Mom, meanwhile, had fallen in love with yet another foreign student—this time an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro. The fact that lolo was Hawaiian slang for “crazy” meant raised eyebrows whenever Soetoro was introduced to anyone on the islands, but he took it in stride. In fact, the compact, dark-haired Soetoro was as soft-spoken and unflappable as Barack senior had been flamboyantly self-assured. Lolo was not above engaging in a little horseplay with Ann’s young son on the Dunhams’ living room floor or laughing at Gramps’s cringe-making jokes over endless games of chess.
Barry was an outgoing, slightly pudgy six-year-old when his mother sat him down and told him she was going to marry Lolo and that they were going to move sixty-seven hundred miles away to Indonesia. It would be their first journey outside the country, and Ann, clearly wondering if this was the right thing to do, wept as she broke the news to her son. As far as Barry was concerned, it was perfectly fine as long as his mother loved Lolo. “Do you love him, Mom?” he asked point-blank. She did, she told Barry tearfully as she swept him up in her arms.
Lolo returned to Indonesia earlier than he had expected—summoned, as were all Indonesian students studying abroad, by the new military government that had toppled Indonesia’s longtime dictator, Sukarno. Many of these students, viewed as a potential threat by the new right-wing regime, were imprisoned or executed. Unbeknownst to Ann, Lolo was immediately drafted by the Indonesian army and sent to fight guerrillas in the jungles of New Guinea.
It would be nearly a year before Ann and Barry finally joined Lolo in Indonesia—a year during which the once easygoing Lolo seemed to have undergone a dramatic change. Now stuck in a low-paying job surveying roads for the Indonesian army, he was prone to binge drinking and long, sullen silences.
For the moment, however, it was enough just to cope with their exotic new surroundings. Barry and Ann moved into Lolo’s small, flat-roofed bungalow on a dirt road just outside Jakarta at 16 Haji Ramli Street, where cockatoos, dogs, chickens, ducks, baby crocodiles, and even a pet monkey named Tata roamed the backyard. The absence of paved roads, electricity, and indoor plumbing scarcely fazed the boy, who viewed everything as an adventure.
When the children in his neighborhood viewed the foreigners in their midst suspiciously, Barry climbed atop a wall that separated his house from his neighbors’, where he cawed and flapped his arms like a giant bird. “That got the kids laughing,” recalled Kay Ikranagara, a friend from that period, “and then they all played together.”
At first, he was teased about his weight—the other kids called him “Fatty” in Indonesian—and about his color. The only black many of these children had ever seen, he was also routinely referred to simply as “Negro”—an appellation that, according to another friend, Bambang Sukoco, did not seem to bother him.
He even became accustomed to the periodic lashings he received at the hands of the nuns at Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He was the school’s only non-Indonesian student; the children of most foreigners went to Jakarta’s International School, but Ann and Lolo lacked the money for tuition.
Ann’s son was enrolled at Franciscus Assisi as “Barry Soetero”—using his stepfather’s surname—and his nationality was listed on official school documents as Indonesian. Since the Catholic school had been in operation for less than a year and needed local children to fill its classes, it made a point of opening up the student body to all faiths. “At that time,” explained his teacher Israella Darmawan, “Barry was registered as a Muslim because his father, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim.” Former vice principal Tine Hahiyari and third-grade teacher Effendi also recalled that Barry was registered as a Muslim, which determined what weekly religion class he attended. “Muslim students were taught that religion class by a Muslim teacher, and Christian students were taught by a Christian teacher,” Effendi said. “Barry was definitely Muslim. He studied the Koran.”
Occasionally, Barry went with his stepfather and his friends to Friday-night prayers at the local mosque. “We prayed a lot but not really seriously—just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played,” said one of Barry’s close friends at the time, Zulfin Adi. According to Adi, Barry often wore a sarong to the mosque.
Barry quickly discovered that he liked to tell people what to do. His first day at school, he commanded his fellow students, “Baris!” (“Make a line!”), then “Siap grap” (“Get ready”), and finally “Tegap!” (“Stand straight!”). Barry then reviewed the line and, once he was satisfied it was straight, allowed the students to march into the classroom. “Sometimes I had to tell him to let the other kids do it,” said Israella Darmawan. Her nickname for Barry: “Little Curly-Haired One.”
Because he was a full head taller than any of the other children in class, Barry also helped Darmawan clean the blackboards. Although he was one of her brightest students—“especially at mathematics”—it was Barry’s instinct for leadership that most impressed his teachers at the time. “He always wanted to be number one, to be at the front. Psychologically, he wants to be in charge.” Nor was he above informing on his fellow students. “Whenever they misbehaved,” third-grade teacher Cecelia Sugini said, “Barry would tell me to make them stop.”
This sense of righteous indignation extended to the playground. Whenever the other children tried to cheat during games of marbles, Barry would stand up and yell, “Kamu curang, kamu curang!” (“You cheat! You cheat!”), recalled Zulfin Adi. “We could never cheat him. We did try, but he always found out.” Adi described his friend as “resolute.” Barry, he said, “never hesitated to stand up to defend his rights.”
