Motherless
by Karina Schaapman
Hodder & Stoughton, HK$324
More than most, Karina Schaapman understands flaws in the legal system as a form of imprecation. A Labour Party Social Services, Education, Youth and Diversity Committee councillor in Amsterdam since 2002, she was the third child of a Chinese-Indonesian mother and Dutch father, an abusive and supposedly homosexual man who left with her two siblings the day she was born. Her depressed mother grossly mismanaged harrowing episodes with racist neighbours, poverty, and ultimately both their lives - which was how Schaapman ended up as a whore for the Church of Satan and then as a political representative.
Motherless: A True Story of Love and Survival is her story.
Finding herself confronted by former johns while in public office, Schaapman realised she had two options: disclose or die. 'In December 2002 I told my colleague Rob Oudkerk what had happened,' Schaapman writes. 'Apart from being my party leader, he was also a general practitioner. I trusted him with my past. As an experienced politician, he knows, more than anybody, what representation in the media can do.'
The married Oudkerk may well have informally authorised Schaapman's revelation, but what she doesn't mention is that he was later hustled out of the party after a journalist revealed his yen for pornography and prostitutes in a region famed for sex trafficking and the casual exploitation of society's most vulnerable members. (Overheard referring to Moroccans as 'c***s' - kutmarokkanen - during a televised vote count, Oudkerk was succeeded in 2004 by Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan.)