by Janny Scott
It was not easy. Ann wanted Maya to have an English-language education, and Maya would have been ill equipped to leap into an Indonesian school for the first time at age ten or eleven. In preparation for entering the Jakarta International School, Ann had made sure that Maya’s homeschooling included English. But Maya felt, as she put it, some “discomfort being the only Indonesian in the Jakarta International School.” It was a discomfort of which Ann was surely aware. “I think batik-making was the only Indonesian thing that I did,” Maya remembered. “I remember taking choir and singing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.’ We did Pygmalion and British history.” Hoping to gain acceptance, she brought in photographs of American relatives she did not even know. “There were a couple of mixed kids like me,” she said. “No full-blooded Indonesians, except folks who worked there. Some. I certainly felt like I was in two different worlds: the world of Indonesia that I knew, populated by Indonesians, and then the world of JIS, which was basically an expatriate school.” Ann worried that the nature of her work would affect Maya’s shot at social acceptance. “Ann said Maya’s friends thought Ann’s job was rather odd—going into the field, talking with poor people,” Yang Suwan told me. When Maya had friends coming over for the night, Yang recalled, Ann seemed uncharacteristically anxious. The Indonesian snacks would disappear from the dining room table. “Suddenly, there are steaks and soft drinks,” remembered Yang. She would say, teasingly, “Ann, this is not locally made!” Ann also worried about Maya’s exposure to the excesses of some of her more privileged, jaded classmates. Richard Holloway remembered Ann observing, in some distress, “I’m afraid that this comes with going to an international school, because most of the kids there have too much money.”
Ann wanted Maya, like Barry, to be a serious student. “She hates me to brag, but I am forced to mention that she made high honors this term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey in February 1984. She made her expectations clear. “Ann was pretty strict with her,” Rens Heringa remembered. “I think she needed to be. Maya was too pretty for her own good. Ann talked to her, took her to task—to do her homework, to be a serious student, to not do the things that many of her classmates did.” She worked hard to pass on her values. On one occasion, she arranged for Maya to accompany a friend of Ann’s who was doing research in a slum area of Jakarta, then was upset when the colleague’s methods fell short of Ann’s exacting standards. Ann herself took Maya into the field and traveled extensively with her outside the country. In April 1984, Ann used her annual home-leave allowance instead for what she called a “grand tour” with Maya to Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. “I had to spend five days en route at an employment conference in Dhaka, but the rest was vacation and great fun, despite beastly dry season weather and dust storms in North India,” she wrote to Dewey late that month. “Saw lots of Moghul palaces and forts, rode elephants, rode camels, bought heaps of silk and clunky silver jewelry and useless gew-gaws very cheap—altogether a most satisfying trip.”
Ten months earlier, Ann and Maya and a group of Ann’s friends had traveled to Bandungan, a hill resort near Semarang in Indonesia, to watch a total solar eclipse over Central Java. The government had campaigned for weeks to convince Indonesians to stay inside with their windows covered in order to avoid being blinded by the sight of the eclipse. The countryside was eerily empty, many Javanese having taken to their beds in fear. The group drove past mosques packed with men, all turned toward the interior, praying. From Bandungan, they made their way to a place where nine small eighth- and ninth-century Hindu temples sit one thousand meters up in the foothills of Gunung Ungaran. Reached by a trail through a ravine and past hot sulfur springs, the place offered one of the most dazzling views in Java, to the volcanoes in the distance. “We sat on the edge of the escarpment and watched the shadow of the eclipse rushing across the plain beneath us and engulfing us,” recalled Richard Holloway, who had gone along on that trip. The horizon turned red, according to a later description, “and in the half-light distant volcanoes usually obscured by the glare of the sun became visible. For the four minutes of total eclipse, the sun, almost directly overhead, looked like a black ball surrounded by a brilliant white light.”
Ann remained in regular contact with Maya’s father, Lolo. They spoke often by phone and met for lunch, according to Paschetta Sarmidi, the secretary who worked with Ann. “They tried to take care of Maya together,” Sarmidi said. But Lolo’s second marriage had changed Maya’s relationship with his family. His new wife was young and “not secure enough to bring me into the family—and certainly not Mom,” Maya said. “We stopped going to all family functions. There was a complete loss of contact.” Maya continued to see her father on his own, but he never took her to see his family or play with her cousins. Ann complained to at least one friend that Lolo, like a stereotype of a divorced parent, was lavishing Maya with luxuries, toys, and sweets. “That particular thing really irritated her,” her old friend Kay Ikranagara remembered. “She felt that he had grown up without material things, and now he put so much importance on material things. He was conveying this to Maya.”
One evening, shortly before dinnertime at the house in Kebayoran Baru, a group of young activists was gathered around Ann’s dining room table, working on a project, Yang Suwan recalled. There was a knock at the door. Yang went to open it and found a man she had never seen before with his arms full of jackfruits and packages. He was there to see Maya, he announced. When Maya ran in and hugged him, Yang was startled. She glanced back into the dining room. Ann’s expression had grown uncharacteristically dark. “I had never seen Ann’s face so changed, so not friendly,” Yang said. When Lolo left after ten minutes, the young people chided Ann, saying she should have invited him to dinner. After all, he was Maya’s father. “She looked so annoyed,” Yang remembered. “She didn’t want to talk.”
