A Singular Woman (14 page)

On the night of September 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta in what the army quickly characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Though immediately quashed, the incident unleashed a bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and suspected sympathizers were slaughtered in the following months, often by civilian vigilantes with the support of the army. As Adam Schwarz described the events in
A Nation in Waiting,
people were killed by knife and bayonet, their bodies often “maimed and decapitated and dumped in rivers. At one point officials in Surabaya in East Java complained to Army officials that the rivers running into Surabaya were choked with bodies.” The Central Intelligence Agency described the massacres as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”

On the serene campus of the University of Hawai‘i, Indonesian students were summoned to be questioned by people whom Sylvia Krausse remembered as visiting representatives of the Indonesian government. A fellow student warned her to show up “or something will happen to your parents.” There were written questions followed by questioning in person. “We were there all day,” she said. “They were looking for Chinese and communist connections.”

Like many students studying outside the country in that period, Lolo was called back to Indonesia. He and Ann had married on March 5, 1964, shortly after she divorced Obama. Lolo had received his master's degree in geography three months later, but Ann, an anthropology major, would not receive her undergraduate degree until 1967. Andrew P. Vayda, a professor of anthropology and ecology who was visiting the University of Hawai‘i in that period, remembered meeting Lolo for the first time at the university in the spring of 1966, then visiting him on a trip to Jakarta late that summer. The two of them traveled together to Bandung, once a Dutch colonial garrison in the northern foothills of the Bandung Plateau, surrounded by volcanic peaks, hot springs, and tea plantations. The inflation rate was seven hundred percent, and the country felt on edge. On one leg of the trip, they encountered tanks rumbling down the main road. “He and all the Indonesians, you could see the fear on their faces—that something was going to happen,” Vayda remembered. Throughout the trip, Lolo made a point of trying the spiciest and most exotic foods and the most decrepit toilets. “How do you think Ann would react to that?” Lolo would ask.

“That was the first I had heard of Ann,” Vayda remembered. “He said he was going to bring her there.”

T
he luncheon invitation was delivered by bicycle one morning in early 1971. Elizabeth Bryant, an American in her early thirties, was living in a converted rice storage facility in the city of Yogyakarta in Central Java. Her husband, Nevin, was doing research in Indonesia on an East-West Center grant. Like pretty much everyone in Indonesia in those years, they had no running water, no plumbing, no telephone service. To brush their teeth, they pumped water from a well, boiled it on a single kerosene burner, and spat it off the front porch. Their three servants, living in what had been the guardhouse, had fenced a five-foot pit in the yard for use as their toilet. Bushes served as a clothesline for the Bryant baby's diapers. Life may not have been easy, but it was good. The Bryants' house was next to the
kraton,
the walled compound surrounding the palace of the sultans of Yogyakarta, the lively center of traditional Javanese arts and culture. In the evening, the aqueous sounds of the gamelan practice drifted out of the compound; neighbors dropped by to lure the Bryants out to an all-night shadow-puppet performance based on tales derived from the Hindu epic the
Mahabharata.
On this particular morning, the invitation to Elizabeth Bryant came by messenger from an older American woman in Yogyakarta whose husband was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Jakarta office had asked her to extend her hospitality to a young American and her nine-year-old son, visiting from their home in Jakarta. Could Mrs. Bryant join them for lunch? the older woman wanted to know. The guest of honor was showing her son around Java before sending him back to Hawaii for school. He was half Kenyan and born in Hawaii, Bryant recalled her hostess telling her in advance. Bryant knew enough about Hawaii to know that a half-African child would have been a rarity. Are you sure? she asked.

It was a memorable lunch—one that Bryant was able to describe in detail when I reached her in Southern California thirty-eight years later. Ann Soetoro arrived at the house with the young Barack Obama. She was dressed in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric—not the sort of sundress that Mrs. Bryant had noticed that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. She instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she had brought along. She was sending him back to Hawaii for an English-language education, Bryant remembered her saying. She was also deciding whether to go back herself. “She said, ‘What would you do?'” Bryant told me. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.' She said, ‘Why?' I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn't agree with me.” Ann had left her infant daughter, Maya, in Jakarta with a servant—a choice that startled Bryant, unaccustomed as she was to Indonesian child-rearing. She wondered, too, why Ann, with an Indonesian husband, would consider moving to the United States. Over lunch, Barry sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant's son, who was thirteen months old. After lunch, the group took a walk near Gadjah Mada University, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction, ducking behind a wall and shouting racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodgeball “with unseen players,” Bryant remembered. Ann did not seem visibly to react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he's okay,” she remembered Ann saying. “He's used to it.”

“I'll tell you what both of us felt,” Bryant told me. “We were floored that she'd bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks. It was unusually bad. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, they're more racist than the U.S., by far.'” At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way—for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.

