A Singular Woman (34 page)

At a farewell party at Yang Suwan's house in Kebayoran Baru, Yang told Ann to choose anything in the house as a farewell gift. In the years they had known each other, Yang had made a point of bringing Ann handicrafts from remote reaches of Indonesia that Ann had not visited. She admired Ann's knowledge and never dared give her anything second-rate. Yang had built up her own collection, too. One of the most beautiful pieces in it was a sarong by Masina, a batik artist from Cirebon on the north coast of Java, where the mixing of Javanese, Sundanese, and Chinese influences had produced a rich culture and a distinctive style of batik. The pattern on the sarong was
mega mendung,
or rain clouds in reds and blues, dyed naturally in just the right weather. The sarong hung on a wall in her house. On the day of the party, the house was filled with Ann's friends—Julia Suryakusuma, Wahyono Martowikrido, Pete Vayda, and many others. When Yang made the offer of any object in the house, Ann spun on her heel without a moment's hesitation and pointed to the sarong, displayed on the wall directly behind her.

“This!” she said.

Perhaps Ann had had her eye on that batik for a long time, Yang thought later. After all, Ann knew everything you had in your house. Ann knew her friends, too, Yang thought, fondly.

“She knew I could never say no.”

In early July, a shipping company packed up Ann's possessions: batiks, ikats,
wayang
puppets, wood carvings, wall decorations, paddy-field hats, ten boxes of books, three wooden chests, one trunk of clothes, a rattan sofa, five rattan tables, two rattan cabinets, a rattan bed, kitchen utensils, one mirror, and so on. The total weight fell well short of the 3,300-pound limit.

Then she and Maya headed for Honolulu, leaving Indonesia behind.

“It wouldn't have surprised me if she had stayed forever,” Sidney Jones, Ann's colleague, told me one afternoon in Jakarta, where she was still working a quarter of a century later. “I got the sense that she was permanently enamored of the place. It's probably the same thing that I feel: This is where a particular formative period of your life took place, it's where your friends are, it's the place that you've made a second home. And it eventually becomes your first home.”

H
onolulu was a comedown. Ann went back to the University of Hawai‘i, where she had first enrolled as an undergraduate twenty-four years earlier. She rented a modest two-bedroom apartment in a cinder-block building not all that different from the one she had left behind in 1975. Maya was accepted by Punahou, the school to which Barry had returned from Jakarta alone in 1971. Madelyn Dunham helped make up the difference between Maya's partial scholarship and her tuition. Once again, Ann was living a couple of blocks from her parents. At the university, she sat in on Alice Dewey's course on economic anthropology, reviewing material she had surely already learned. Having never learned to drive, she commuted by public bus or on foot. Without savings, she was in no position to buy a house that might have served as a base for future operations, a repository for her collections, a gathering place for her children and for her friends—that is, a home on the scale of the roomy, bustling households to which she had grown accustomed. The anonymity of urban America, even Honolulu, felt alien after the warmth and intimacy of Ann's life in Jakarta. In her tiny household of two, she was without servants for the first time in years. Fearless abroad, Ann seemed vulnerable at home. She wanted Maya, who had roamed Jakarta at night, to be at home in Honolulu by dark. Eager to go out with friends, Maya would hesitate, worrying about her mother. “She seemed lonely, perhaps?” Maya told me. Ann would have loved a companion, Maya said, but she had too much dignity to go to great lengths to find one. Instead, she worked on her dissertation and planned her escape.

“I sympathize with your desire to get back out there in the real world, writing something with an impact on more people,” Ann wrote to her friend Julia Suryakusuma, who was doing graduate work in the Netherlands. “I've made the decision to stay based in Hawaii so Maya can graduate there, but it has not been the most thrilling two and a half years of my life, let me tell you.”

On January 1, 1985, Ann opened a spiral notebook she had begun keeping toward the end of her time in Jakarta. It was already filled with methodically numbered lists of all sorts under headings that included “Work + Employment,” “Health and App,” and “Personal and Travel.” There were lists of vegetarian dishes, topics for future articles, calories burned per hour of various activities. One list of debts, titled “Owed to Folks,” comprised fifteen entries, including “Punahou $1,784” and “$2,000 deposited in account by Mom.” There was a handwritten schedule of daily activities ranging from what appears to be meditation at five a.m. and straightening up the apartment at seven-thirty a.m. to “read w/ Maya” at nine p.m. and “read and slp” a half-hour later. “People List” contained 216 numbered names, the first five of which were, in order, Maya, Adi, Bar, Mom, Dad. The notebook suggested a woman trying hard to be organized, struggling to be responsible about money, looking for a job, thinking about her children, worrying about her weight, reflecting on her past, sorting out her future. On New Year's Day, she turned in the notebook to page 103 and wrote a list of challenges to herself, without elaboration, under the heading, “Long Range Goals.”

1. Finish Ph.D.

2. 60K

3. in shape

4. remarry

5. another culture

6. house + land

7. pay off debts (taxes)

8. memoirs of Indon.

9. spir. develop (ilmu batin)

10. raise Maya well

11. continuing constructive dialogue w/ Barry

12. relations w/ friends + family (corresp.)

