A Singular Woman (30 page)

“Okay, sport,” the consultant countered cheerily.

On another occasion, Ann challenged a table full of Indonesian activists, all men, with whom she was dining, because she felt they were being rude to the waitress.

“Excuse me,” a younger Indonesian friend recalled Ann saying. “You guys make me feel uncomfortable. I'm sitting here and you're doing nothing to me and yet I feel badly. How do you think she felt?”

What drove her?

In the eyes of her children, there was something soft and a bit naive about their mother. In
Dreams from My Father
, she comes off as a romantic, a dreamer, an innocent abroad. Amid the secrets, the unacknowledged violence, the corruption of Jakarta, Ann is “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” Twenty years after the end of her first marriage, her chin trembles when she speaks to her college-age son about his father. Her wistful expression at a screening of
Black Orpheus
seems, to her son, a window into “the unreflective heart of her youth.” In later life, she travels the world, working in villages in Asia and Africa, “helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world's economy,” as Obama describes her work. She stares at the moon and forages through markets of Delhi or Marrakech “for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye.” At times, she seems almost childlike.

Maya, too, described her mother to me as what she called “a softie”—a person of acute sensitivity and empathy who would be overwhelmed with feeling at the sight or even the prospect of other people's suffering. In the company of her family, she might weep at a newscast, Maya said, and she could barely watch movies in which children were hurt. “She could be naive when speaking about this country and what people were ready for . . .” Maya said. “There was that sense—like, ‘Why can't we all get along?' And, you know, there was a touch of the flower child in her.” Perhaps Ann was simply an optimist; perhaps she refused to be cynical. But, Maya said, “it seemed perhaps a little naive at times—this failure to comprehend that not everyone would necessarily have good motives or benevolent intentions.”

When I asked President Obama if he saw his mother as naively idealistic, as his book seemed to suggest, he paused a while before answering, then said, “Yes, I do and did see her that way, in part—but not in a pejorative sense. I mean, my mother was very sophisticated and smart. In her field of study and her work, she was deadly serious about what she was doing, willing to take on a lot of sacred cows, and really committed. So as a professional, she knew her stuff. There was a sweetness about her and a willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt, and sort of a generosity of spirit that at times was naive. . . . Now, I like that about her. That's not a criticism; there's a wonderful quality about that. But there's no doubt that there were times when she was taken advantage of in certain situations. And she didn't mind being taken advantage of. Part of the idealism was, ‘You know what? If somebody makes me pay five times what the going rate is at the market for this little knickknack that I think is neat, that's fine.' There's an idealism and naiveté embedded in that. But I don't see that as a criticism. I see that as part of what made her special—and also part of what made her resilient. Because I think she could bounce back from disappointments in a lot of ways.”

Friends and colleagues described her differently. Many remembered Ann as tough, sharp, and worldly. Most said they had never seen her cry. She was more open than many people, both intellectually and emotionally. She was unusually curious: She wanted to understand the reasons for things. At one point, for example, she became interested in the relationship between Indonesians and the relatives some of them exploited as servants, Pete Vayda remembered. “It was the kind of thing she was very interested in—some kind of injustice based on something structural or cultural,” he said. “It was not a matter of saying these were evil people, but something systematic about exploiting poor relatives from the countryside.” Her convictions, he said, arose less out of emotional responses than out of empirical data. Her sense of injustice was sharp but informed—not a sentimental reaction. He could not recall having heard Ann “give any passionate speeches about the injustices of the world.” She would just comment, rather matter-of-factly, “I'm looking into this.” She was fully aware of corruption, the government restrictions, the cynicism of elites. She knew all about people exploiting one another, and she did not romanticize any of those things. At the same time, she believed it was not impossible to make life in Indonesia better. “She saw the good and the bad everywhere,” Vayda said. “She was smart about it. She realized these were things she had to accept if she wanted to make a difference.” He said he had no evidence that correcting injustices was what drove her—but if something could be corrected, that was a bonus.

“Other people talk about her warmth and compassion and generosity,” Vayda said, with some impatience, reflecting on characterizations of Ann in the media during the presidential campaign. “All that's true. But I haven't seen that much about how funny she was—and how hardheaded.”

What was striking, James Fox said, was not her passion but her authority.

“Ann had lived how many years with poor people?” he said. “She didn't have to parade it, it was just there. When she talked, she talked as if she knew the villages of Java. You knew she knew. It was a kind of mission, but she didn't put up a flag to parade it.” At the same time, he said, “she just couldn't stand some of the bullshit that comes from an expatriate who's been in the country a week and knows the answer to everything. Ann could be very tough. She didn't suffer fools who pretended to know what they didn't know.”

To some in the Ford Foundation office, she came off as more of an advocate.

