• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1002 0

She was an American citizen who had lived in Indonesia for more than half of her adult life. She had a doctorate from the University of Hawai‘i based on work done over two decades in Java. She had a career in Asia but a family in the United States. Her mother, Madelyn, turning seventy, was a widow living alone in Honolulu. Barack, at thirty-one, was a lawyer in Illinois, writing his first book and engaged to a woman rooted in Chicago. Maya, twenty-two, was an undergraduate majoring in English at the University of Hawai‘i. Ann longed to live closer to her children and had begun dreaming of grandchildren. But she could live more comfortably in Indonesia, on a development consultant’s salary and benefits, than she could ever afford to live in Hawaii, and her work had a degree of impact in Indonesia that she could not begin to match in the United States. As long as she had a job, she could keep renewing her visa and continue to live in Indonesia. She even toyed with the idea of making it a more permanent base. She thought about one day having a house in Bali, if she could come up with the money; it would be a place where she and her children and their friends could alight. But as a foreigner, she could not own property, she could only lease it. As an expatriate, one heard unsettling stories of sudden lease cancellations, mysterious property claims, precipitous departures. If she could park everything that was important to her in another country, the risks might be fewer. But Ann did not have the luxury of maintaining homes in two places. She never wanted to fall out of love with Indonesia because of some catastrophe she could ill afford, she told Garrett Solyom. An American consular official in Bali had once told the Solyoms ominously, “If you’re at an age where you don’t have the money or connections to be able to get out of here at a moment’s notice when you need to, you shouldn’t be here.”

In mid-1992, Ann made the decision to move back to the United States. Barack was to marry Michelle Robinson at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in early October—an event to which Ann looked forward with great pleasure. On a visit to Chicago in advance of the wedding, she got in touch with Mary Houghton, the president of ShoreBank, a bank holding company that Houghton and others had founded in the early 1970s in an effort to show that banks could play a constructive role in low-income black neighborhoods. Houghton, who had also advised microfinance organizations, had met Ann at a party in Jakarta in the late 1980s and remembered her warmly as “forthright, sharp-tongued, opinionated, happy.” When Ann contacted her, they agreed to meet for what Houghton remembered years later as an agenda-free brunch in downtown Chicago. Ann’s contract in Jakarta was to wind up the following January. She was moving back to the United States and would need a job. Houghton offered to put her in touch with a nonprofit based in New York City whose interests seemed aligned with Ann’s. Conceived during the first United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975, the organization, called Women’s World Banking, had set out to promote full economic participation for low-income women by helping them develop viable businesses. Toward that end, it offered support, training, and advice to several dozen microfinance organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, which in turn offered credit and other financial services to women producers and entrepreneurs. The original board had included Ela Bhatt, the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association, whom Ann had first encountered during her eye-opening trip to India in her first weeks at Ford. Women’s World Banking was governed by women and run by women and existed first and foremost for the benefit of women.

In mid-September, Ann received a letter from Women’s World Banking, alerting her to a job opening. Embarking on a monthlong trip to Hawaii and the mainland, Ann sent off her résumé and a letter asking to be considered. In New York, she met with the president of Women’s World Banking,