Meet a Friend:  Wim Houwink 

of Redwood Forest (CA) Meeting

(January 2008 newsletter)

Born: 1920 in Holland.

Education: Rotterdam School of Economics.

Career: 1947-1949: Research, Rotterdam School of Economics; 1949-1951: Guest Professor, University of Nevada Reno (UNR); 1951-1959: Research and international banking, City Bank, New York;1959-1983: UNR; 1964-1966: American University of Istanbul; Summer 1976: American University in Cairo; 1977-1978: Boston University in London, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Rome, Napoli; 1982-1985: University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing; 1985-1990: Honorary Professor, UIBE.

My story is dominated by my three-year stay in the concentration camps. It is not a happy story as I had learned in the camps not to trust anybody and as I had lost the concept of unconditional love. I became a “loner” and still am. A sentence out of a book, written by that rascal Oscar Wilde, became important to me: “Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what I can get out of myself.” I once read a definition of happiness that fitted me as a loner, “Happiness is getting a moral victory over yourself.”

The amount of luck one meets in his/her life seems important. It was to a great extent plain luck that I liked economics which was my major. I always wanted to study mathematics but choose economics as my father had nobody to succeed him in his business. It was to a great extent plain luck that I survived life in the concentration camps. It was to a great extent plain luck that I went to the U.S. as a visitor and that a private bill was introduced to the Congress making it possible for me to abandon my native country Holland (where the unhappy memories of my camp time were so strong) and to become an American citizen. It was to a great extent plain luck that I became a professor of economics and was able to teach in various parts of the world, including China, Turkey and Egypt.

During the last 25 years or so my big love has been China where I became an Honorary Professor of the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. In China I made friends I TRUSTED. It occurs to me that that was so as I noticed that loyalty between friends in China is higher than in any of the sixty plus countries I visited during my life. (I am fully aware of the fact that outside your circle of friends you have to be rather careful in China.)

In a certain way, it is ironic that I met the Quakers in China. An American colleague of mine invited me to a (officially forbidden) Quaker meeting in Beijing. After having had various experiences with religious and meditation movements, the Quaker ideas found a response within me. When returning from China to Reno, I started to attend the meetings there, encouraged by Bill and Ann Scott. They were also important in my decision to join Friends House in Santa Rosa.