If Ann had imagined she could wrap up her dissertation in nine months, as she had told the university, she was mistaken. Eighteen months after returning from Jakarta, she passed her comprehensive exams, having submitted a list of two dozen theoretical issues in anthropology and archaeology that she was prepared to discuss. But her dissertation, on five peasant industries, had ballooned to nearly seven hundred pages. It was already twice as long as many Ph.D. theses, and it was far from finished. “But I'll definitely be through and out of here when Maya graduates in June,” Ann wrote to Suryakusuma. A year later, she was wishing she had chosen a smaller topic. Her enthusiasm was waning. “I don't find I care very much about it,” she wrote again to her friend. “The creative part was over long ago, and it's just a matter of finishing the damn thing.” It was not an uncommon problem. Financial support for graduate students in anthropology was hard to come by. Jobs in international development would turn up, promising good pay plus expenses. Graduate students, burdened with credit card bills, would accept, figuring they could finish the dissertation on weekends. Repeatedly, Ann appealed to the university for patience. “I regret the delay, but hope you can once again hold the fort for me till I get back,” she would write several years later to Dewey. Ben Finney, a member of Ann's dissertation committee, recalled drafts “of this and that” coming in and Dewey “pulling out her hair. ‘It's too long!'” Dewey received in the mail from Ann a postcard of a painting by Picasso,
Interior with a Girl Drawing.
In the painting, a brown-haired woman wearing a garland of flowers draws blithely on lemon-colored paper. Another woman slumps over a table nearby, burying her face. “Rather a nice Picasso I picked up at the Museum of Modern Art en route,” Ann wrote in the letter attached. “I call it, ‘Ann writing her dissertation on yellow tablets while Alice waits patiently (I hope) in the background.'”

Ann's parents had little understanding of Ann's professional passions. Stanley, nearing seventy, had never found work that he loved. Retired from selling insurance, he now devoted himself to crossword puzzles and television game shows such as
The Price Is Right.
He started projects—photo projects, albums, a family tree—that as often as not went unfinished. He had an immense repertoire of jokes, at which his granddaughter cringed while dutifully laughing. Madelyn, by contrast, loved her work and did it well. By the time Ann returned to Hawaii in 1984, Madelyn had risen to become one of the first female vice presidents at the Bank of Hawaii. Her marriage to Stanley did not seem, at least from the outside, to have improved with age. They bickered and sniped and took refuge in separate bedrooms. Madelyn drank. Occasionally, Ann told a friend, Madelyn would rent a hotel room in Honolulu where she would spend a solitary vacation. “Well, you know how Mother and Father are,” Ann would say to her uncle Ralph Dunham after her father's death, some years later. “They fought all the time, but they really loved each other.” Ralph Dunham agreed: As far as he could tell, they couldn't live with each other, or without. Ann sometimes wondered if Madelyn was reminded of Stanley when she gazed on her restless, voluble, dark-haired daughter. “I don't think either one of her parents read her dissertation or really even knew what it was about,” Maya told me. “So there was a whole side of her adult life that remained a mystery to them. There was a difference in interests and in manner and in temperament that was difficult to bridge.”

At the same time, Madelyn made it possible for Ann to live the life she chose.

“Our mom was the one who gave us the imagination and the language, the storytelling, all of those things,” Maya told me. “And those things are really important. . . . But I think that if my grandmother had not been there, in the wings, making sure that we had savings accounts and school tuition taken care of and that sort of thing, maybe I would have felt more torn about the way that I was raised. As it was, I could feel free to love my childhood unabashedly and to love growing up in all those different places with all these different languages and flavors. And so on some level, I would say that our grandmother gave our mother the freedom to be the kind of mother that she was.”

As Ann's list of long-term goals suggested, she was not especially interested in staying put. In May 1986, less than two years after returning from Jakarta, she moved to Pakistan on a six-month contract to work as a development consultant on a rural-credit program in the Punjab. The following summer, she was in Illinois, presenting a scholarly paper at an academic meeting and visiting Barry in Chicago. Next, she was in New York visiting friends with Maya, who was looking at colleges. From there, Ann flew to London for three days en route to Pakistan. (“Any chance you could fly over and spend some time with me in London?” she had asked Suryakusuma in a letter. “. . . It would be great if we could do London together. . . . If you are still planning to go to India in September, could we meet in Delhi? I'd rather see you in Delhi than Bombay just because I like the city better, but Bombay might also be possible. . . . You could also come over to Pakistan. . . .”) Back in Pakistan, she spent three months completing the consulting contract she had begun a year earlier, then returned to Honolulu, stopping off in Jakarta. The dissertation would be worth the wait, Dewey believed. “Ann would run out of money and go take a job,” she recalled. “Not washing dishes. She was building up more data. So she would come and go constantly. We knew she was the kind of student who was going to end up knowing three times more than we did—in our specialties. So we just let her go.”

Ann took Maya with her when she could. In 1986, they traveled together to India en route to Pakistan, stopping in Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. In Pakistan, Maya stayed with Ann for three months, studied Mughal dancing, and accompanied her into the field. They took a six-day driving trip from Islamabad to the border of China along the Karakoram Highway, the highest paved international road in the world, following the Indus River gorge, passing through the tribal areas of the Pathans, Gilgitis, and Hunzas to the place where the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas, and the Karakoram Range converge. Pakistan was fraught with difficulties, said Michael Dove, an American anthropologist and friend of Ann's from Java, who worked in Pakistan from 1985 to 1989 and saw her there during that period. Bombs fell in marketplaces and around the house in Islamabad where Dove and his wife were living. Dove said he and his wife were kidnapped by armed Pathans in the upper Indus River gorge. “It was the opposite of Indonesia,” he recalled. “It was a difficult culture, much more violent. Everyone had a gun.” In border areas, people kidnapped foreigners to raise cash. It was difficult to be a Western woman in Pakistan without a husband. Simply walking alone in public was problematic.

Ann wrote to Suryakusuma: