The household, in the suburban no-man’s-land between the South Side of Chicago and the heavy-industrial powerhouse of northwest Indiana, was Americanized, but Willem grew up bilingual in English and Dutch. From time to time the family would make weekend forays into Chicago’s Chinatown, but Bel spoke the wrong dialect and so it was a foreign place to her. Willem did learn how to read many Chinese characters, albeit in the traditional form still used in Taiwan.