A Singular Woman (31 page)

Ann had a strong sense of right and wrong about people abusing other people, Holloway had noticed. She knew wealthy women in Jakarta, some educated abroad, who “talked up a great talk about democracy,” Holloway said, then went home and gave their own servants no wages, poor food, and abysmal accommodations. He had been struck by what he described as Ann's “vituperation about high-class Javanese women treating servants badly.” That sort of thing was a fact of life in Indonesia, he said. “But she was not prepared to just slough that off and say, ‘That's how Indonesia is.' She would get angry about it.” To encounter Indonesians who felt passionately about challenging such injustices was emboldening. Holloway said, “She would, I think, feel justified in this because, ‘I'm not just a foreigner getting angry, there are people like Adi getting angry. This is an Indonesian response, not a foreign response.'”

It was an important point, Holloway added.

“There was always a danger that you would become overidentified with the problems of the people you were working with,” he said. “When that happens, you exaggerate the nature of their problems in a way that's meaningful to you but not to them. They have accommodated such problems in their view of life; for you to go on about it seems naive or foolish.”

Ann played an unusual role during that period: At a time when fledgling independent-sector organizations offered just about the only opportunity for the exercise of democratic values, Sasono told me, Ann served as a catalyst and a bridge. The Suharto government tolerated a limited amount of activity. But the organizations had a tendency, Bigalke said, “to kind of carve out their own little territory and not be all that interested in interacting with others.” Rarely did one group try to bring others together. “In a way, Ann was doing that through the various grants that she had, and then bringing people together at her home for dinners in the evening, having the kinds of social interaction that we had with the institutes that we were giving grants to,” Bigalke said. Sasono, who had been impressed as a young man by the stories of American democratic institutions as told in booklets distributed by the United States Information Service to libraries all over Indonesia, said he learned about pluralism from Ann's example.

“Bridging is not an easy job, because she has to understand the ideas of many people with different ideas,” he said. Being an anthropologist, she talked to people as partners, not “as target beneficiaries.” Her involvement was emotional, not simply intellectual. Those discussions, Sasono said, gave people ideas and courage. Many became activists in the reform movement that eventually brought the government down. A few, such as Sasono, went on to work in the governments that followed. “Development, like democracy, is a learning process,” Sasono said. “People have to learn to have freedom, on one side, and also responsibility, the rule of law, social discipline. It must be done through a social learning process. That's what we learned from both Ann Dunham as well as David Korten, because both come from a society that has learned from democracy in more than two hundred years.”

More important than projects, he said, was the selling of ideas.

In mid-1982, Ann made several field trips to tea plantations in the mountains of Java. An Indonesian organization, the All-Indonesia Labor Federation, had proposed to the Ford Foundation a project aimed at improving the welfare of female tea plantation workers. It was also intended to increase the participation of women in labor organizations. Traveling with women, some of whom she had met through Sasono, Ann talked with plantation owners, managers, and pickers. She kept detailed notes, full of observations about the meddling of managers, the hardships faced by the pickers, the comfortable lives of the owners. “She is a Sundanese and she also lives on the plantation in a large comfortable home with diesel-powered electricity, stereo and cassette collection, etc.,” Ann wrote of the owner of a plantation between Jakarta and Bandung, where heavy ash from an erupting volcano was falling. “She provided us with a lavish lunch, but attempted in various ways to obstruct our free discussions with her workers.” Managers tried to orchestrate the interviews—handpicking the workers and sitting in on the conversations. “We overcame this by rearranging chairs, splitting up and moving in amidst the workers for private conversations,” Ann wrote. The area was Islamic, and the women said they were “diligent in praying,” Ann wrote. None had ever been to Jakarta or Bandung. None had completed more than third grade. Only two out of seventy-five they met with could read or write. Most could not understand Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. “Claimed school costs prohibitive,” Ann wrote. “Includes contributions of rice to the teacher.”

