Simcha (23) suffers from dust mites, Bram (20) is plagued by cockroaches and Jaimy (19) finds four children between five months and six years old in her New York host family. A new series Au pairs (BNNVARA) has started; four young Dutch people stay with an American family for three months to take care of the children. In episode 2 of Tuesday, three of them met the parents and the children, they were assigned a spacious room or a cubicle and they are introduced to the rules and routines of ‘their’ family. Only Anne (19) from Hoofddorp has not yet been accommodated anywhere; her host family dropped out before the first meeting.
Somehow this series never disappoints. It must be the clash between the Dutch babysitters, much more sensible and mature than you might think, and the muddling through parents. Sometimes insanely strict or exuberantly religious, often fretting about their children’s ways, mostly explaining to themselves why they don’t put a limit on certain behavior. “We don’t have a routine”, Rebecca, the host mother Rebecca of au pair Bram. “Conscious.” She is a pastor at the Presbyterian Church, Father Zachary is also a pastor, but at a different church. In the proposal video, he added that although he is married and a father, he identifies as bisexual.
The couple lives in a basement apartment in Brooklyn with two small children, lots of cockroaches and other vermin. Zachary absolutely does not want to contradict and certainly not correct Rebecca, he wants to add that the children roughly have breakfast when they wake up, which is usually at half past seven. “We don’t punish or discipline,” says Rebecca firmly. To which he ‘adds’ that she does ‘name’ some forms of behaviour. Anyway, Zachary told the kids that he and his mom are going away together for three days, and that Bram will take care of them. The children, Zachary said, had then “indicated” that they wanted to “get some distance” from their parents. They are five and three. I won’t tell too much about how it goes, but as soon as the parents are away, the kids shit on the floor.
Sister band
And a woman without a husband and without a child has failed, says Hu Xin Hidden Letters – women and freedom in China (AVROTROS). She is the youngest practitioner of the Nüshu tradition, a kind of secret code in which Chinese women communicated, read and wrote among themselves, which had been forbidden for centuries. On fans and handkerchiefs they wrote songs and poems for each other in tiny characters that men could not read.
For Hu Xin, language and script represent the sisterly bond between women who resisted the life they were forced to live in such a quiet and serene way. Indoors, toiling and caring, obedient to their father, husband and sons. For Hu Xin, Nüshu is an art form in which women can show that their lives are very different now. But I don’t think she really believes that herself.
At the Nüshu Museum in Jiangyong, where Hu Xin works and demonstrates her skills live, male visitors poke fun at the industrious calligraphy women. “Look what these beautiful girls are writing.” At a Chinese tourism fair, a seller displays menswear with a Nüshu fragment on it. “That radiates love, it gives the impression that women take good care of men.” Art has become folklore, a commercial product. It has to be, says the former manager of the Nüshu Museum. “Otherwise the tradition will disappear.” According to him, the Nüshu represents the “true values” of women. Obedience, acceptance, resilience. Back to square one, I think.