Stadsloket
Paperwork and Week Three in Amsterdam
The lady at the City Service Desk, or Stadsloket, said “oh”.
She gave me a grin through the glass between us, and I knew instantly that I was not going to get the thing I came for. She was firm but personable. Her light brown hair reminded me of a mom character in Dark, the German time-travel series on Netflix.
She told me I had to come back tomorrow for the BSN registration, because that was when my lease would officially kick off. “Dutch bureaucracy at its finest” was the consensus from my group chats.
BSN is the national ID of every resident in the Netherlands. Without it, I was stuck on applying for a public transport card and many other things. I assumed it was also why I got an auto-rejection from a mobile provider for a pre-paid service on the second day I landed. In the dark age before neon banks, I would not have been able to get a bank account either.
I had built a rapport with the lady because she was at the same window two weeks ago, number 22. She even apologised and said “I will see you tomorrow” on my way out.
Despite the insanely competitive rental market, people are expected to have a physical and permanent address within five days of landing in Amsterdam. Of course, even the lady at the Stadsloket said the penalty stated on the government website was not serious.
I wondered how many people were stressed about it. I certainly took it seriously, because the onboarding team at my new company had also bolded the requirement in the email they sent me.
Without securing a rental, students were even advised not to come to the city. Apparently, there were tents set up in front of universities because of the challenging housing market during the Pandemic. One of Steven and Kuangyi’s friends currently lives in a squatted place nearby. It was featured in the local newspaper the other day.
I wondered if my blind confidence would still be intact had I done a tiny bit of research before departure. I knew a job in tech was a massive factor in play, but according to all the friends around me, 8 days from starting to securing a contract was indeed a record time.
I felt both proud and like I had dodged a bullet.
Compounded by the fact that a one-year lease is the minimum requirement, there was a clear assumption made about everyone who arrived in the city:
You are here to stay.
Instead of feeling boxed in, I was ready to surrender, especially after floating around and crashing at different friends’ homes for the past few months. I counted four in total.
A space of my own to slop around or do whatever I want feels incredibly precious right this moment.
I returned to the Stadsloket the next day, first thing in the morning.
I was going to pick up the keys for my new place later in the afternoon. It would be a great milestone if I could sort out the BSN on the same day.
Third time’s a charm, I thought, looking at the piece of paper I got for the queue. It happened to have 333 on it.
To my disappointment, I had to walk past desk 22 and be greeted by a different lady at 24. She was visibly colder when checking whether I had all the documents I was required to bring.
“But do you have the original birth certificate and 户口本 (Household Record)?”
An extremely weird sensation hit my brain when words in Mandarin suddenly jumped out. After realising she was speaking my language, I came to the conclusion that it must have been such a recurring thing for her that a lady with dark skin sitting in a Dutch office knew what a 户口本 was.
My legs started shaking because I felt another rejection might be on its way.
“Why is my very existence in this office right now not strong enough proof of being born?”
It was what I wanted to say out loud. Instead, my mind flashed through a few memes about ridiculous bureaucratic processes.
A supervisor who had been summoned a minute prior started chatting to her in Dutch. I was waiting for my verdict, which felt like a pending death sentence in the moment.
“You need to come back with the original copy.”
I was doomed.
“But you can get your BSN today.”
I was suddenly alive again.
My heart raced so hard when the lady finally printed out the official documents and ran a highlighter over the BSN number. I bet the two people behind the glass could read my stress level like a thermometer.
I didn’t like it.
I have always thought the ask of mailing your passport to an Embassy was a pretty risky thing. I have done it once, to get a tourist visa sticker for Japan. Asking my parents to send the 户口本, arguably the most important thing to a Chinese household, overseas felt absolutely ridiculous.
Not to mention, I have lost track of the last time I spoke to my dad. My mind went through a number of scenarios with him using the request as leverage to force me into some sort of grand apology.
“Hell no.”
Later, it was clarified that without the record, the Dutch Government and Gemeente won’t have any information about my parents. The real implication is that I can’t get married.
I could suddenly feel how important the ancestral line is for Europeans through this tiny requirement — and why all the gene and ancestral testing products had become so popular.
Knowing how progressively the Dutch government treats queer and transgender people, I guess that in front of a system and a bureaucracy, there will always be other edge cases and minorities facing some type of exclusion. In this case, it’s a particular document and a notarised format, the assumed access to it, and by extension a stable relationship with one’s family.
My brain was conjuring a movie scene where I was standing at an altar without the blessing of my parents.
I did tell David that even though I paid visits to the Stadsloket three times to get my BSN, the bureaucracy in the Netherlands really isn't that bad. He prayed I'd never have to experience it in Germany, which still runs on physical mail and fax machines.
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So the current state is that I am effectively an orphan to the Dutch government.
There’s something very punky about it.