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By Root 993 0

better of financial good sense. On one occasion, a man came to her, professing to represent a nongovernmental organization and asking for money, Suarjana told me. She gave him two million rupiahs, or roughly twelve hundred dollars, of her own money—and never heard from him again. She was not especially concerned about money. Once, Suarjana suggested that the price of a batik she was considering buying at an exhibition was too high. “It’s only paper,” she said blithely, before allowing him to talk her out of the purchase on the grounds that most of her money would go to the dealer, not the craftsman. She was not ambitious or acquisitive, at least in the usual sense. She would have liked to have learned to drive so she could have driven Suarjana around Hawaii without having to rely on her father. She would have liked to have found a way to afford a house in Bali where friends and her children could stay. As the latest deadline for her dissertation closed in, Suarjana threatened to end their friendship if she did not finish. When she finally did finish it in 1992, and he congratulated her for it, she told him, “I did it because I wanted us to remain friends.”

To those who knew her well, Ann seemed happy with Suarjana. Rens Heringa met her and Suarjana for dinner in Yogyakarta. “It had just started,” Heringa remembered. “She was all rosy and happy, and it was quite funny and nice.” Ann ordered spaghetti, which Suarjana loathed, and joked that it was his favorite food. She called over a street singer to sing “Bésame Mucho.”

Bésame, bésame mucho,

As if tonight were the last time.

In a letter to Suryakusuma, who was skeptical of Suarjana’s motives, Ann downplayed her feelings. “I never said I was a woman in love . . .” she protested. “I like him a lot. He has a place in my heart.” Suryakusuma believed Ann could be too open, too trusting. In a letter that Suryakusuma read aloud to me, but did not give me, she told Ann: You have a big capacity to love, but you often love uncritically. (“I know I benefit,” Suryakusuma wrote.) She told Ann that one of the nicest things about being her friend was that Ann was not judgmental: “You take people as they are, with all their faults.” But, Suryakusuma said, often one’s strong point is also a source of vulnerability. Your capacity to love, she told Ann, leaves you open to being used by others.

In the early 1990s

The attention of a much younger man was flattering, Heringa told me, but it cannot have been simple. Indonesians made jokes about older women who went around with younger men. Hotels expected couples to be married. “Ann didn’t give a damn,” Heringa told me. “She was much less concerned about what people thought than I was. She just could not have cared less.” In the spring of 1990, Ann and Suarjana spent several months together at the University of Hawai‘i, where Suarjana took part in the English-language institute in which Ann had helped him enroll. They lived in a dorm at the East-West Center, where, according to Suarjana, they had separate rooms. He cooked Indonesian soto—a souplike dish with bean sprouts, scallions, cellophane noodles, lemon slices, hot chili, egg slices, and so on—for Ann’s parents. They took a short vacation to the Big Island. Ann reported to Suryakusuma that she had enjoyed their domestic arrangement. They had had only one fight—over his tendency to turn off her fan without asking first. They enjoyed collaborating on the chores and the shopping—the novelty of which, Ann confessed, was wearing off for her. “After all, God surely intended me to be a Nyonya Besar,” she wrote to Suryakusuma with mocking self-knowledge, using a term for “mistress of the house.”

Ann’s work at Bank Rakyat Indonesia had delayed, once again, the completion of her dissertation. In early November 1989, she asked Dewey to run interference for her with the university. “Have just returned from a long, hard trip to North Sumatra with my field team,” she explained. There had been delays getting into the field, she said, “and it has been necessary for me to do more handholding