A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [108]
“You managed,” Zurbuchen said. Even if barely.
The Jakarta International School, where Ann enrolled Maya, was both extraordinary, in its community and curriculum, and extraordinarily exclusive. Founded by international organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, that put up money in return for shares, it served the families of those institutions. The grounds of the new campus in South Jakarta were landscaped with tropical flowers. There was a swimming pool, air-conditioning, a theater with plush upholstered seats, where students performed plays by the likes of George Bernard Shaw. The faculty was international. The student body comprised fifty-nine nationalities, with the United States and Australia contributing the most. Parents were accomplished and ambitious for their children, and there was an abundance of nonworking mothers available to, say, sew kimonos for a production of The Mikado. The school played a powerful and positive role in shaping the worldview of its students. “They came to easily transcend the notion that national identity is the normal referent for looking at people,” Tom Kessinger said of his two sons. “And they found early on that friendships take many different forms, particularly over time.” One group was glaringly absent, however. Under Indonesian law, Indonesian children could not attend. When Kessinger wrote to Ann, telling her that Maya’s enrollment had been approved, he added that the only hitch was that the school would need copies of the first page of Maya’s passport and of Ann’s work permit: “They need them to satisfy Government of Indonesia regulations for all students, and are somewhat concerned because she obviously carries an Indonesian surname.” In that way, among others, the school stood apart. “It was like a satellite on its own,” said Halimah Brugger, an American who taught music there for twenty-five years. Frances Korten, who joined the Ford Foundation office as a program officer in 1983 and had a daughter in Maya’s class, recalled, “That kind of insularity of the foreign community was something that Ann, I think, frankly, more than the rest of us, felt was really not good. . . . To have her child going to a school that Indonesians couldn’t attend, I think, was an affront.”
It was not easy. Ann wanted Maya to have an English-language education, and Maya would have been ill equipped to leap into an Indonesian school for the first time at age ten or eleven. In preparation for entering the Jakarta International School, Ann had made sure that Maya’s homeschooling included English. But Maya felt, as she put it, some “discomfort being the only Indonesian in the Jakarta International School.” It was a discomfort of which Ann was surely aware. “I think batik-making was the only Indonesian thing that I did,” Maya remembered. “I remember taking choir and singing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.’ We did Pygmalion and British history.” Hoping to gain acceptance, she brought in photographs of American relatives she did not even know. “There were a couple of mixed kids like me,” she said. “No full-blooded Indonesians, except folks who worked there. Some. I certainly felt like I was in two different worlds: the world of Indonesia that I knew, populated by Indonesians, and then the world of JIS, which was basically an expatriate school.” Ann worried that the nature of her work would affect Maya’s shot at social acceptance. “Ann said Maya’s friends thought Ann’s job was rather odd—going into the field, talking with poor people,” Yang Suwan told me. When Maya had friends coming over for the night, Yang recalled, Ann seemed uncharacteristically anxious. The Indonesian snacks would disappear