that the nuclear bomb saved his life, in a perverse way. To him, it was simply intellectual curiosity. He doesn’t consider the more psychologically introspective questions, but I do. I ask if he ever dwelled on the bombs’ horror, the fact that 120,000 or more innocent people died with two strikes. To learn in university that that same power could be harnessed for energy to power cities must have at least touched some personal psychological investment in using that technology for good, to know that he could in some way make up for the lives of people who involuntarily gave their lives for his. For him, the thought isn’t that complex. “Well, we as a class discussed how important it was not ever to use the technology for that again. But as long as we had the technology, we wanted to find out how to use it to help society. I wrote about nonproliferation. There were a lot of nonproliferation groups and efforts established then.”
The one thing that doesn’t go so well for Jeff in America is love, but he keeps trying. He is lonely; he wants a wife. The American women think he’s funny, and they enjoy dancing with him, but he struggles to get close to any of them. There is a cultural disconnect. Always the pragmatic problem solver who persists until he succeeds, he approaches this problem the same way. He asks his little brother, Kees, a senior in high school back in Holland, who the cutest and most outgoing girl in his class is. And in 1953, when he goes home on summer holiday, he goes on a few dates with this girl, Agnes. By the time he leaves a couple of months later, she’s agreed to be his wife. They have an engagement party in Eefde, where his parents live, and they plan to marry when Jeff graduates Berkeley with his BS degree in 1954. Agnes will join him in the United States. But as the months go by and the excitement wears off, Agnes rethinks her decision. She has only just finished high school. She doesn’t really want to leave her friends and family and move to America. She breaks off the engagement the following summer. He returns to Berkeley alone to start grad school, dejected.
As a graduate student, Jeff meets Martha, an American woman, and they start dating. Jeff thinks maybe the broken engagement with Agnes was for the best. He and Martha get married and Martha gets pregnant. He now has a wife, the promise of a good job in Los Angeles after graduation, and soon he will have a family. They move down to L.A., as my father finishes his dissertation for his Ph.D. But they have increasingly heated fights after their daughter, Laura, is born, and Jeff is the wrong type of person to deal with volatile relationships. When Martha gets frustrated with him, he simply leaves the house. After about a year, they divorce.
In 1960, he gets a job at Aerospace Corporation, working on rocket propulsion and space surveillance satellite systems. In order to get security clearance to work on classified projects, he has to become a naturalized American citizen, renouncing his Dutch citizenship. He does so immediately and unsentimentally, severing his last ties to the former Dutch kid Sjeffie. He lost his home long before this anyway, and considers himself a nomad. He’s very happy to become American and find a new home. In 1963, he is appointed chief of the laser systems department at Northrop Space Laboratories. It is there that he begins working on the laser isotope separation process that he spends the rest of his life trying to perfect. When war once again intervenes in his life, this time in Vietnam, it costs him his project. With the end of the war and the United States struggling to pay for it, the government cuts funding to Northrop’s space labs, and my father’s department is eliminated. He is offered a job in another department, but he chooses instead to leave Northrop with members of his team and continue their work on laser enrichment projects as a small, independent lab. Thus begins years of working with companies and on his own, but he always stays focused on this one area of research, laser isotope separation. (In the ’70s, my father brings home some early prototypes of handheld green lasers, and my siblings and I shine them onto the neighborhood patrol car in the streets below the house. Well before the laser-pointer era, the patrol officer repeatedly exits his vehicle to shine his flashlight into the shrubbery on the hillside above him while we laugh our heads off at our prank, imagining he believes that aliens have descended.)
After the divorce in 1959, Martha gains custody of my half sister and moves to Arizona, and then Texas, with my half sister flying to see my father sporadically. My father returns to the idea that he wants to meet a Dutch woman. Enter my mother.
14
FORMING A FAMILY
Pacific Palisades, California, USA, 1967
As Jeff and Else travel across the Atlantic on the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, in Los Angeles, workmen pour concrete and erect a frame and build a house at the top of a hill in the Santa Monica Mountains. This is where my parents will live. With his first job securing the mortgage, my father buys the lot before my mother joins him from Holland. Together, the lot and house will cost $60,000, which seems an astronomical sum to Else. The neighborhood is a new one, half empty, with lots for sale and several models to choose from, customizable. They choose a sprawling 2,500-square-foot model, a midcentury modern bungalow with wide bay windows that look out over the city and the Pacific Ocean below. From the spacious backyard, there is a nearly 360-degree view, and the house is situated such that the neighbors can’t be seen. In an equally spacious front yard, my parents plant a tree that grows massive over the years, its lowest branch worn smooth by all the children who know and love it, including me. Roses line the fences, and an exuberant flowering bougainvillea bush frames the walkway to the house with a shower of fuchsia. By any account, it is a spectacular house. And in the home movies from their first years there, my mother looks happy. She is beautiful, and her body is strong. I watch movies of my parents visiting Yellowstone, camping, going to Catalina Island together, dolphins surfing the waves next to the ferry. There’s a palpable optimism in the images; my parents are living a new life in a new place that isn’t marred by bombs or famine, and nobody they know is identified as a traitor or an occupier. They believe they’ve left it all behind.