Ann’s visits with Barry were inevitably infrequent. When she went to work for Ford in early 1981, he was in his sophomore year at Occidental College in Los Angeles. That fall, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City. At least twice during her nearly four years at Ford, Ann arranged for him to fly to Indonesia to visit. “I would like to use my educational travel for dependent children this summer to have my son, Barry, come out to visit us,” she wrote to Kessinger in May 1981. Barry spent July in Jakarta, then went on to Pakistan to visit a friend from Occidental on his way back to the United States. A week before leaving Jakarta, he sent a telegram to Nancy Peluso, Ann’s friend, who had offered him her apartment on West 109th Street in Manhattan: “DO WANT THE APARTMENT WILL ARRIVE AT LATEST AUGUST 24 IN CASE COMPLICATIONS WIRE MOM.” The following summer, Ann and Maya visited him in New York City. And in May 1983, after graduating from Columbia, he flew again to Indonesia for a month, stopping in Los Angeles and Singapore to visit friends. “After Barry arrives I would like to take a week or ten days off,” Ann wrote to Kessinger in April. “If I can get reservations (this is right after the eclipse and right after JIS gets out), we would like to go to Bali.”
Richard Holloway, Ann’s friend from Semarang, recalled arriving to stay at Ann’s house and being startled to encounter Barry for the first time.
“There was this young black lad pumping iron in her garden,” Holloway remembered. “Very good-looking, great body, polite, personable.”
“‘This is my son, Barry,’” he recalled Ann saying.
“‘Nice to meet you.’”
Women, however, told me that Ann spoke often to them about Barry.
“Never did we get together where we didn’t hear, right up front, the first thing, what Barry was doing,” said Georgia McCauley. If Ann had received a letter from him, Yang Suwan said, she would be in a good mood all day. Saraswati Sunindyo, who had described Ann as “a big person with little ego,” said that little bit of ego pertained to her son. She would show his photograph “and say how handsome he is,” Paschetta Sarmidi, Ann’s secretary, said. “She spoke of Barack Obama a lot of times a day.”
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br /> “You married an African?” Sarmidi recalled asking.
“Yes.”
“Is he very black?”
“Yes!”
“How is Barry? Does he have his father’s skin?”
“Yes.”
“Is it like my skin?”
“No,” Ann answered. “Your skin is like a Hispanic. But Barack Senior, he is very black. Barry is very handsome. And he is very smart, Paschetta. My boy is brilliant.”
By February 1984, during his first year out of college, Barry was working for Business International Corporation, a small newsletter-publishing and research firm that helped countries with foreign operations understand overseas markets. Ann reported on his progress to Dewey.
Barry is working in New York this year, saving his pennies so he can travel next year. My understanding from a rather mumbled telephone conversation is that he works for a consulting organization that writes reports on request about social, political and economic conditions in Third World countries. He calls it “working for the enemy” because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in those countries. He seems to be learning a lot about the realities of international finance and politics, however, and I think that information will stand him in good stead in the future.
In November 1982, after receiving a call from an aunt in Kenya telling him that his father had been killed in a car accident in Nairobi, Barry telephoned Ann in Jakarta with the news. She had been divorced from Obama for eighteen years and had not seen him since that Christmas in Honolulu eleven years earlier. But when the younger Obama delivered the news of his father’s death, he wrote in his memoir, he heard his mother cry out. Ann telephoned Bill Collier, perhaps the only person she knew in Indonesia who had also known the elder Obama. Collier, a classmate and friend of Obama’s at the University of Hawai‘i, told me that Ann’s sadness was unmistakable. It was clear, he said, that she still felt strongly about Obama. Julia Suryakusuma found Ann in her office on the verge of tears. “I just heard the news that Barack’s father died,” Suryakusuma remembered Ann saying. Then she broke down and wept.
“I always got the impression that she was critical of her husbands,” Suryakusuma said, “but I had the feeling she still loved them in a certain way.”