“I think this is one reason he's so
halus,
” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “It's because of his Indonesian background. I think he's a mixture of cultures, and that makes him more worldly. He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans—being
halus,
being patient, calm, a good listener. If you're not a good listener in Indonesia, you'd better leave.”

Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. After centuries of domination by the Dutch, followed by Japanese occupation and a four-year revolution, the 17, 500 islands that make up what is now Indonesia had become an independent nation in 1949. By the early 1960s, inflation was soaring, foreign investment had stagnated, and poverty was widespread. People waited in long lines to buy basics, such as kerosene and rice. The Communist Party had grown into the third largest in the world. In 1963, Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, suspended elections. The following year, he declared “the year of
vivere pericoloso
,” borrowing the Italian phrase for “living dangerously” from a speech by Mussolini. The details of the September 30, 1965, coup and counter-coup remain in dispute, as do the particulars of the slaughter that followed. There is disagreement over who planned the attack on the generals and for what purpose; and estimates of the number of communists, suspected communists, and others killed in the ensuing bloodbath range from 100,000 to more than a million. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of
A History of Modern Indonesia
, militias went door-to-door in villages in Bali, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. The army became the dominant institution in the country. Soldiers were ubiquitous, armed with machine guns on buses and trains and in public buildings. Major-General Suharto, who took power when Sukarno was sidelined, exercised tight control over internal security and community life. Trials and imprisonments dragged on for years. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened. Bill Collier, who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent fifteen years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers would be told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. He recalled how a well-dressed stranger knocked on the door to his house in Bandung in 1968, at a time when many educated people even remotely suspected of communist ties had lost their jobs. The man's children were hungry, and he had no food in the house. Could Collier spare some rice? he wanted to know. Four decades later, slumped in a chair in the extravagantly appointed lobby of a hotel in Jakarta where we met, Collier recalled saying no—an act of such stupidity, he said, that the memory haunted him to that day. “I have wished a thousand times that I had given him all the rice in the house,” he said.

The sixteen-million-man megalopolis of glass bank towers, shopping malls, and traffic-choked boulevards where I met Collier was nothing like the city that greeted twenty-five-year-old Ann Soetoro and her six-year-old son. Jakarta was a tapestry of villages—low-rise and sprawling—interwoven with forests, paddy fields, and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called
kampung
s. Central Jakarta had just one high-rise hotel—built with war reparations from the Japanese. A few neighborhoods, such as Menteng and Kebayoran Baru, were handsome and leafy, laid out meticulously by the Dutch. But squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities, and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, canals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Cars, buses, and motorcycles were scarce. Denizens of the city traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called
becak
s. Power outages were a fact of life. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. “Secretaries spent hours dialing and redialing phone numbers just to get through,” said Halimah Brugger, an American hired in 1968 to teach music to the children of foreign oil company executives and missionaries at the Jakarta International School. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. “I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a
becak,
wearing a short skirt,” Brugger said. For adventurous travelers who washed up in Jakarta after hitchhiking across Java, there were no maps or guidebooks. The National Museum, stuffed with antiquities dating back to the ninth century, had languished for a decade. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gastrointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur. In the open-air markets, where one shopped for food, bargaining was essential. “If you knew how to bargain, you could get a foreigner price down to a Chinese price,” said Halimah Bellows, another American who lived in Jakarta in the early 1970s. “But you would never get an Indonesian price.” Westerners needed to learn one cardinal virtue: patience.

But like Yogyakarta for Elizabeth Bryant, Jakarta had a magical charm. People who were children in the city in that period, including Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public address systems, and the signature sounds called or rung out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the
kampung
s. Bureaucrats whiled away their days amid the faded splendor of Dutch colonial buildings. Tea was still served on the portico of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned languidly in the mid-afternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. “Jakarta was very peaceful in those years,” said Samardal Manan, who arrived in 1967 at age twenty-five, a young man from a traditional Muslim family in a village in West Sumatra. The cost of living was low, and the city felt friendly and safe. As an Indonesian with a college degree, he had little trouble finding a job; soon after that, he could afford a house. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. “I was quite naive about the whole thing,” said Halimah Brugger. “It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered.” Indonesians welcomed Americans, she said. Within a week of arrival, she was paying the equivalent of a few dollars a week, plus rice and soap, for a maid who made her breakfast, ironed her clothes, and worked for her seven days a week. It was in some ways a wonderful place to raise children. Javanese families crave, love, and indulge children. They are a collective responsibility of not just parents but siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles—the entire community. “It was like the whole world was taking care of the children,” said Brugger, who raised three. By 1969, inflation was under control and the economy was improving. The government launched a series of five-year plans aimed at modernizing the country. Foreign investment resumed, and Indonesia was soon accepting more foreign aid than any country other than India. Years later, many would look back on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a honeymoon period, Vickers writes. Restrictions on the press eased, a youth culture flowered, literary and cultural life thrived. For a few years, Indonesia seemed to have emerged from darkness into a time of hope. It was, some later commented, Indonesia's Prague Spring.