Twitter search 2020

It has been a year since I began searching for my Indonesian mother. When I started, I truly believed it might lead nowhere. A hopeless attempt. A message thrown into the wind. Yet today, one year later, I can say with certainty that I am grateful I tried.

Growing up, my world was mostly Dutch. Indonesians were rarely part of my daily life. That only began to change a few years ago, when friendships with former colleagues — Danielle, Herwin, Erna, Octa, Peter and Tazia — came into my path. Being with them felt natural. Familiar, without effort. Somewhere in those conversations, something quietly woke up inside me. A remembering of where I came from.

After hearing my story about meeting the woman I believed to be my biological mother back in 1991, Tazia gently pushed me toward something I had never seriously considered: putting my search on Twitter. I had opened an account years earlier, but it never really drew me in. Social media felt loud, public, overwhelming. And my history? Complicated, layered, full of question marks. I doubted it could ever fit into short online messages. But Tazia explained something important. In Indonesia, Twitter travels fast. And if we built the story carefully, step by step, people would understand. So we decided to try.

Monday, 15 June 2020, during our lunch break at Dudok in The Hague, we pressed publish. We were nervous. My hands were sweating. It hardly felt like lunch because we spent the entire time staring at our phones, asking everyone we knew to share the thread. Tazia had a large network. I had two followers. By the time I returned to work, it was already clear something extraordinary was happening. The story was moving far beyond us.

What followed was a year unlike any other. A pandemic. Messages arriving day and night. Leads to examine. Hope rising, collapsing, reshaping itself. New discoveries, unexpected turns, truths that were sometimes comforting and sometimes deeply unsettling. Parts I am still learning how to tell.

But if there is one thing that stands above everything else, it is this: people cared.

Strangers gave their time, their knowledge, their networks. They searched archives, asked relatives, forwarded my face and my memories across islands and cities. I was carried by a wave of generosity I could never have imagined. My adoption may now be public, but I do not regret opening that door. Because in stepping into the light, I discovered I was no longer walking alone. And whatever the final answers may be, that already changes everything.