Given Barry’s take-charge personality, Darmawan was not surprised at his response when he was asked to write an essay on the theme “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” “I,” Barry wrote in the opening line, “will become President.” At the time, Darawan said, it was hard to tell from the essay if he intended to become President of the United States or Indonesia. “His father was Indonesian,” she recalled. “His sister was Indonesian. He spoke Indonesian. There was no reason to think that he meant anything other than becoming President of Indonesia.”
It had taken less than a year for Barry to essentially master Indonesia’s language and customs. What he found more daunting—even frightening—were his countless encounters with human misery. Beggars, some disfigured by leprosy, others missing limbs, accosted him on the street or came to the house pleading for money or food.
Understandably, Ann, who had a penchant for bursting into tears at the slightest provocation, found herself weeping on a daily basis. Initially unable to turn down any of the beggars who appeared on the doorstep—“Your mother has a soft heart,” Lolo observed—Ann eventually learned to be more selective.
Ann soon began teaching English to Indonesian business executives at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. The yawning chasm between this tiny elite and the rest of the country’s vast population was a fact of Indonesian life Ann was unwilling to accept. When Lolo joined that elite—landing a job at an American oil company and quickly advancing through its ranks—Ann grew even more indignant. Proud of his attractive American wife, he insisted that she accompany him to cocktail parties and other company functions, but she refused.
With the birth of Barry’s half sister Maya in August of 1970, Lolo hoped that Ann would become less restless and more resigned to her role as a wife in Indonesian society. Certainly she had no quarrel with Lolo’s attitude toward her son; in every way possible, he treated Barry as his own.
Still, Ann felt isolated and alone. Moreover, she knew that this was neither the childhood nor the future she had in mind for her son. “You are not an Indonesian,” she reminded Barry frequently. “You are an American. You have American values. Don’t ever forget that.” Accordingly, during these years abroad she went to great lengths to ensure that Barry never lost his command of the English language and the American idiom. Each day before dawn she woke him
up to drill him with lessons from an English correspondence course, then headed off to her job at the American embassy. “She would be totally exhausted,” he recalled. “But it was very important to her that I never lose sight of who I was, and where I fit in in the scheme of things.”
That also meant reinforcing Barry’s black heritage by having him read books about civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and listen to recordings ranging from Harry Belafonte and Maha-lia Jackson to Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder. “Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier, every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne,” Barry would later recall. “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny.”
To Ann, it was also important for Barry to view his absent father as a role model. She preferred to overlook the fact that Barack senior would go on to father numerous other children (for a grand total of eight) with his various wives and lovers in Kenya. Instead, she stressed Barack senior’s intellect, his idealism, and his commitment to bettering the lives of his fellow Africans. “Your brains, your character,” Ann told her son, “you got from your father.”
In fact, Barack senior seldom even bothered to inquire about his American family, much less seek to have direct contact with his son. No matter. The boy was willing to accept whatever his mother told him about his father as gospel—for now.
Barry’s mother had done such an effective job of building up Barry’s self-esteem that he was nine before it ever occurred to him that being black was anything but a blessing. It was then that he came across a magazine article about a black man who had tried to chemically lighten the color of his skin and wound up horribly scarred. In one life-altering moment, the young boy realized for the first time that there might be something wrong with being black—that it was a condition that some people found so onerous that they would go through painful, expensive treatments to turn themselves white. Seeing the photos was “violent for me,” he later wrote. “My stomach knotted. Did my mother know about this?”
Barry said nothing to his mother or to anyone at the time. But he would remember that this was the moment when he began to harbor serious doubts about where he really fit in as a biracial child.
After two years at Assisi, Barry transferred to a public school; this one, like all public schools in Indonesia, was Muslim and incorporated in its regular curriculum teachings from the Koran. “At the Catholic school, when it came time to pray,” Barry later said, “I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words.” At “Muslim School,” as he later referred to the public school he attended, the teacher sent a note home to Ann complaining that Barry misbehaved by making faces during Koranic studies. Ann took Barry aside and admonished him to “be respectful,” but declined to punish him as the teacher requested.
“My whole family was Muslim,” Barry’s sister Maya later said, “and most of the people I knew were Muslim.” It was a situation that did not sit entirely well with Ann. Barry’s mother, whose own deep spirituality belied a distrust of all organized religion, did what she could to drum Western ideals of equality, democracy, and fairness into her son’s brain. She also tried to imbue both her children with a sense of the spiritual. “Our mother was fascinated by all things lunar,” Maya recalled. “She called herself a ‘Lunatic,’ and would take us out in the middle of the night to gaze at the moon if it was particularly full or bright.”
The lessons Barry learned from his stepfather were of a more practical nature. When a schoolmate tossed a rock at Barry and left him with a goose egg on the side of his head, Lolo produced two sets of boxing gloves and taught his stepson how to defend himself. “Men,” Lolo told Barry, “take advantage of weakness in other men.”