By early 1984, Ann was at a crossroads. She had spent six years fulfilling her graduate course requirements and doing the fieldwork necessary to graduate with a Ph.D. But she had yet to take her comprehensive exams, complete a dissertation, and sit for its defense. The nine-month leave of absence she had requested from the University of Hawai‘i in 1979 had stretched into five years. “The major reason for the delay in my return to Hawaii is the need to work to put my son through college,” she wrote to Alan Howard, the chairman of the anthropology department, in March 1984. “I am happy to say that he graduated from Columbia in June, so that I am now free to complete my own studies.” Her contract with Ford was set to expire in late September. “I will either not extend it, or extend it but request an educational leave of absence for nine months (one school year),” Ann told Dewey in a letter that February. “If I do not need to be physically present in Hawaii during the whole time, it might be better for me to stay in Indonesia through the end of the year. The deciding factor will probably be finances.” If she could land a part-time fellowship with the East-West Center, she and Maya would return to Honolulu for the 1984–1985 academic year. If not, she might accept an offer from Pete Vayda, who was returning to the United States, to take over the lease on his house in Bogor. “This would be an ideal, quiet place to work and finish up my thesis draft and the house is available very cheaply,” she told Dewey. She hedged her bets. She asked Ford for a ten-month leave of absence, applied to schools in Hawaii for Maya, and approached the East-West Center about a fellowship. At the same time, she began looking into applying for a one- or two-year appointment as a visiting professor in the rural-sociology department at Cornell University, specializing in women in development. It was a long shot: A Ph.D. was a prerequisite for the job. She let Alice Dewey know she had listed her as a reference on applications for fellowships from several foundations and funding agencies. “If anyone asks, you can tell them that I am good with dogs,” Ann said.
Meanwhile, she went to some lengths to make it clear to Dewey, still the chairman of her dissertation committee, that she was swamped with work.
Maybe you remember that I am handling projects for Ford in the areas of women, employment and industry (small and large). Jakarta was made the Regional Southeast Asia office last year, so that we are also working in Thailand and the Philippines. This year I have major projects for women on plantations in West Java and North Sumatra; for women in kretek factories in Central and East Java; for street food sellers and scavengers in the cities of Jakarta, Jogja and Bandung; for women in credit cooperatives in East Java; for women in electronics factories, mainly in the Jakarta-Bogor area; for women in cottage industry cooperatives in the district of Klaten; for hand-loom weavers in West Timor; for shop girls along Jl. Malioboro and market-sellers in Beringharjo (still tentative); for slum dwellers in Jakarta and Bandung; for street food sellers in Thailand. . . .
During Ann’s tenure in the Jakarta office, Ford had backed the first women’s studies center in the country, a fledgling research center at the University of Indonesia. Ann had successfully made the case for an early affirmative-action program for Indonesian women—a scholarship program aimed at getting more women trained in the social sciences and working in the upper levels of university faculties and the civil service. Smaller grants had gone to translating into Indonesian, for use in universities, a key text by Ester Boserup, a Dutch economist, on the role of women in development; paying for fellowships for female graduate students doing dissertations on women in home industries; supporting a conference to familiarize the leaders of grassroots organizations with women’s issues; and sending top staff members from the women’s cooperative in Malang to India to learn from the women’s cooperatives and trade unions there. The Bogor project, which continued for some years afterward, had laid the groundwork for a network of Indonesian researchers experienced in the study of village women. It had generated what Ann called, in a 1983 report, “a great deal of useful and surprising data, which forces us to change some of our basic perceptions about Indonesian women.” Java was atypical, as it turned out. Rural women on Java worked long hours, often in multiple occupations, though their hourly earnings were low. Elsewhere, women worked few hours, and needed money but had few opportunities to make it because they lived in places with few roads, means of transportation, or markets. Under such circumstances, development planning needed to be decentralized—tailored to each province, even each village. Pujiwati Sajogyo, who went on to serve for a time as a consultant to the Indonesian government’s Ministry for the Role of Women, helped shift the government’s focus away from simply the health and domestic roles of women to include women’s need for income and paying work.
In the end, Ford did not renew Ann’s contract. She had been in the Jakarta office for nearly four years, which, several Ford people told me, was becoming the standard tenure after which program officers moved to another country or moved on. Kessinger was interested in trying someone new in Ann’s job. Ford was increasingly a grant-making organization, not an operating foundation. No longer were several hundred Ford staff members scattered all over, say, India, teaching in management schools, serving in government ministries, working in agricultural research. Program officers sat behind desks, conceived areas of activity, designed grants, wrote memos justifying what they wanted to do. To Kessinger, Ann seemed less comfortable in the office than she was in the field. Some people were good at one thing, some at the other, he believed. Few were good at both. “I felt that from an institutional point of view, she’d probably given us what she could give us,” he said.
Kessinger also believed that Ann should complete the work needed to get her Ph.D. Not infrequently, graduate students drift
ed away from writing their dissertations because they needed money and found paying work, he knew from his years as a professor. When he had started graduate school, the average time from enrollment to a Ph.D. in history was nine years—in large part because students married and needed to support their families. Ann was lucky in that she had found work that not only paid well but that she loved. But that kind of good fortune made it even harder for people to go back and finish. Those who never did, Kessinger was convinced, went on to regret it. Your Ph.D. was your union card. “Get a union ticket,” Ben Finney, the University of Hawai‘i anthropologist, advised his students. “Become a qualified anthropologist. Then you can get your own grants or jobs.” If Ann ever wanted to work in a university, she would need a doctorate. Furthermore, as Kessinger saw it, there was something selfish about carrying out fieldwork and doing nothing with it. In the village in India where he had done his fieldwork, the first questions were always: Why are you here? Why is anybody interested in that? The people you studied expected you to finish. Kessinger told Ann as much. Looking back later, he did not know how she took his tough love. She said, at least, that she saw his point.