A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  “Bridging is not an easy job, because she has to understand the ideas of many people with different ideas,” he said. Being an anthropologist, she talked to people as partners, not “as target beneficiaries.” Her involvement was emotional, not simply intellectual. Those discussions, Sasono said, gave people ideas and courage. Many became activists in the reform movement that eventually brought the government down. A few, such as Sasono, went on to work in the governments that followed. “Development, like democracy, is a learning process,” Sasono said. “People have to learn to have freedom, on one side, and also responsibility, the rule of law, social discipline. It must be done through a social learning process. That’s what we learned from both Ann Dunham as well as David Korten, because both come from a society that has learned from democracy in more than two hundred years.”

  More important than projects, he said, was the selling of ideas.

  In mid-1982, Ann made several field trips to tea plantations in the mountains of Java. An Indonesian organization, the All-Indonesia Labor Federation, had proposed to the Ford Foundation a project aimed at improving the welfare of female tea plantation workers. It was also intended to increase the participation of women in labor organizations. Traveling with women, some of whom she had met through Sasono, Ann talked with plantation owners, managers, and pickers. She kept detailed notes, full of observations about the meddling of managers, the hardships faced by the pickers, the comfortable lives of the owners. “She is a Sundanese and she also lives on the plantation in a large comfortable home with diesel-powered electricity, stereo and cassette collection, etc.,” Ann wrote of the owner of a plantation between Jakarta and Bandung, where heavy ash from an erupting volcano was falling. “She provided us with a lavish lunch, but attempted in various ways to obstruct our free discussions with her workers.” Managers tried to orchestrate the interviews—handpicking the workers and sitting in on the conversations. “We overcame this by rearranging chairs, splitting up and moving in amidst the workers for private conversations,” Ann wrote. The area was Islamic, and the women said they were “diligent in praying,” Ann wrote. None had ever been to Jakarta or Bandung. None had completed more than third grade. Only two out of seventy-five they met with could read or write. Most could not understand Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. “Claimed school costs prohibitive,” Ann wrote. “Includes contributions of rice to the teacher.”

  Accompanying Ann on one of those trips was Saraswati Sunindyo, a young organizer newly graduated from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta with a degree in sociology. “My line about Ann is, ‘She found me in a slum when I was organizing,’” Sunindyo told me when I interviewed her in Seattle, where she was living. Sunindyo was organizing the residents of a squatter settlement in Jakarta for an organization run by Sasono. Later, she moved to Bandung, where, she said, she lived in a shack in a community of scavengers she was organizing into a cooperative. She and Ann met at a meeting of independent and grassroots organizations. “She was this big American woman,” Sunindyo remembered, referring to Ann’s presence more than her size. “She is a big woman with very little ego. She’s not playing the role of an expatriate—not ‘I’m an American, I read lots of books, therefore I know.’ She worked for the Ford Foundation, but she didn’t act like someone who was going to dictate what Ford wanted.” Instead, Sunindyo said, Ann “would listen and listen and listen. She was interested in how people are doing things. Rather than, ‘Okay, this is a story from another place that I read about. . . .’ We all read lots of books, but we don’t have to show it. That’s Ann. She saw potential in people. And when they needed a push, she really pushed.”

  In September 1982, Sunindyo traveled with Ann and several younger women to a plantation in the mountains southeast of Bandung. They were housed for the night in a Dutch-period guesthouse with an antique wood-burning stove and a veranda overlooking the adjacent valley and what Ann described as the “tea-covered hills beyond.” The bathroom Ann shared with one other woman, she wrote in her field notes, was the size of the bathroom used by many of the workers, as well as their children. To speak with workers, Ann and the others were taken to where women were picking tea. Sunindyo, wanting not simply to gather information but to help out, fell in beside one picker and began picking with her, dropping tea leaves into her basket. The skin on the faces of the pickers was cracked from the weather and the cold.

  “And politely, very politely, Ann asked one of the women, ‘May I see what’s in your lunch box?’” Sunindyo remembered.

  There was only rice and sambal, a paste made from ground red chili peppers.

  “So, we asked, ‘What else are you going to eat?’” Sunindyo recalled.

  “The leaves,” the woman said.

  The trip to the tea plantation with Ann was important to Sunindyo. “For us, young women at that time, it was really empowering—in the sense that we were learning from her,” she said. “We just watched, said, ‘Okay, that’s it, that’s how.’” To have Ann recognize their commitment and treat them as friends emboldened them to return to their work in their organizations “knowing that we are in this together,” Sunindyo said.