But I’ve learned that while you can leave places behind, you can’t leave yourself behind. My father is driven to make his mark at work, and my mother finds herself at home on top of this mountain alone most days. She barely speaks English and doesn’t know anyone there in her first years. She misses the Netherlands intensely, and in later years she describes her move to the United States as very lonely, something she never really got over. I grow up with an awareness of this palpable loneliness she has, living in a culture in which she always feels like an outsider. Sometimes she forgets where she is for a moment and says something to a neighbor in Dutch, shaking her head afterward like she needs to shake herself back into America. “Oh, I
’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” I often think that while her parents were jailed for their war activities, lost their voting rights, and were rejected by the community, my mother exiled herself. Her brother Rob, now living in New Zealand, writes me, “Maybe it isn’t coincidence that the two youngest siblings are the ones who have gone overseas. There is something in that. I can’t quite speak for your mother, but as for myself, I have always had a tendency to distance myself from my origins. It was especially Hannie, who eventually became the mother hen, who was unhappy with that. But here I am, intentionally or not, at the maximum possible distance from Apeldoorn.”
In 1969, my brother, Jelmer, is born, and he becomes the vessel for my mother’s hopes and desire for a purpose. He occupies much of my mother’s time. There are hours of film of my brother as a baby. My mother is happy to have a child, and writes effusively about him in letters back home to the Netherlands: baby’s first steps, his first words, his indefatigable toddler-boy love for airplanes and trucks. But she also writes about the difficulty of the long days alone, how she tries to be content washing clothes, cooking, cleaning. For many new mothers this is true. For a new immigrant it is doubly so. Her family is an ocean away. Her mother comes to visit for a couple of weeks, but it is an expensive and long trip, and when she leaves, my mother knows she won’t see her again for a long time, not until my birth three years later, and my sister Boukje’s birth three years after that. Meanwhile, my father continues to spend long hours in the lab. When my parents married, my father’s younger brother, Kees, warned my mother that my father would always be married to his work first and his family second, and this bears out to a large extent.
The focus on his work is evident throughout the whole marriage, such that he is still preoccupied with it today in his mideighties; and while I believe that this dogged determination to succeed and focus on his own goals is a character my father was born with, I also believe that being in an internment camp by himself in extreme conditions from ages eleven to fourteen strengthened this trait and made it very difficult for my father to learn how to focus on other people’s needs. How could he know how to do that when for some of his most formative years he learned day in and day out that focusing on others instead of himself meant death? My thoughts return to his friend who died brokenhearted in the camp, whose suitcase was filled with toys. Is it any wonder that my father continues to live in survival mode for the rest of his life?
The ways in which the war traumas of my parents infiltrated the lives of my siblings and me are manifold, and often quite subtle. As an adult, I often find myself connecting my parents’ behaviors to their war trauma, and connecting my own behaviors and psychology to theirs.
My brother and sister and I were raised on a mountaintop in Los Angeles with odd Dutch names and speaking Dutch, while our grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins all lived in the Netherlands. I wonder if it ever gave my parents pause to be raising their children in another culture, apart from their families, if the concept of home and belonging are an illusion for them. Both of them were taken from their homes at a young age, sent to live in an internment camp and a children’s home, respectively, where they were treated poorly. Both of them were fiercely and angrily rejected by the communities in the places they considered home, my father fleeing Java as rebel fighters shot at him, my mother’s family shunned as traitors and shouted down as fout in the streets, her home boarded up. My parents’ decision to raise us in the United States made us outsiders to some degree, too. To be tribeless and feel like an outsider in two cultures caused me to cling to the one home I had, a tiny nation of 2,500 square feet on the top of a mountain, something that could not last, of course, as we grew up. Eventually, my siblings and I would move away, the home would be sold, and I would feel perpetually homeless.
* * *
The first years of our life in Pacific Palisades are idyllic. I watch the home movies taken then with great nostalgia. I can still feel and smell every part of that home in Los Angeles. The sandbox; the birthday parties on the back patio; the kiddie pool; our dog, Eva; pedaling in the driveway on a Big Wheel; the camper with its vinyl glitter seats and musty scent. Sunlight filters through the bougainvillea onto the paved walkway in our garden. I lie there on a hot Los Angeles day, the smell of the concrete steaming up through my nostrils, mixing with the specific smell of tar and volcanic pebbles from the roof. We have hosed down the roof to cool the house, and the water streams off the sides like a shower. My siblings and I put on our bathing suits and stand under the stream, then lie on the wet pavement in the sun to dry. I trace the lines running across the concrete, poke roly-poly pillbugs, those tiny armadillos that roll into balls when my chubby fingers touch them. Blue-bellied lizards do push-ups on the brick retaining wall. There is a patch of grass worn away where we have created home base for baseball games. The neighbor’s dog, Skipper, barks. It’s all there in the home movies—the bottlebrush, the rabbit hutch my father built with the sign that says “Bunny Hilton,” the creased mountains and blue ocean backdrop, locked in forever.
