Erick Janssen has what he calls his “Baseball Theory of Social Life” to explain one of the fundamental differences between his native
Netherlands and the US, and it has to do with making friends. He came up with it 18 years ago, just a few months after moving from Amsterdam to Bloomington, Indiana, home of the Kinsey Institute where he is senior scientist and director of education and research.
“In the US it’s very easy to get to first base,” he says. “You’re invited in, and there’s a big reception for you, and it’s one of the most wonderful things about this country. But it’s hard to get to second and third base. In the Netherlands, it’s the other way around. It’s really quite hard to get to first base as a stranger. It’s a small country, and people are so protective of their lives. But once you get in, it’s like a home run.”
Janssen, 49, was born and raised in the industrial town of Oss, where his sense of humour and rebellious streak were forged. “I played electronic organ in the church band,” he says. “Our priest didn’t speak English, so we managed to play songs that had nothing to do with religion, like Supertramp’s
Lord Is It Mine. We performed that one with the whole youth choir.” Oss is in the southern province of North Brabant, where the pace of life is slower, giving its residents a somewhat unflattering reputation. “Every country has its ‘south’,” says Janssen, and while he is proud of his origins, it was with some relief that Janssen found that in the US he was not a southerner, but simply Dutch.
Janssen’s roster of things he misses about home reads much like most expats’, composed of friends and special places and, predictably, foods. “I love raw herring and Dutch fries,” he says. “And I miss foods I rarely ate while living there, like croquette or
bitterballen. And
frikandel – you don’t even want to know what’s in those things. It’s the first thing I eat when I get back, and after I’ve had one, I remember why I never used to eat it.”
Having been away from the Netherlands for nearly two decades now, Janssen worries that his identity as a Dutch person is being eroded and replaced by something else, a more American side. On the other hand, he is not entirely sure what it means to be Dutch. “I suppose it’s that we love apple pie, riding bikes, our language,” he says. “And we will defend to our deaths our
Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter,” Saint Nicholas’s velvet-clad, black-faced sidekick. “When you tell Americans about this, their mouths fall open. You do what for Christmas?” Janssen’s wife, who is of Haitian descent, was no less dismayed: “When Nadine first saw it, we had to give her electric shocks to revive her. She almost went into a coma.”
In the end, Janssen settles on another theory, modelled on a principle of sex research: becoming more American doesn’t necessarily mean becoming proportionately less Dutch. Ever the scientist, he is comforted by this solution. Still, some hard data continue to elude him. “Being Dutch is like beauty or art or quality,” he says. “It’s hard to define, but you recognise it when you see it.”
Read more: Expat lives: from the Netherlands to the US - FT.com
