Inventory

Abstract

Inventory Karen Kao (bio) The security guard assumes that I am a tourist. I'm in a queue awaiting my timed entry into the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national repository for art and history. He speaks kindly to me in his charmingly mangled version of English. I do not venture to correct him, nor do I disclose my command of his language. The guard recommends that I take the audio tour of the Slavery exhibit. Many years ago, when I was a newly minted lawyer in Washington, D.C., I found myself near the courthouse in need of lunch. The street vendor recommended a chili hot dog, then complimented me on my mastery of the English language. He asked, where did you learn to speak so well? I said, at the Montebello Unified School District in Los Angeles, California. Not long after, I married a Dutchman, and when we married, I knew already that we would be leaving D.C. for Amsterdam. Inside the Slavery exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, I stand out. Of the hundred or so visitors allowed in that space at any one time, I can count the people of color on my fingers. No exotic garb or loud language identifies them as outsiders. They are, I suspect, as Dutch as I am. When I moved to the Netherlands three decades ago, the Dutch stared at me in the street. In Amsterdam, where I live, the interest has always seemed to me to be commercially motivated. Shopkeepers hope that I am a wealthy Asian tourist and are disappointed to find I am not. But the Netherlands is a civilized country. No one attempts to touch my straight black hair or rub my nose or take my photograph on the sly. ________ A photograph hangs in the Slavery exhibit. Six women and a baby pose against a matte background, framed on either side by large bushes. The photograph known as Inventory No. RP-F-1994-12-3 is printed in sepia tones. I can see neither the green of the bushes nor the ubiquitous red brick wall against which they stand. My imagination supplies the electric blue, the blush rose, the ochre yellow of the dresses, and the exact tint of the darkness of their skin. Since the Netherlands is a largely racially homogenous nation, I am often the only person of color in the room. The Netherlands favors a Talmudic approach towards its migrants. We are classified as first or second generation, west versus east. My Chinese parents might be surprised to learn that here I am considered a person with a western migration background. This category includes migrants from Europe (but not Turkey), North America, Oceania, Indonesia, and Japan. According to the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics, the socioeconomic and cultural position enjoyed by people from Indonesia and Japan warrant their inclusion into the panoply of the west. I wonder how the ancestors of migrants born in the former Dutch East Indies would regard this modern label. Iron brands once marked enslaved persons as the property of the Dutch East or West Indies Company. In the former Dutch colony of Batavia, the most valuable enslaved persons were [End Page 225] Balinese women renown for their beauty. Balinese men, on the other hand, were generally shunned for their unaccountably angry nature and propensity toward violence. ________ In the photograph known as Inventory No. RP-F-1994-12-3, six women and a baby pose on a lawn. The women wear voluminous skirts, fussy short jackets, and fancifully folded headscarves. Their backs are erect and their faces set. Perhaps they're cold, standing as they are on the frigid Dutch earth so far away from home. Perhaps they have been told to stop squirming so that the photographer might take his shot. The six women and the baby in the photograph live in a human zoo known as the Surinam Pavilion. From May to October 1883, over one million visitors will peek into their reconstructed huts, watch the women pound cassava, and the baby sleep through the first International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam. The Netherlands abolished slavery in 1863. And yet, twenty years later, six women and a...