Twitter search 2020

It has been a year since I started my search for my Indonesian mother. I thought this was going to be a fool's errand and nothing would come of it, but a year later I can honestly say I am happy that I did it.

When I grew up I was surrounded by Dutch friends and rarely came across Indonesians living in the Netherlands. This changed a couple of years ago when I befriended my formal colleagues, Danielle, Herwin and Tazia. Being friends with them was easy and rekindled my awareness of my Indonesian roots.

After hearing of my adoption and the genuineness of meeting my biological mother in 1991, Tazia encouraged me to use Twitter to try to find my Indonesian mother and find the answers I needed. Years ago I opened my first account, but twittering never really appealed to me. My friend told me with the pandemic Twitter was increasing in popularity again.

Today you often see adoptees advertising their search for biological family on Facebook. I was not convinced that it would benefit me, since I felt my background was too complicated. Tazia explained that in Indonesia Twitter is more popular than Facebook and with the right template and setup you can easily explain a complicated story.

Exactly a year ago we decided to give it a try. We started to set up a Twitter thread of 26 short messages. I decided to make up a timeline of the things I remembered from my time before my adoption and include all the documentation I had. I was honestly scared to put it all out there since I am a private person. Though the mysteries of my past had been a burden for years and I wanted to give it my all in order to solve it. Putting all the information out there was necessary to reach my goal.

To make my story interesting and readable for a Twitter audience, I needed to explain why I was looking for my Indonesian mother and make them want to read all the information in my thread. I decided to write and post a personal letter to my long lost Indonesian mother to make this happen.

Monday, 15 June 2020, Tazia and I launched our Twitter search during our lunch break at Dudok, The Hague. We were both nervous and my hands were sweating. It was kind of a weird lunch since we were both hooked to our mobile phones to ask everyone in our network to share the story. I was fortunate that my friend had a huge number of followers. I myself had exactly 2. After our posting, I went back to work but it was already clear that it would become viral by the end of the day.

Last year was a strange year, not only because of the pandemic but as well with the investigation of the received leads. Fortunately, there were many, but it was also a year of discovering a lot of twists and turns in my adoption tale, ones that I have not yet been able to share. And although my adoption is now a public record, I do not have any regrets and am amazed at the love that everyone gave trying to help me find my Indonesian mother.