  “There is Ann, who works for the Ford Foundation,” she said. “We see Ann as one of us.”

  Ann’s circle of friends in Jakarta kept expanding. There were anthropologists, artists, activists, academics, curators, writers, development consultants, and filmmakers, among others. Yang Suwan, a Chinese-Indonesian anthropologist educated in Germany and newly returned to Jakarta, had done studies on women in development in West Sumatra and East Kalimantan. She and Ann shared a fascination with Indonesian crafts and textiles. Rens Heringa was studying a group of isolated villages on the northeast coast of Java where women made batik from hand-spun locally grown cotton. In October 1981, in the hot period before the rains broke, she and Ann took a three-day car trip along the northeast coast of Java to visit those villages. They stopped along the way to explore a series of saline ponds where the owners, many of them of Arab descent, trapped shrimp and harvested salt. Wahyono Martowikrido, the archaeologist whom Ann had known in the early and mid-1970s, was back at the National Museum in Jakarta. Ann Hawkins, who had known Ann in Semarang, had moved to Jakarta to work for UNICEF, around the corner from the Ford Foundation offices. By crossing an old Dutch canal on jerry-rigged boards, she and Ann would meet from time to time for lunch. Pete Vayda, living in a Ford bungalow near Ann’s, dropped in regularly for breakfast and rode to work in Ann’s car. Her long dining room table was a gathering place, often arrayed with packages of homemade Indonesian snacks. “Please, take these,” Yang Suwan remembered Ann saying. “You’ll help the poor women if you eat the snacks.” Often, Ann had guests. After Vayda introduced her to a graduate student of his who was doing fieldwork in East Kalimantan, the student, Timothy Jessup, became a regular guest when he was in town. Was there a place in Jakarta to play squash? Vayda asked Ann. Soon she had arranged, through Lolo, for Vayda to become a member of the Petroleum Club.

  Ann could be found at parties at the East Jakarta home of Ong Hok Ham, a Chinese-Indonesian, Yale-educated historian and public intellectual. Newspaper editors, academics, artists, foreign reporters, foundation program officers, and diplomats with duty-free privileges were regularly invited. The parties served as a kind of salon and a source of inside information and political gossip. “He collected people he found interesting,” said John McGlynn, an American translator of Indonesian literature who first encountered Ann in the early 1980s. “He wanted intellect, he wanted argument. I was told you can count on Ann for some of that.” Ann was a member of a group McGlynn referred to as “the white women in tablecloths”—expatriates with a taste for wraparound batik skirts. Ann’s laugh was full-throated and spontaneous, “a cross between a chuckle and a neigh.” But her speaking voice was soft—as Heringa put it, “almost Javanese. It was as if she was telling fairy tales. In that way, she had adapted fully.” On several occasions, she gave lectures on topics such as textiles a
nd Indonesian ironworking traditions as part of a series organized by the Ganesha Society, a group of mostly expatriate volunteers at the National Museum. At other times, she could be found at exhibitions and plays at the Taman Ismail Marzuki Arts Center, where some of the performances were known to be, as James Fox put it, “pushing the edge of things.”

  “If you knew Indonesian culture, if you knew what was being said, you could recognize the game,” Fox said. “But you had to know the language well enough, you had to know the way things were being communicated. Of course, Ann did. Her Indonesian was excellent; it was almost like a native’s. She could pick those things up. So either at events like that or parties we’d have with Indonesians, you could participate. In the expatriate community, you would almost have to spell it out and they’d never get it. You’d tell them the simplest thing, and it would be a revelation. Ann was one of those rare birds who knew how things were. She had an edge to her. She was feisty. She had a huge sense of humor, I thought. It was honed to be subtle. She could make a joke without appearing to. It was innuendo.”

  It was, perhaps, almost Javanese.

  “Are you aware that our friends are all people living in more than one culture?” Ann marveled to Yang Suwan on one occasion, being driven home one evening in Jakarta. “We are so lucky to know both cultures. This problem about ethnicity, about race—it is not a problem for us.”

