A Singular Woman (44 page)

Maya and Ann walked in Central Park, bought frozen yogurt, wandered among the glittering displays of smoked fish and cheeses at Zabar's, the legendary food store on Broadway on the Upper West Side. They watched a movie of no particular interest to either one of them, Maya sitting next to her mother, holding her hand. When it was over, Maya asked Ann what she thought of the movie. It was a good distraction, she said, from the turmoil inside. Years later, Maya would remember her uncertainty about how best to help her mother—whether to encourage her to talk about what she was feeling or simply to be with her. If she could just get through the semester at New York University and at the school where she was teaching, Maya thought, she could fly home to Hawaii and stay with her mother as long as she was needed.

On September 15, 1995, the oncologist saw Ann for a second time. On the basis of the reevaluation of the tumor cells and the pattern of the illness, he believed Ann's cancer was uterine, not ovarian, and stage four, not stage three. He recommended that Ann's physician in Honolulu switch to a chemotherapy regimen based on a different drug, Adriamycin, or doxorubicin. The survival rate for women in Ann's condition was poor, he said, and sixty percent of patients did not respond positively to the drug he was suggesting. But if it worked, Ann might hope for a delay in recurrence and a period relatively free of symptoms.

Back in Honolulu, the new treatment proved grueling. Arlene Payne's conversations with her niece became shorter and shorter. Ann had never been inclined toward regrets. If she regretted anything now, it was not having left Indonesia sooner to get medical care, Payne told me. “But she fought it for as long as she could. Then she sort of gave up and just sort of lived out the rest of her life.” The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing came and went. From the point of view of Women's World Banking, it had gone well. Much of the language hammered out in the report of the expert group on women and finance, in which Ann had played a central role, had been incorporated into the action plan endorsed by the delegates in Beijing. Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the First Lady, had spoken on a panel on microfinance that Women's World Banking had helped organize. For the first time, microfinance seemed to have emerged front and center in the world's attention. Nina Nayar, Ann's young protégée from Women's World Banking, returned from China via India, then flew to Honolulu to see Ann. Ann's mane of dark hair was gone. But she was ornamented, as always, for the occasion. “The turban becomes you,” Nayar marvelled affectionately. “I think it's even more majestic.” As Nayar recalled that visit, she and Garrett Solyom hoisted Ann into a wheelchair and set off on one last field trip. After all, it was Nayar's first visit to Hawaii. They picnicked at sunset and tried Ann's favorite Hawaiian foods. At Ann's insistence, they made their way up to the Nu‘uanu Pali State Wayside, where the trade winds climb the windward cliff of what remains of the Ko‘olau volcano and roar through the Pali Pass as though through a funnel. There, not far from the tunnels that carry traffic through the mountain and from one side of O‘ahu to the other, there is a panoramic view of the green Nu‘uanu Valley, Kaneohe Bay, and the beach town of Kailua. Struggling with the wheelchair against the wind and trying to keep Ann's headgear from taking flight, Nayar remembered, she and Solyom maneuvered Ann into the optimal spot. “It was the same feeling as we had on top of the pyramid,” Nayar said. “It was probably a parting gift for both of us.”

In early November, during a collect call to her mother on a pay phone near the NYU campus, Maya noticed that Ann sounded momentarily confused.

“You know what, Mom?” she later recalled saying. “I'm coming. I'll work it out. I'll do whatever papers I have left. I'm coming. I'll see you there very soon.'

“She said, ‘Okay,'” Maya remembered. “And I told her I was scared. And she said, ‘Me, too.' And then, ‘I love you.'

“And that was it.”

On November 7, Maya flew to Honolulu, unsure of what she would find. Ann was unconscious and emaciated. To Maya, she appeared to be starving. But she was alive, as though she had waited. Maya took Madelyn's place by Ann's bed in the hospital room so that her grandmother could go home. Then she talked—about all that Ann had given her, about how she would be remembered with love. Maya had brought with her a book of Creole folktales, which she had been reading with her students as part of a study of origin myths. She began reading aloud. In one story, a person was transformed into a bird. Then the bird took flight.

“I told her finally that she should go, that I didn't want to see her like that,” Maya remembered. “And she was gone about fifteen minutes later.”

For Barack, not being at his mother's bedside when she died was the biggest mistake he made, he would say later. He was at home in Chicago when he got word. He had last seen Ann in New York City in September, and had last spoken to her, he told me, several days before her death, before she lost consciousness. “She was in Hawaii in a hospital, and we didn't know how fast it was going to take, and I didn't get there in time,” he told the
Chicago Sun-Times
in 2004.

Word spread quickly. Dick Patten got the news in Burma, where he was working on a project for the United Nations Development Programme—trying to help the Burmese people, as he would later put it, without helping the Burmese government. Don Johnston, whom Ann had discreetly nudged into domestic happiness, got the news in Indonesia in the field. Made Suarjana, at his typewriter in his office in Bali, wept when Maya called. In a private ceremony, he told me, his family offered prayers to help deliver Ann's spirit to the next world. In Colorado, Jon Payne asked the priest in his church to include his niece in the congregation's prayers. After all, as far as Payne could tell, Ann had been doing what Christians always said saints did—helping people. “She wasn't a particularly religious person, if at all,” Payne said. “But she did more things for people than a lot of Christians do.”

