A Singular Woman (25 page)

So she returned to Honolulu for several months that fall. In a haunting scene from
Dreams from My Father
, Obama describes a confrontation between mother and son during that visit. A friend of his has been arrested for drug possession. Ann confronts Obama, with the intensity of a parent fearing that the opportunity to influence her nearly adult child is running out. His grades are dropping, she says; he has yet to start his college applications. Isn't he being a bit cavalier about his future? In a manner at first patronizing, then hostile, he brushes Ann off. He tries an old gambit—a smile, a few reassuring words, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. When Ann is not appeased, he informs her that he is thinking of not going away for college, just staying in Hawaii, taking a few classes, working part-time. She cuts him off: He could get into any college he wanted, she tells him, if he would make a little effort. He cannot just sit around like a good-time Charlie, counting on luck. “I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son's destiny . . .” Obama writes. “I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”

Instead of shouting, he laughs.

“A good-time Charlie, huh? Well, why not? Maybe that's what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn't even go to college.”

Obama realizes, from Ann's expression, that he has stumbled upon her worst fear.

“‘Is that what you're worried about?' I asked. ‘That I'll end up like Gramps?'” Then, having done his best to sabotage her faith in him, Obama walks out of the room.

One can only imagine how Ann took that exchange. She came from a family of teachers, though neither of her parents had received a college degree. Her mother, regretting her own decisions, had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that Ann, then Barry, would have the education and the opportunities that she had missed. The University of Hawai‘i had thrown wide Ann's horizons—emotionally, intellectually, and professionally. For Barry to have the same chances, she had accepted their living half a world apart. She could not have helped worrying about the toll of that aching separation on the connection between them. Ann had the highest expectations for her son; she had emphasized from his earliest years the value of education and hard work. Now, to spite her, he was professing to reject both.

What was Ann's “experiment”—as Obama referred to it in the book?

When I asked President Obama that question, he explained that he had written the scene in the voice of his cynical, sarcastic, teenage self. His mother thought he was special, he believed at the time; she imagined that the values she had inculcated would make him the person she wanted him to be. But he was angry, full of self-doubt, and unconvinced that her efforts were worthwhile.

Who was the person she wanted him to be? I asked him.

“You know, sort of a cross between Einstein, Gandhi, and Belafonte, right?” he said, laughing. “I think she wanted me to be the man that she probably would have liked my grandfather to be, that she would have liked my father to have turned out to be.”

Then he added, “You know, somebody who was strong and honest and doing worthwhile things for the world.”

T
he village of Ungaran was a speck in the mountains above the port of Semarang on the north coast of Central Java. A two-lane road between Semarang and Yogyakarta wound steeply through terraced rice fields and past the village. Trucks broke down or crashed so often that the road was said to be inhabited by spirits. There was a village square, some food stalls, a market, and a movie house that screened second-rate Hollywood movies. Ann Hawkins, a young American, was living outside Ungaran, working with an Indonesian organization, training village people in organic farming. To reach the training center from the road, one walked a mile along a footpath through paddy fields. One day in late 1979 or early 1980, Hawkins looked up from the ditch in which she was mixing compost and dirt, and was startled to see a Western man and woman watching. The woman, porcelain-skinned and smiling, sunglasses parked on the top of her head, was Ann Soetoro. The man was an official of an international development organization. “What are you doing?” one of them asked Hawkins. She was wondering the same thing. White people never came to Ungaran, she was thinking. Especially white women.

In early 1979, Ann had moved from Yogyakarta to Semarang, the ancient trading port that is the capital of Central Java. She had completed her fieldwork, for the time being, and had drained the last of her East-West Center grant. Barry, in his final year at Punahou, would be applying to colleges; Maya, still being educated at home, would soon need to be enrolled in a school. Even with Madelyn Dunham's bank salary subsidizing Barry's education, Ann needed money. “Please don't forget to put me down for assistanting spring term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey from Java in the summer of 1978, announcing her intention to return to Honolulu in time for her favorite holiday, Halloween. “I'm going to be really broke when I get back.” But rather than settle down as a teaching assistant at the university, she returned to Java in January. “Although I finished fieldwork at the end of 1978, family finances and the exhaustion of my EWC grant prevented me from returning immediately to Honolulu for write-up and comprehensives,” she explained later in a progress report to the anthropology department. Instead, she accepted a job as a consultant in international development on a project in Central Java funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The job came with a salary, a house in Semarang, a car and driver, and home leave. She persuaded the University of Hawai‘i to grant her an initial nine-month leave of absence. “Well, now that I'm working I'm hoping to clear all debts soon,” Ann wrote to Dewey several months into the job.