* * *
In 1979, my father gets a contract in Iran, then an ally of the United States, to develop a laser isotope separation process for its nuclear program. We are going to leave behind the mountaintop home and move to Iran. I’m in kindergarten. I will be raised in Tehran. My brother and I are taken out of school. Our home is packed up. And we fly to the Netherlands to spend two weeks with my mother’s sister, Hannie, before flying on to Tehran. On the two-week stopover, however, two things happen. First, my father’s father dies, and I attend my first funeral. Second, the Iranian Revolution breaks out. The pro-West shah is overthrown, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, an anti-West theocrat, is installed as Supreme Leader. Once again in my parents’ lives, war intervenes. My father’s lasers, already having been shipped to Iran in advance of our arrival, are quarantined at the Tehran airport by the ayatollah’s regime, and years of lawsuits against the new Iranian government to be compensated for them will ensue, as the ayatollah refuses to return the lasers. This results in my father’s being forever linked with the Iranian nuclear program, leading to years of reporters calling the house and surveillance by American intelligence agencies. My father is under suspicion from the country to which he pledges his loyalty. Only days away from having emigrated to Iran, we are now stuck between countries, so we stay in the Netherlands for a year until we can get back into our home on top of the mountain in Los Angeles. This is the year I will go to school in Hoog Soeren and we will all live together in my aunt Hannie’s farmhouse, and I will begin to think of that as a version of home too. When we return to the house in Pacific Palisades, I have to make friends all over again, and I miss the Netherlands.
While it’s solidly upper-middle-class when my father has our house built there, Pacific Palisades quickly becomes one of the wealthiest areas in the country after a flurry of development in the 1970s, its coastal location and village vibe within the city of Los Angeles appealing to actors, lawyers, doctors, and other moneyed people. Their children become my peers in school, but I feel miles away from them in experience, because despite living in a beautiful home overlooking the sea, my parents behave as though we are on the verge of losing everything at all times. And in their respective experiences, maybe we are. Maybe trucks will pull up to our doors tomorrow and march us off at gunpoint. Maybe we’ll be invaded by another country and be living in a camp tomorrow. Maybe the shelves of the supermarket will be empty next week. This is their lived experience of the world. However, for my siblings and me, as children experiencing life in a place with the most obscene displays of abundance, the messages we get at home are confusing. Our friends live in homes where they have their own wings and housekeepers. They have expense accounts at beach clubs and wear designer labels to school after shopping sprees with their mothers. I get sturdy leather European shoes, my brother’s hand-me-down jeans, the neighbor girl’s castoffs. After a post–swim practice pizza dinner with my girlfriends during which I
order only a salad because my allowance is running thin, they want to split the bill evenly and look at me skeptically when I question this idea, one thirteen-year-old girl saying, “What’s the issue? Stop being so cheap. Just put it on your credit card!”
My siblings and I spend weekends with these friends on their yachts, at their ski cabins, driving around in their BMWs. Some of my friends’ parents are movie stars or musicians, and I envy the gifts and vacations they get from fans and sponsors. My mother, by contrast, thinks fruit roll-ups are an extravagant indulgence. Before I am exposed to the real world outside of the Palisades–Malibu–Santa Monica area, I am convinced we are poor, which, given our actual circumstances, is outrageously offensive to people who really live in poverty.
* * *
Pacific Palisades has a large Jewish community, and many of my friends growing up are Jewish. Every Hanukkah, I play dreidel at their parties, and at age thirteen, I attend a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs. One of my friends’ grandmother, a woman my mother also knows quite well, has a number tattooed on her arm. My mother tells me that means she was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. One afternoon, my friend’s grandmother speaks at our school about her experiences in Auschwitz, about the dangers of groupthink and judging people for things beyond their control. At the time, I am too young to know anything about my mother’s war history, but I have an intense awareness of the horror of the Holocaust. It isn’t until high school that I really become aware of my grandfather’s collaboration. I believe for many years that it is an enormous family secret I should never reveal. I feel the shame deeply and am certain that if I tell any of my Jewish friends about it, they won’t want to be my friend anymore. In drama class in high school, after someone does a monologue from The Diary of Anne Frank, one of my Jewish peers, a young man who is always quite emotional, turns to me and says, “Any person who ever had anything to do with the Nazis in any way should have been shot.” I wonder if he can see it on me, if his declaration is directed at me, and in the back of my mind, I wonder if my mother is included in that group by proxy—or worse, if I am. Of course I reveal nothing and nod. “Yeah, I know, totally.” I always feel shame when it comes to my family history. It is something I hide. I wish I were a normal kid born to normal American parents.
All Ships Follow Me Page 22