A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [114]
Nine
“Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds”
Honolulu 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