Accompanying Ann on one of those trips was Saraswati Sunindyo, a young organizer newly graduated from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta with a degree in sociology. “My line about Ann is, ‘She found me in a slum when I was organizing,'” Sunindyo told me when I interviewed her in Seattle, where she was living. Sunindyo was organizing the residents of a squatter settlement in Jakarta for an organization run by Sasono. Later, she moved to Bandung, where, she said, she lived in a shack in a community of scavengers she was organizing into a cooperative. She and Ann met at a meeting of independent and grassroots organizations. “She was this big American woman,” Sunindyo remembered, referring to Ann's presence more than her size. “She is a big woman with very little ego. She's not playing the role of an expatriate—not ‘I'm an American, I read lots of books, therefore I know.' She worked for the Ford Foundation, but she didn't act like someone who was going to dictate what Ford wanted.” Instead, Sunindyo said, Ann “would listen and listen and listen. She was interested in how people are doing things. Rather than, ‘Okay, this is a story from another place that I read about. . . .' We all read lots of books, but we don't have to show it. That's Ann. She saw potential in people. And when they needed a push, she really pushed.”

In September 1982, Sunindyo traveled with Ann and several younger women to a plantation in the mountains southeast of Bandung. They were housed for the night in a Dutch-period guesthouse with an antique wood-burning stove and a veranda overlooking the adjacent valley and what Ann described as the “tea-covered hills beyond.” The bathroom Ann shared with one other woman, she wrote in her field notes, was the size of the bathroom used by many of the workers, as well as their children. To speak with workers, Ann and the others were taken to where women were picking tea. Sunindyo, wanting not simply to gather information but to help out, fell in beside one picker and began picking with her, dropping tea leaves into her basket. The skin on the faces of the pickers was cracked from the weather and the cold.

“And politely, very politely, Ann asked one of the women, ‘May I see what's in your lunch box?'” Sunindyo remembered.

There was only rice and
sambal,
a paste made from ground red chili peppers.

“So, we asked, ‘What else are you going to eat?'” Sunindyo recalled.

“The leaves,” the woman said.

The trip to the tea plantation with Ann was important to Sunindyo. “For us, young women at that time, it was really empowering—in the sense that we were learning from her,” she said. “We just watched, said, ‘Okay, that's it, that's how.'” To have Ann recognize their commitment and treat them as friends emboldened them to return to their work in their organizations “knowing that we are in this together,” Sunindyo said.

“There is Ann, who works for the Ford Foundation,” she said. “We see Ann as one of us.”

Ann's circle of friends in Jakarta kept expanding. There were anthropologists, artists, activists, academics, curators, writers, development consultants, and filmmakers, among others. Yang Suwan, a Chinese-Indonesian anthropologist educated in Germany and newly returned to Jakarta, had done studies on women in development in West Sumatra and East Kalimantan. She and Ann shared a fascination with Indonesian crafts and textiles. Rens Heringa was studying a group of isolated villages on the northeast coast of Java where women made batik from hand-spun locally grown cotton. In October 1981, in the hot period before the rains broke, she and Ann took a three-day car trip along the northeast coast of Java to visit those villages. They stopped along the way to explore a series of saline ponds where the owners, many of them of Arab descent, trapped shrimp and harvested salt. Wahyono Martowikrido, the archaeologist whom Ann had known in the early and mid-1970s, was back at the National Museum in Jakarta. Ann Hawkins, who had known Ann in Semarang, had moved to Jakarta to work for UNICEF, around the corner from the Ford Foundation offices. By crossing an old Dutch canal on jerry-rigged boards, she and Ann would meet from time to time for lunch. Pete Vayda, living in a Ford bungalow near Ann's, dropped in regularly for breakfast and rode to work in Ann's car. Her long dining room table was a gathering place, often arrayed with packages of homemade Indonesian snacks. “Please, take these,” Yang Suwan remembered Ann saying. “You'll help the poor women if you eat the snacks.” Often, Ann had guests. After Vayda introduced her to a graduate student of his who was doing fieldwork in East Kalimantan, the student, Timothy Jessup, became a regular guest when he was in town. Was there a place in Jakarta to play squash? Vayda asked Ann. Soon she had arranged, through Lolo, for Vayda to become a member of the Petroleum Club.

