CHAOS THEORY In 1952, my family moved from Rotterdam [in the Netherlands] to Jakarta [Indonesia] for four years. I was eight years old. Holland after the second world war was very chaotic; Indonesia looked like paradise in comparison. It had its own chaos, but in a wonderful way. There was a total coexistence of formal and informal cityscapes. The kampongs [villages] were very condensed with the living - people, animals, agriculture - all in the middle of the city zones. I had been used to everything being segregated in the Western model of cities.
Because Indonesia had just won its independence, we had to behave like Indonesians. I went to an Indonesian school, was a local boy scout and I spoke the language. I cannot emphasis how much freer the world was at that time. My parents would leave me and my brother at home while they went travelling and we were left to our own devices. It created a sense of independence very early on in my life.
The local Chinese market was my first exposure to 'Chineseness'. But, by the end of the 50s, both the Chinese and the Dutch had to leave Indonesia.
Having the expatriate experience early on in life probably made it so that 'difference' [became] the natural condition of things, rather than 'similarity'. That notion has continued to influence my whole outlook. It drives my constant curiosity about others.
When we returned to Rotterdam in 1956, the whole country seemed rebuilt and reorganised in a way I found deathly boring. That experience in Jakarta made me unfit for more rigorous forms of organisation.
THE WRITE PLACE As a teenager, I dabbled in script writing, as I had friends who were studying film. My father was a writer, so in that discipline I was fully expressing his DNA. At 18, I became a journalist with De Haagse Post, which attracted creative writers. In the 60s, you could be incredibly young yet find a lot of confidence from editors. When I was 21, I interviewed [film director Federico] Fellini.