A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [105]
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