Ann could be found at parties at the East Jakarta home of Ong Hok Ham, a Chinese-Indonesian, Yale-educated historian and public intellectual. Newspaper editors, academics, artists, foreign reporters, foundation program officers, and diplomats with duty-free privileges were regularly invited. The parties served as a kind of salon and a source of inside information and political gossip. “He collected people he found interesting,” said John McGlynn, an American translator of Indonesian literature who first encountered Ann in the early 1980s. “He wanted intellect, he wanted argument. I was told you can count on Ann for some of that.” Ann was a member of a group McGlynn referred to as “the white women in tablecloths”—expatriates with a taste for wraparound batik skirts. Ann's laugh was full-throated and spontaneous, “a cross between a chuckle and a neigh.” But her speaking voice was soft—as Heringa put it, “almost Javanese. It was as if she was telling fairy tales. In that way, she had adapted fully.” On several occasions, she gave lectures on topics such as textiles and Indonesian ironworking traditions as part of a series organized by the Ganesha Society, a group of mostly expatriate volunteers at the National Museum. At other times, she could be found at exhibitions and plays at the Taman Ismail Marzuki Arts Center, where some of the performances were known to be, as James Fox put it, “pushing the edge of things.”

“If you knew Indonesian culture, if you knew what was being said, you could recognize the game,” Fox said. “But you had to know the language well enough, you had to know the way things were being communicated. Of course, Ann did. Her Indonesian was excellent; it was almost like a native's. She could pick those things up. So either at events like that or parties we'd have with Indonesians, you could participate. In the expatriate community, you would almost have to spell it out and they'd never get it. You'd tell them the simplest thing, and it would be a revelation. Ann was one of those rare birds who knew how things were. She had an edge to her. She was feisty. She had a huge sense of humor, I thought. It was honed to be subtle. She could make a joke without appearing to. It was innuendo.”

It was, perhaps, almost Javanese.

“Are you aware that our friends are all people living in more than one culture?” Ann marveled to Yang Suwan on one occasion, being driven home one evening in Jakarta. “We are so lucky to know both cultures. This problem about ethnicity, about race—it is not a problem for us.”

Ann's closest female friend was Julia Suryakusuma, the “feminist and femme fatale.” On the surface, the two women made an unlikely pair. A diplomat's daughter born in India and educated at the American high school in Rome, Suryakusuma was tall and beautiful, and twelve years younger than Ann. Colorful and outspoken, she prided herself on being, as she put it, “naughty and rebellious.” She had married Ami Priyono, an Indonesian film director who was fifteen years older, when she was barely twenty. James Fox considered her “some of the best company in Jakarta,” and Rens Heringa described her to me as “a person one gets into trouble with.” Ann was calm and measured. Julia was volatile. “The ideas were squirting out of her imagination,” Timothy Jessup said. “It was interesting to see them talk, because Julia would be waving her hands around. Ann would be calm, and Julia would be getting very excited. She liked to make an impression and shock people. Ann liked to make an impression in a different way.” Yet they were both bright and unconventional, and not terribly interested in conforming. “Ann used to say that I was from another planet,” Suryakusuma told me. “Well, it takes one to know one.” They shared a scholarly and personal interest in the condition of Indonesian women. They occasionally fought over handicrafts. They went to parties together, hung out, critiqued each other's relationships with men. (“You know, Julia, you're overqualified for him,” Ann once told her.) “We shared our innermost secrets, our fears and desires,” Suryakusuma told me. The friendship was intimate and turbulent. “She put up with a lot of shit from me,” Suryakusuma said. There were periods when they did not speak.

During one of those periods some years later, Ann sent Suryakusuma a letter that, at least at this distance, seems remarkable in its blend of frankness, respect, and bruised affection.