I'm finally considering visiting my country of birth

For years I've thought about going back to Indonesia without ever really meaning it. I never had the real drive to pull the trigger. I have zero emotional connection to the country.

I was born in Jakarta and flown to Belgium when I was six weeks old, and for most of my life that's been the whole story.

What changed is smaller and stranger than any long-held plan to return. I lost my photo album. The one with all my photos from when I was a baby and a kid. I realized that when I was packing up some old boxes.

Now I have zero memories of my childhood, my biological parents, or any relatives, and nothing left to hold onto. That loss is what's made me consider going back, for the first time, instead of just thinking about it in the abstract.

I haven't seen anyone from that side of my life in almost twenty years. I became completely estranged after I left. I've spent the years since roaming around the world, and I've ended up in Taiwan, close to Jakarta in a way I haven't been since I was six weeks old, and still impossibly far from it.

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Those photos from the eighties are gone for good. I remember them vividly anyway. I can still see them in my mind even though I'll never hold them again.

The one that sticks with me most is a single photo of me as a baby, held by a nurse in a hospital in Jakarta, with my Indonesian name written on the back.

I never got that name. I ended up with a Belgian name, and later a Chinese name given to me by Taiwanese immigration. Two names, and neither one was actually mine, come to think of it.

I got lucky, if you can call it that. I was one of ten babies, all presented as the healthiest at the time, and I was the one picked. I doubt it works that way anymore, but that's how it was done back then.

I never found out exactly how the adoption happened, how I ended up in Belgium, or how it was arranged. All I know is I went to Brussels and never looked back.

What going back would mean

This is the question that's been bothering me the most since the photo album disappeared. Even if I go back to Jakarta, even if I take a trip around the country, what's the endgame?

People have asked me for years if I'll ever go back. My answer went from a firm no to, eventually, maybe. Losing the photos is what's turning that maybe into something closer to a plan.

I know nothing about the country I was born in. I don't speak the language. I don't understand the culture or how status works there. And the part that scares me most is that even if I show up, I'll be seen as a complete foreigner.

If I went back to Belgium right now, I'd feel foreign there too. Living in Taiwan, without speaking Chinese properly, already makes me a foreigner here. Indonesia was never a place I could call home in the first place. I'm a foreigner everywhere I go, and going to Jakarta wouldn't fix that. But it might still be worth doing.

Why I've never gone before

The more I sit with this, the more I circle back to why going back scares me at all. I'm used to being treated as an outsider. Indonesia shouldn't be any different. But it is.

Maybe it's because I've never talked about it openly. I've had a few brief conversations with people about it over the years, but I never documented any of it, and I think that silence is part of why it never turned into a real plan before now.

That's changing. I'm going to document this from start to finish. What I'm thinking, what I'm planning, and when the day comes that I actually take the trip to Indonesia, I'm going to vlog it, blog it, and write down exactly what happens.

I know the odds of finding the hospital where I was born, or my biological mother, are close to zero. But I want to at least find out if there's anything left to find.

A 0.01% chance is still a chance, and losing the last of my old photos is what finally made me want to take it.