  Ann’s closest female friend was Julia Suryakusuma, the “feminist and femme fatale.” On the surface, the two women made an unlikely pair. A diplomat’s daughter born in India and educated at the American high school in Rome, Suryakusuma was tall and beautiful, and twelve years younger than Ann. Colorful and outspoken, she prided herself on being, as she put it, “naughty and rebellious.” She had married Ami Priyono, an Indonesian film director who was fifteen years older, when she was barely twenty. James Fox considered her “some of the best company in Jakarta,” and Rens Heringa described her to me as “a person one gets into trouble with.” Ann was calm and measured. Julia was volatile. “The ideas were squirting out of her imagination,” Timothy Jessup said. “It was interesting to see them talk, because Julia would be waving her hands around. Ann would be calm, and Julia would be getting very excited. She liked to make an impression and shock people. Ann liked to make an impression in a different way.” Yet they were both bright and unconventional, and not terribly interested in conforming. “Ann used to say that I was from another planet,” Suryakusuma told me. “Well, it takes one to know one.” They shared a scholarly and personal interest in the condition of Indonesian women. They occasionally fought over handicrafts. They went to parties together, hung out, critiqued each other’s relationships with men. (“You know, Julia, you’re overqualified for him,” Ann once told her.) “We shared our innermost secrets, our fears and desires,” Suryakusuma told me. The friendship was intimate and turbulent. “She put up with a lot of shit from me,” Suryakusuma said. There were periods when they did not speak.

  During one of those periods some years later, Ann sent Suryakusuma a letter that, at least at this distance, seems remarkable in its blend of frankness, respect, and bruised affection.

  Friends often ask me about you, Julia. . . . Frankly, I don’t know what to say to them. The situation is made more mysterious because I am not even sure what you were angry about. I THINK you were angry because I suggested you patch up your quarrels with Garrett and Rens, but I am not even sure about that. If that is the case, I can only say that, as an old friend, I felt I had the right to give you an honest opinion.

  It has been more than 7 months since we last talked, Julia. I haven’t called you because I felt I should respect your wish to break things off. Also, I don’t like you in your arrogant bitch mode, and I did not want to run the risk of encountering you in that mode again. (Who in the hell did you think you were talking to, anyway, Julia?).

  That said, I do of course miss you, and I miss the whole family as well. After all, we were best friends for almost 10 years. I hope things are going well for all of you. Will you be moving into your new house soon? . . .

  Have a good holiday. Regards to Ami. Love, Ann.

  Yet on another occasion, Ann wrote, “Wanted to write and let you know how much I enjoyed our time together in London. . . . I realized when we were there how much you actually mean to me. In a world where most people are such bloody hypocrites, your spirit shines like a beautiful star! I never have to go through a lot of crap with you, so to speak. Sounds corny, but I mean it. I love you a lot, kiddo.”

  With many of her friends, Ann kept the details of her private life private. Even with some who knew her well, she revealed little about her childhood, her parents, even her marriages. On the subject of her sex life, she was discreet even with close friends—or so they led me to believe. But opportunities for romance did not end with her second divorce. Carol Colfer, who was also a single American woman in her thirties working in Indonesia, said she and Ann used to talk about people hitting on them. “It was very common,” she said. “A lot of Indonesians like white skin. And, of course, she had quite white skin. We would joke about people bothering us and thinking we were going to be these wildly sexually active folks. We weren’t very wild.” If Ann confided on a regular basis in anyone, it appears to have been Suryakusuma. “We were both very sexual,” Suryakusuma told me. “We talked a lot about sex and our sex lives.” Ann was sensual, Suryakusuma said. She took pleasure in, among other things, food and sex. Rens Heringa said she and Ann shared an astrological sign, Sagittarius, thought to signify an adventurous spirit. “I never was interested in Dutch guys, ever,” Heringa said. “She never was really interested in white guys.” According to Suryakusuma, “She used to say she liked brown bums and I liked white bums.”

  With Ong Hok Ham, Julia Suryakusuma, Ami Priyono, and Aditya Priyawardhana, the son of Julia Suryakusuma and Ami Priyono, July 1989

  Ann’s secretary at the Ford Foundation, Paschetta Sarmidi, noticed that Ann’s eyes “glittered” at the mention of a certain Indonesian man who worked for a bank near the Ford offices.

  “You like Indonesians,” Sarmidi observed tentatively. “The first time, you married an African. The second time, you married Lolo. Now you like the man from the bank.”

  “She smiled,” recalled Sarmidi, who pressed no further.