Her reasons for taking it were not exclusively financial. The project, the first of its kind in Indonesia, was designed to build the capacity of provincial planning offices to do development planning in direct response to the needs of poor communities. “It was perfect for her,” Ann's friend Nancy Peluso told me. “To be able to find something where she could directly apply the knowledge that she had been collecting in a very good way, and at the same time get enough of an income to maybe start paying for some of these things and saving up for college.” The prospect of solving problems, not just describing them, appealed to Ann. After a fellow anthropologist wrote to her jokingly that she had heard that Ann had “sold your soul to the large international organizations,” Ann apparently mounted a persuasive defense. The friend wrote back, “I must say that your job with AID sounds fascinating and challenging. . . . I can well understand the excitement of doing something practical rather than theoretical and actually working in the field of development rather than theorizing it and criticizing it from the safety of a U.S. university. In addition, I know what you mean when you describe the people you work with (or at least some of the people in your team) as being dynamic, progressive, social minded and involved.”

The project in Java represented a new approach. Development agencies had tended to operate by lending governments money for large-scale infrastructure, such as water systems and roads. When the work was completed and the agency moved on, the new facilities were often not maintained. By the late 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development was moving toward a different approach. Projects would be multifaceted—say, a little infrastructure, some skills training, some rural electrification, some microcredit—and decisions would emanate less from the top down than from the bottom up. “The idea was that we should embark upon programs that involved local communities, and we should be responsive to their needs,” Carl A. Dutto, the rural development officer for the agency in Jakarta at that time, told me. “The theory behind it was if you're working that way, it's sustainable, because people want it.” There was increasing attention, too, to addressing the problems of the rural poor. After the upheaval of the 1960s, the Suharto government had set about tackling rural poverty, which was seen as a cause of social and political unrest. The government enlisted the banking system to diversify the economy and encourage rural development. It would begin setting up credit programs to channel money to rural entrepreneurs, promoting small industries and reducing dependence on farming. To understand poor communities better, some development agencies began hiring anthropologists like Dutto, who joined the Agency for International Development in 1976 from a teaching job at the University of Nairobi. Their job became articulating the community's perspective.

The project for which Ann was hired was an experiment in what was called bottom-up development. Decisions would not be made by the central government in Jakarta; instead, the development agency and its contractor, a firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, that did economic development projects around the world, would work with the planning offices in the two provinces where the project was based. The aim was to cultivate the provincial offices' capacity to come up with and carry out small-scale projects in response to local demand. Dutto, who oversaw the project from 1978 to 1983, said it began with the preparation of detailed profiles of each province and district, based on social and economic data, sometimes gathered for that purpose by local universities. There were meetings with village residents to determine what their communities needed—for example, rural roads, a market for selling their vegetables, higher-yielding varieties of rice. Initial meetings in Kudus, a center of the clove-flavored
kretek
cigarette industry, and Jepara, a wood-carving center, revealed a need for access to credit, especially for women. As a result, Dutto said, credit for small industries became one component of the development project. Jerry Silverman, whom the contracting firm Development Alternatives Inc. hired straight from a similar project in Ethiopia to head the one in Semarang, told me, “The project was built on the premises that DAI had been advocating and which I believed in. This was, ‘We're really going to show the world what can be done with a bottom-up, demand-responsive process.' It was the new model.”

That model embodied a particular attitude toward the poor.

“You know the old adage ‘You give a man a fish . . .'?” Silverman asked me. Here is the adage: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The project in Central Java, Silverman said, was about neither. Here is how he explained it. According to one view, the poor are charity cases and we need to give them stuff. (That would be the fish.) According to another view, the poor are not as technically sophisticated as we are, so we need to teach them stuff. (That would be how to fish.) But there is a third possibility. That is, the poor know what they are doing, but circumstances prevent them from escaping poverty. “How do we go in and help them remove an obstacle, reduce a constraint, make a technical connection they didn't understand?” Silverman said. “It's not like, ‘We're smart, they're dumb. We can tell them how to do it.' It's beyond the teach-him-how-to-fish. It's ‘Understand that he knows how to fish, but maybe what he needs is somebody who will allow him access to fish, or a stronger line so it won't break.' That's a step further.”

When Ann arrived on the north coast of Java in early 1979 at the age of thirty-six, she was one of relatively few Westerners in Semarang. The city, a centuries-old trading port and commercial hub, bore traces of its colorful, cosmopolitan past. There were Chinese temples and shop houses, an Arab quarter, one of the oldest remaining Christian churches in Java. There was a Dutch colonial administration building, which had served as a refuge for Javanese independence fighters during the Japanese occupation. Dilapidated and hot, Old Semarang spilled across the flatlands of the coastal plain. In the hills rising behind the city, expatriates lived in neighborhoods such as Candi Baru, where grander houses and gardens laid out by the Dutch enjoyed panoramic views of the coastline. “They lived in their own expatriate ghetto,” said Clare Blenkinsop, who moved to Semarang with Richard Holloway, her husband and the country director for Oxfam, the international relief and development organization, in 1979. It was possible very quickly to sort “the sheep from the goats, the serious versus the less serious development people,” Holloway told me. You knew by whether or not they learned to speak Indonesian and by whether they felt any empathy toward village people or simply saw them as grist for their projects. There was an active chapter of an expatriate running and beer-drinking club founded in Kuala Lumpur called the Hash House Harriers. “I must say, we had a philosophical objection to wealthy expatriates pouring beer over each other's heads in the presence of villagers who don't have threepence ha'penny,” Blenkinsop said.