A Singular Woman (33 page)

One evening, shortly before dinnertime at the house in Kebayoran Baru, a group of young activists was gathered around Ann's dining room table, working on a project, Yang Suwan recalled. There was a knock at the door. Yang went to open it and found a man she had never seen before with his arms full of jackfruits and packages. He was there to see Maya, he announced. When Maya ran in and hugged him, Yang was startled. She glanced back into the dining room. Ann's expression had grown uncharacteristically dark. “I had never seen Ann's face so changed, so not friendly,” Yang said. When Lolo left after ten minutes, the young people chided Ann, saying she should have invited him to dinner. After all, he was Maya's father. “She looked so annoyed,” Yang remembered. “She didn't want to talk.”

Ann's visits with Barry were inevitably infrequent. When she went to work for Ford in early 1981, he was in his sophomore year at Occidental College in Los Angeles. That fall, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City. At least twice during her nearly four years at Ford, Ann arranged for him to fly to Indonesia to visit. “I would like to use my educational travel for dependent children this summer to have my son, Barry, come out to visit us,” she wrote to Kessinger in May 1981. Barry spent July in Jakarta, then went on to Pakistan to visit a friend from Occidental on his way back to the United States. A week before leaving Jakarta, he sent a telegram to Nancy Peluso, Ann's friend, who had offered him her apartment on West 109th Street in Manhattan: “DO WANT THE APARTMENT WILL ARRIVE AT LATEST AUGUST 24 IN CASE COMPLICATIONS WIRE MOM.” The following summer, Ann and Maya visited him in New York City. And in May 1983, after graduating from Columbia, he flew again to Indonesia for a month, stopping in Los Angeles and Singapore to visit friends. “After Barry arrives I would like to take a week or ten days off,” Ann wrote to Kessinger in April. “If I can get reservations (this is right after the eclipse and right after JIS gets out), we would like to go to Bali.”

Richard Holloway, Ann's friend from Semarang, recalled arriving to stay at Ann's house and being startled to encounter Barry for the first time.

“There was this young black lad pumping iron in her garden,” Holloway remembered. “Very good-looking, great body, polite, personable.”

“‘This is my son, Barry,'” he recalled Ann saying.

“‘Nice to meet you.'”

Women, however, told me that Ann spoke often to them about Barry.

“Never did we get together where we didn't hear, right up front, the first thing, what Barry was doing,” said Georgia McCauley. If Ann had received a letter from him, Yang Suwan said, she would be in a good mood all day. Saraswati Sunindyo, who had described Ann as “a big person with little ego,” said that little bit of ego pertained to her son. She would show his photograph “and say how handsome he is,” Paschetta Sarmidi, Ann's secretary, said. “She spoke of Barack Obama a lot of times a day.”

“You married an African?” Sarmidi recalled asking.

“Yes.”

“Is he very black?”

“Yes!”

“How is Barry? Does he have his father's skin?”

“Yes.”

“Is it like my skin?”

“No,” Ann answered. “Your skin is like a Hispanic. But Barack Senior, he is very black. Barry is very handsome. And he is very smart, Paschetta. My boy is brilliant.”

By February 1984, during his first year out of college, Barry was working for Business International Corporation, a small newsletter-publishing and research firm that helped countries with foreign operations understand overseas markets. Ann reported on his progress to Dewey.

In November 1982, after receiving a call from an aunt in Kenya telling him that his father had been killed in a car accident in Nairobi, Barry telephoned Ann in Jakarta with the news. She had been divorced from Obama for eighteen years and had not seen him since that Christmas in Honolulu eleven years earlier. But when the younger Obama delivered the news of his father's death, he wrote in his memoir, he heard his mother cry out. Ann telephoned Bill Collier, perhaps the only person she knew in Indonesia who had also known the elder Obama. Collier, a classmate and friend of Obama's at the University of Hawai‘i, told me that Ann's sadness was unmistakable. It was clear, he said, that she still felt strongly about Obama. Julia Suryakusuma found Ann in her office on the verge of tears. “I just heard the news that Barack's father died,” Suryakusuma remembered Ann saying. Then she broke down and wept.

“I always got the impression that she was critical of her husbands,” Suryakusuma said, “but I had the feeling she still loved them in a certain way.”

By early 1984, Ann was at a crossroads. She had spent six years fulfilling her graduate course requirements and doing the fieldwork necessary to graduate with a Ph.D. But she had yet to take her comprehensive exams, complete a dissertation, and sit for its defense. The nine-month leave of absence she had requested from the University of Hawai‘i in 1979 had stretched into five years. “The major reason for the delay in my return to Hawaii is the need to work to put my son through college,” she wrote to Alan Howard, the chairman of the anthropology department, in March 1984. “I am happy to say that he graduated from Columbia in June, so that I am now free to complete my own studies.” Her contract with Ford was set to expire in late September. “I will either not extend it, or extend it but request an educational leave of absence for nine months (one school year),” Ann told Dewey in a letter that February. “If I do not need to be physically present in Hawaii during the whole time, it might be better for me to stay in Indonesia through the end of the year. The deciding factor will probably be finances.” If she could land a part-time fellowship with the East-West Center, she and Maya would return to Honolulu for the 1984–1985 academic year. If not, she might accept an offer from Pete Vayda, who was returning to the United States, to take over the lease on his house in Bogor. “This would be an ideal, quiet place to work and finish up my thesis draft and the house is available very cheaply,” she told Dewey. She hedged her bets. She asked Ford for a ten-month leave of absence, applied to schools in Hawaii for Maya, and approached the East-West Center about a fellowship. At the same time, she began looking into applying for a one- or two-year appointment as a visiting professor in the rural-sociology department at Cornell University, specializing in women in development. It was a long shot: A Ph.D. was a prerequisite for the job. She let Alice Dewey know she had listed her as a reference on applications for fellowships from several foundations and funding agencies. “If anyone asks, you can tell them that I am good with dogs,” Ann said.