“She was a very tough person, and I mean that in a good sense,” said Terance Bigalke, a Ford program officer in Jakarta. At Ford, she did not go out of her way to “nuance” her positions, he said. “In an office setting, you often say things where you're making your point but very carefully choosing your words,” he said. “That wasn't her style.” She seemed to believe people should be able to take the full force of her opinions; she was ready to do the same in return. Most people seemed to respect her for it, Bigalke said, even if they might not have taken such an undiplomatic stand. They may even have found it endearing. “They could feel how passionately she felt about the issues she was working with,” he said. “It wasn't an academic exercise for her, it was something she was really committed to.”

Or as Tom Kessinger put it, “It wasn't just a professional job. It was something a little more personal.”

One of the Indonesians with whom Ann worked most closely was Adi Sasono, the son of Muslim social activists from Pekalongan on the north coast of Central Java, who had been a student leader at the time of the overthrow of Sukarno. Trained as an engineer and educated in Holland, Sasono had worked in the corporate sector until the mid-1970s, when he had quit and, with a group of young intellectuals who saw themselves as Islamic reformers, formed an organization to explore alternative approaches to development in Indonesia. By the time Ann met him, Sasono was the director of the Institute for Development Studies, an independent organization with a full-time staff of thirty. He was organizing squatters and scavengers in the cities and encouraging the growth of rural cooperatives. Sasono, who would go on to become a minister in the Indonesian government after the fall of Suharto in the late 1990s, wanted to find ways of allowing “development without displacement”; he wanted to integrate the sprawling informal economy into city planning. His ideas were so attractive, Richard Holloway of Oxfam told me, that many of the international-development people wanted to work with him. “Of all the Indonesians I worked with, he was the strongest in terms of a conceptual framework for what he was doing,” said David Korten, who was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Indonesia at the time and has since become a critic of economic and corporate globalization. Korten recalled “how far he was ahead of most of us in understanding the dysfunctions of the ‘modern' development sector and why it so inexorably increases the marginalization of the majority of the population. He saw the bigger picture that most of us were missing.”

It was assumed, Sasono suggested, that rapid industrialization and the exploitation of natural resources were the best route to economic development and high employment. But industrialization was failing to absorb the growing labor force in the cities. Poverty was increasing, and the gap between rich and poor was widening. The benefits of growth were not trickling down. In Jakarta, people were squatting in cemeteries, encamped beside garbage dumps, crowded in shanties alongside railroad tracks. The government was demolishing makeshift settlements to make way for high-rise buildings and the widening of roads, and the police were confiscating pedicabs to clear streets for cars. There was talk of shipping vagrants to a nearby island. Shantytowns, demolished one day, were being reborn the next. “They were doing constant battle with authorities,” Bigalke remembered. “Police were needing to be bribed to allow people to continue setting up their stands on the street.” Sasono made the case for a broad-based, decentralized approach to growth—“for the people, by the people, and with the people.” Even without government help, he believed, the poor would prosper on the strength of their energy and wits. Sasono was a figure not unlike Saul Alinsky, the author of
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
and the father of community organizing in the United States, Richard Holloway told me. Alinsky wrote that book, he said, for those “who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.” Community organizing, of course, was the line of work that Barack Obama would take up in Chicago just a couple of years after Ann began working with Sasono in Jakarta. Alinsky's phrase, about wanting to change the world, echoes what Craig Miner, the historian, had told me about Kansans—that they were people who said, “You're not okay, I'm not okay, and I know how to fix it.”

Through Sasono, Ann widened her circle of acquaintances to include a diverse group of labor activists, reformers, people in cultural organizations, and organizers from the slums. Her fieldwork in the handicraft villages and on the provincial development project in Central Java had convinced her, like Sasono, of the vitality of the informal sector, and the value of development from the bottom up. “She was very interested in demonstrating what a significant contribution to the overall economy the informal sector was making,” Bigalke told me. That way, the informal sector might be encouraged by the authorities rather than stifled. Ann and Sasono, along with others, traveled together to Malang in East Java to visit the largest grassroots women's cooperative in Indonesia, the Setia Budi Women's Cooperative, which had been set up exclusively to meet the financial needs of women. They attended seminars and workshops in Jakarta, Semarang, and Bali. “They got along well together,” said her close friend Rens Heringa. “With him, she could really talk—politics and social and economic problems, that kind of thing.” Holloway said, “She was friendly with Adi professionally and possibly personally. Of course, you don't express emotion in Java. So whatever emotion they had was always concealed. They hung around a lot together. It would have been talked about a bit. But no big deal.” Through Sasono, Ann told Holloway, “I'm able to find really impressive people that I respect greatly, who are Indonesians and not privileged foreigners like myself, but who are working with down-and-out and poor people.”