Yet Ann’s son preferred the role of peacemaker. Once again, he accomplished this simply by telling his peers how to behave. They invariably complied. “If his friends were having arguments, he’d become a mediator,” recalled Harmon Askiar, one of Barry’s Jakarta neighborhood playmates. “He would grab one friend’s hand and grab the other friend’s hand and force them to shake and be friends again.”
After three years in Indonesia, Ann told her ten-year-old son that his time there was about to come to an end. The owner of the furniture store that employed Stanley Dunham in Honolulu was an alumnus of Hawaii’s elite Punahou prep school, and Gramps had asked if he couldn’t pull some strings to get Barry accepted.
Founded in 1841 by American missionaries, Punahou (Hawaiian for “new spring”) was more than just the islands’ answer to such tony mainland schools as Andover, Exeter, Groton, and Hotchkiss. Punahou actually offered a first-class private school education from kindergarten straight through high school. By 2009, it would grow to include more than thirty-seven hundred students, making Punahou the largest independent school in the United States.
Not surprisingly, competition to get into the middle school and high school classes was especially fierce. Even children from some of Hawaii’s wealthiest and best-connected families had to settle for being wait-listed. Somehow Gramps not only got Barry bumped to the head of the line, but he also managed to wrangle young Obama a full scholarship.
Race also played a significant role in Barry’s selection. Out of a student body that included Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, and numerous combinations of these groups, there were only four blacks at Punahou when Barry enrolled there. “The school had essentially been all-white until the 1960s and had always had this elitist reputation,” said a former teacher at Punahou. “By the 1970s there was a lot of pressure to be more inclusive. Barry was biracial, but he was also someone who had spent years in Indonesia. Not that it mattered that much back then, but we were told he was a Muslim. It was all very exotic and appealing to the powers-that-be at the school.”
Exotic was something Barry desperately did not want to be. On the first day of school, teacher Eric Kusunoki struggled with Obama’s first name while calling the roll. “Is Bar-ack here?” he asked. When the new student said to him, “Just call me Barry,” Kusunoki nodded. “He didn’t say it like he was exasperated or anything,” Kusunoki said. “He just corrected me.”
Despite the fact that it was Gramps’s influence that managed to pave the way for Barry’s entrance into prep school, the economic power in the Dunham family had shifted to Toot. While Gramps had given up the furniture business to sell life insurance over the phone—an inherently frustrating and at times demeaning job he soon discovered he was not particularly well suited to—Toot had gradually climbed up the corporate ladder to become the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii.
It was an opportunity for her son that Ann could not pass up—not even if it meant that she would be separated from him. On a hot day in August, she and Maya waved good-bye from the gate as an airline employee took Barry’s hand and led him toward the plane that would take him home to live with his grandparents. He turned to see his mother’s lower lip tremble as it so often did when she fought back tears, although even at this young age he suspected that such displays were primarily for public consumption. Barack’s sister believed their mother’s emotional outbursts were genuine enough. “She cried a lot,” Maya said. “If she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn’t being understood in a conversation.”
Ann was, in fact, capable of keeping an emotional distance from those around her—including her own children. “She kept a certain part of herself aloof or removed,” observed one of Ann’s close friends in Indonesia, Mary Zurbuchen. “Maybe in some way this was how she managed to cross so many boundaries.”
At this point, Toot and Gramps would pick up where Ann left off when it came to shoring up Barry’s self-confidence. When one of his fellow students at Punahou asked if his African father was a cannibal and others asked to touch his hair—he refused—Barry’s grandparents urged him to simply shrug it off. Unlike
their daughter, they were less interested in stressing Barry’s ties to Africa than they were in seeing him blend in. Although Toot declared more than once that she considered Harry Belafonte “the handsomest man in the world,” her mantra was “what color you are just doesn’t matter.”
Increasingly, it did matter to Barry. When he befriended the only other black student in his grade—a girl named Coretta—on the playground, the other kids gathered around to tease them for being boyfriend and girlfriend. Embarrassed, Barry shouted for Coretta to stay away from him and even gave her a shove. Bewildered and upset, she sprinted away in tears.
In part, Barry, like any ten-year-old boy, objected to being thought of as anyone’s boyfriend. But he was also distancing himself from the only other person in class who shared his skin color. There was a part of him that did not want to be classified simply as black—a lingering result, he would later conclude, of that magazine article about the man trying to bleach his skin. In shoving Coretta, he felt guilty for having committed an act of betrayal.
Barry quickly realized that the often insensitive questions from his peers were not about to abate. Soon he was embellishing the truth. His grandfather, he told his wide-eyed classmates, was a chief, his father a prince, and the family name Obama meant “burning spear.” (Actually, Kenyatta means “burning spear.” Unfortunately, the surname Obama is from the Luo word bam, meaning “crooked” or “bent.” Barack means “blessed.”)
That first December back in Hawaii, Barry’s parents both visited—first Ann from Indonesia and, two weeks later, Barack senior from Kenya. For Barry’s father, who had just been released from the hospital after being injured in an auto accident and now walked with the aid of a cane, this visit was intended to provide some much-needed rest and relaxation.
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