In Jakarta, Julia Suryakusuma made an impromptu altar out of a table and a Balinese mirror in the living room of Gillie Brown's house on Jalan Gaharu in Cilandak. She placed a photograph of Ann in the center, along with candles, flowers, wood carvings, ikat, and traditional Indonesian cookies and cakes. Like an offering, Suryakusuma told me. She sent around flyers announcing a memorial gathering for Ann. On the afternoon of November 13, two dozen friends turned out. There was a period of silence, followed by a guided meditation, with music, led by an Australian yogi (“a lot of stuff that Ann privately laughed at,” Don Johnston told me, chuckling). Wahyono Martowikrido, the archaeologist who had helped introduce Ann to the mysteries and meaning of the patterns in Javanese textiles and the shapes of silver jewelry, and Johnston, the Southern Baptist from Little Rock, Arkansas, were there. So was Ong Hok Ham, the historian, and Yang Suwan, the anthropologist, and several Indonesian women who had tried to start an Indonesian affiliate of Women's World Banking. There were women from Ann's team at the Ministry for the Role of Women. There were messages sent by Bruce Harker; Sabaruddin, Ann's driver; and others. After the guided meditation, Ann's friends regaled one another with memories of and stories about her. When everyone had drifted away, Gillie Brown sat down and wrote a letter to Madelyn, Barack, and Maya in Hawaii, listing everyone who had turned out in Jakarta. “The spirits of all these people will be with you in Hawaii today, as you say your farewells to Ann,” she wrote.

In Honolulu, they gathered in the Japanese garden behind the East-West Center, the institution that embodied, more than any other, the spirit of the time in which Ann had come of age and the values by which she had lived. They convened near the stream, whose rambling course beneath the monkeypod trees was intended to signify the progress of a life. The group of several dozen included Madelyn Dunham, Maya and Barack, Michelle, Alice Dewey, the Solyoms, Nancy Peluso, Ann Hawkins, Michael Dove, Benji Bennington, and others—close friends from graduate school, the East-West Center, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Pakistan, and New York. They, too, recounted recollections of Ann. Then they drove east out of Honolulu to the Kalaniana‘ole Highway, the road that winds along the wind-whipped southeastern coast of the island of O‘ahu. They followed it, past the turnoff for Hanauma Bay, to where the coastline turns wilder and great slabs of rock tilt toward the indigo water. At a scenic lookout, they parked and got out. Beyond a low wall built of volcanic rock, the ledges descended toward a distant point the shape of an ironing board jutting into the surf. There, gripping each other against the wind, Barack and Maya carried the ashes of their fifty-two-year-old mother across the water-slicked rocks and delivered them into the rough embrace of the sea.

I
n the aftermath of her death, the heirs of Bu Ann set their sights on the horizon.

Kellee Tsai, who had left Women's World Banking for graduate school with Ann's encouragement, spent two years doing fieldwork in China. She wrote a five-hundred-page dissertation and became a professor of political science and director of East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But she prided herself on being a closet anthropologist, combining in her work large statistical analyses with hundreds of interviews in the field; she had learned from Ann the impossibility of understanding the numbers before talking to and knowing the people. In China, she met an American whom she married and with whom she now has two children. In her dissertation, she wrote that the memory of Ann, along with that of another friend, “followed me into the field and back. Both would have scrutinized every page, footnote, and table in this dissertation.”

For Nina Nayar, Ann's assistant at Women's World Banking, it was time to break out of the role of the good Indian daughter. “Losing Ann was a big moment where you say, ‘Well, life is short,' ” Nayar remembered. “ ‘You have to do what you want to do now.' ” After nearly twenty years abroad, Nayar decided—against the advice of her family, she told me—to base her life in Asia, not in the United States. It was not easy to return to India as a single woman of marrying age with relatives around. “This is the influence that Ann had,” Nayar said. “She didn't do the stuff that her parents or community thought was appropriate.” Nayar spent two years in Bangladesh, working on building a virtual microfinance network, and much of the next three years in Cambodia as a consultant in microfinance sector development. When she and I first spoke in 2008, Nayar was in Kabul, having turned her attention to the role of microfinance in countries recovering from conflict. By mid-2010, she had worked in nearly thirty countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. She had also abandoned her resolve to remain single. Instead, she had married a man whose values reminded her of Ann's. She was certain, she said, that Ann would have approved.

Gillie Brown, Ann's colleague in Jakarta, was hired by the World Bank in 1996 on the strength of the work she had done as Ann's replacement on the project to strengthen the State Ministry for the Role of Women. By the time Suharto fell in 1998 and the World Bank staff was evacuated from Indonesia, Brown was already planning to resign and rejoin her husband and children, who had returned earlier to Great Britain. But when the bank offered her a job in Washington, she surprised herself by accepting. She left her children in Britain with her husband. She would never have considered a step like that, she told me, if she had not known Ann. Maybe there was more than one way to be a good mother after all, she thought. Ann's children seemed to have done okay.

Maya, who was twenty-five when her mother died, immersed herself in the profession of her Kansas forebears. She went to work in a new school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that served a largely poor and Latino population. The staff was young, the work demanding, the learning curve steep. She accompanied her students to museums in upper Manhattan to widen their horizons, and to the city jail on Rikers Island, in a few cases, to visit their parents. Near the end of each pay period, she would rummage through her coat pockets for money to cover her commute. Immediately after Ann's death, Maya had wondered fleetingly if she should remain in Hawaii and help her grandmother. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, Mom wouldn't have wanted that,' ” she told me. “ ‘I'm twenty-five years old. It's time for me to really grow up.'”

Several years earlier, Maya had told Ann that she was thinking of getting married. At the time, she was five years older than Ann had been when she had married Barack Obama Sr. Maya was working toward a master's degree, but she had barely begun a career. According to Maya, Ann advised her to wait. If marriage was what she really wanted, she should do it, Ann said. But she should know herself well enough to know who would satisfy her for the duration. Women have choices, Ann reminded her. They had gone through the women's movement, she said, yet they continued to act as if they had no options. They needed to ask themselves what they really wanted, then go out and get it.