A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [107]
With Ong Hok Ham, Julia Suryakusuma, Ami Priyono, and Aditya Priyawardhana, the son of Julia Suryakusuma and Ami Priyono, July 1989
Ann’s secretary at the Ford Foundation, Paschetta Sarmidi, noticed that Ann’s eyes “glittered” at the mention of a certain Indonesian man who worked for a bank near the Ford offices.
“You like Indonesians,” Sarmidi observed tentatively. “The first time, you married an African. The second time, you married Lolo. Now you like the man from the bank.”
“She smiled,” recalled Sarmidi, who pressed no further.
Ann loved men, but she did not claim to understand them, Georgia McCauley, who became a close friend of Ann’s in Jakarta in the early 1980s, told me. McCauley, who was fifteen years younger than Ann and a mother of two small children, remembered once asking Ann for advice about men. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry, I have no idea. I just have nothing to offer you. I haven’t learned anything yet,’” McCauley told me. “She was befuddled by them. They were interesting to her; she had this intense curiosity. Her relationships had not worked out. Like many women, she didn’t understand men. She was a cultural anthropologist, it was a kind of topic: ‘Interesting, but don’t know!’”
Life in the bubble had its downside for an unmarried American woman with a half-Indonesian daughter at home and a half-African son in college thousands of miles away. In a community made up largely of married men with wives and children at home, Ann was an anomaly. “You’re more subject to gossip,” said Mary Zurbuchen, who had become a single parent by the time she returned to Jakarta in 1992 as the Ford Foundation’s country representative. “People might have wondered who she was and who she was hanging out with. They might have noticed things.” After attending a meeting of high-ranking Ford people from all over the world, Nancy Peluso remembered, Ann remarked that nearly all the participants were male, and those who were not male were mostly unmarried or childless. “She was really the odd person out,” Peluso said. Ann’s home life “imposed different kinds of constraints on her life that Ford was simply not cut out to understand.”
Suzanne Siskel, who joined the Ford Foundation as a program officer in Jakarta in 1990, ran into Ann at a party in 1990 shortly after accepting the job. “She looked at me,” Siskel told me. “She said, ‘Hmm. You’re going to work for Ford? Get ready for the eighteen-hour workday.’”
The logistics of managing Ann’s household could be complex: “Barry will stay in Indonesia +/- one month and then return to New York via Honolulu, taking Maya with him and dropping her off at her grandparents for the rest of the summer,” Ann wrote to her boss, Tom Kessinger, in April 1983, laying out the family’s travel plans for the summer after Barry’s college graduation. “This will count as her home leave. I will either go to Hawaii at the end of the summer to pick her up, staying two weeks as my home leave, or I will have her grandparents put her on a plane to Singapore and I will pick her up there. We will do our physicals in Singapore at that time.” For work, Ann traveled often: New Delhi, Bombay, Bangkok, Cairo, Nairobi, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur, and throughout much of Indonesia. On at least one occasion, she appealed to Ford to rewrite its spouse travel policy to cover dependent children. “This is particularly relevant for single parents who