  Ann loved men, but she did not claim to understand them, Georgia McCauley, who became a close friend of Ann’s in Jakarta in the early 1980s, told me. McCauley, who was fifteen years younger than Ann and a mother of two small children, remembered once asking Ann for advice about men. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry, I have no idea. I just have nothing to offer you. I haven’t learned anything yet,’” McCauley told me. “She was befuddled by them. They were interesting to her; she had this intense curiosity. Her relationships had not worked out. Like many women, she didn’t understand men. She was a cultural anthropologist, it was a kind of topic: ‘Interesting, but don’t know!’”

  Life in the bubble had its downside for an unmarried American woman with a half-Indonesian daughter at home and a half-African son in college thousands of miles away. In a community made up largely of married men with wives and children at home, Ann was an anomaly. “You’re more subject to gossip,” said Mary Zurbuchen, who had become a single parent by the time she returned to Jakarta in 1992 as the Ford Foundation’s country representative. “People might have wondered who she was and who she was hanging out with. They might have noticed things.” After attending a meeting of high-ranking Ford people from all over the world, Nancy Peluso remembered, Ann remarked that nearly all the participants were male, and those who were not male were mostly unmarried or childless. “She was really the odd person out,” Peluso said. Ann’s home life “imposed different kinds of constraints on her life that Ford was simply not cut out to understand.”

  Suzanne Siskel, who joined the Ford Foundation as a program officer in Jakarta in 1990, ran into Ann at a party in 1990 shortly after accepting the job. “She looked at m
e,” Siskel told me. “She said, ‘Hmm. You’re going to work for Ford? Get ready for the eighteen-hour workday.’”

  The logistics of managing Ann’s household could be complex: “Barry will stay in Indonesia +/- one month and then return to New York via Honolulu, taking Maya with him and dropping her off at her grandparents for the rest of the summer,” Ann wrote to her boss, Tom Kessinger, in April 1983, laying out the family’s travel plans for the summer after Barry’s college graduation. “This will count as her home leave. I will either go to Hawaii at the end of the summer to pick her up, staying two weeks as my home leave, or I will have her grandparents put her on a plane to Singapore and I will pick her up there. We will do our physicals in Singapore at that time.” For work, Ann traveled often: New Delhi, Bombay, Bangkok, Cairo, Nairobi, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur, and throughout much of Indonesia. On at least one occasion, she appealed to Ford to rewrite its spouse travel policy to cover dependent children. “This is particularly relevant for single parents who do not have another responsible adult in the household to handle child care during periods of extensive travel,” she wrote in a memo to New York in December 1983. On the other hand, the cost of living in Jakarta, combined with a Ford salary and benefits, made it possible to be a single mother in a high-powered, travel-intensive job in a way that might have been more difficult in the United States.

  “You managed,” Zurbuchen said. Even if barely.

  The Jakarta International School, where Ann enrolled Maya, was both extraordinary, in its community and curriculum, and extraordinarily exclusive. Founded by international organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, that put up money in return for shares, it served the families of those institutions. The grounds of the new campus in South Jakarta were landscaped with tropical flowers. There was a swimming pool, air-conditioning, a theater with plush upholstered seats, where students performed plays by the likes of George Bernard Shaw. The faculty was international. The student body comprised fifty-nine nationalities, with the United States and Australia contributing the most. Parents were accomplished and ambitious for their children, and there was an abundance of nonworking mothers available to, say, sew kimonos for a production of The Mikado. The school played a powerful and positive role in shaping the worldview of its students. “They came to easily transcend the notion that national identity is the normal referent for looking at people,” Tom Kessinger said of his two sons. “And they found early on that friendships take many different forms, particularly over time.” One group was glaringly absent, however. Under Indonesian law, Indonesian children could not attend. When Kessinger wrote to Ann, telling her that Maya’s enrollment had been approved, he added that the only hitch was that the school would need copies of the first page of Maya’s passport and of Ann’s work permit: “They need them to satisfy Government of Indonesia regulations for all students, and are somewhat concerned because she obviously carries an Indonesian surname.” In that way, among others, the school stood apart. “It was like a satellite on its own,” said Halimah Brugger, an American who taught music there for twenty-five years. Frances Korten, who joined the Ford Foundation office as a program officer in 1983 and had a daughter in Maya’s class, recalled, “That kind of insularity of the foreign community was something that Ann, I think, frankly, more than the rest of us, felt was really not good. . . . To have her child going to a school that Indonesians couldn’t attend, I think, was an affront.”