Meanwhile, she went to some lengths to make it clear to Dewey, still the chairman of her dissertation committee, that she was swamped with work.

During Ann's tenure in the Jakarta office, Ford had backed the first women's studies center in the country, a fledgling research center at the University of Indonesia. Ann had successfully made the case for an early affirmative-action program for Indonesian women—a scholarship program aimed at getting more women trained in the social sciences and working in the upper levels of university faculties and the civil service. Smaller grants had gone to translating into Indonesian, for use in universities, a key text by Ester Boserup, a Dutch economist, on the role of women in development; paying for fellowships for female graduate students doing dissertations on women in home industries; supporting a conference to familiarize the leaders of grassroots organizations with women's issues; and sending top staff members from the women's cooperative in Malang to India to learn from the women's cooperatives and trade unions there. The Bogor project, which continued for some years afterward, had laid the groundwork for a network of Indonesian researchers experienced in the study of village women. It had generated what Ann called, in a 1983 report, “a great deal of useful and surprising data, which forces us to change some of our basic perceptions about Indonesian women.” Java was atypical, as it turned out. Rural women on Java worked long hours, often in multiple occupations, though their hourly earnings were low. Elsewhere, women worked few hours, and needed money but had few opportunities to make it because they lived in places with few roads, means of transportation, or markets. Under such circumstances, development planning needed to be decentralized—tailored to each province, even each village. Pujiwati Sajogyo, who went on to serve for a time as a consultant to the Indonesian government's Ministry for the Role of Women, helped shift the government's focus away from simply the health and domestic roles of women to include women's need for income and paying work.

In the end, Ford did not renew Ann's contract. She had been in the Jakarta office for nearly four years, which, several Ford people told me, was becoming the standard tenure after which program officers moved to another country or moved on. Kessinger was interested in trying someone new in Ann's job. Ford was increasingly a grant-making organization, not an operating foundation. No longer were several hundred Ford staff members scattered all over, say, India, teaching in management schools, serving in government ministries, working in agricultural research. Program officers sat behind desks, conceived areas of activity, designed grants, wrote memos justifying what they wanted to do. To Kessinger, Ann seemed less comfortable in the office than she was in the field. Some people were good at one thing, some at the other, he believed. Few were good at both. “I felt that from an institutional point of view, she'd probably given us what she could give us,” he said.

Kessinger also believed that Ann should complete the work needed to get her Ph.D. Not infrequently, graduate students drifted away from writing their dissertations because they needed money and found paying work, he knew from his years as a professor. When he had started graduate school, the average time from enrollment to a Ph.D. in history was nine years—in large part because students married and needed to support their families. Ann was lucky in that she had found work that not only paid well but that she loved. But that kind of good fortune made it even harder for people to go back and finish. Those who never did, Kessinger was convinced, went on to regret it. Your Ph.D. was your union card. “Get a union ticket,” Ben Finney, the University of Hawai‘i anthropologist, advised his students. “Become a qualified anthropologist. Then you can get your own grants or jobs.” If Ann ever wanted to work in a university, she would need a doctorate. Furthermore, as Kessinger saw it, there was something selfish about carrying out fieldwork and doing nothing with it. In the village in India where he had done his fieldwork, the first questions were always: Why are you here? Why is anybody interested in that? The people you studied expected you to finish. Kessinger told Ann as much. Looking back later, he did not know how she took his tough love. She said, at least, that she saw his point.

“She felt she had to do it,” her friend Rens Heringa recalled. “And she did it.”

She would go back for a year, she seems to have imagined. She would return to Honolulu in time to register at the University of Hawai‘i in late August and would stay through the spring semester. She would audit whatever basic theory courses were offered, take her comprehensives, and defend her dissertation before the end of the spring term. To support herself and Maya, she hoped to find a research or teaching position. “Something in the areas of peasant studies, women's studies or applied anthropology would probably be most suitable,” she wrote to her department chairman, Alan Howard. She asked Dewey to look out for a two-bedroom apartment or house-sharing arrangement on a good bus route or within two miles of campus. Then she set about packing up her life in Jakarta—finishing up evaluations on several grants, clearing out her office, moving out of her house, finding homes for her animals. She would stop in Singapore with Maya for two days for insurance physicals. She would make one last visit to Yogyakarta and her villages, on which Dewey would join her. She suggested Dewey pass up the opportunity to make the return trip to Hawaii with her and Maya. “After nearly nine years in Indonesia, I will probably need to hire a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our baggage on the plane, and I'm sure you don't want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments,” she wrote. Her sea freight shipping allowance of three thousand three hundred pounds, she said, “should about cover my batik collection.”