• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1048 0

She placed a photograph of Ann in the center, along with candles, flowers, wood carvings, ikat, and traditional Indonesian cookies and cakes. Like an offering, Suryakusuma told me. She sent around flyers announcing a memorial gathering for Ann. On the afternoon of November 13, two dozen friends turned out. There was a period of silence, followed by a guided meditation, with music, led by an Australian yogi (“a lot of stuff that Ann privately laughed at,” Don Johnston told me, chuckling). Wahyono Martowikrido, the archaeologist who had helped introduce Ann to the mysteries and meaning of the patterns in Javanese textiles and the shapes of silver jewelry, and Johnston, the Southern Baptist from Little Rock, Arkansas, were there. So was Ong Hok Ham, the historian, and Yang Suwan, the anthropologist, and several Indonesian women who had tried to start an Indonesian affiliate of Women’s World Banking. There were women from Ann’s team at the Ministry for the Role of Women. There were messages sent by Bruce Harker; Sabaruddin, Ann’s driver; and others. After the guided meditation, Ann’s friends regaled one another with memories of and stories about her. When everyone had drifted away, Gillie Brown sat down and wrote a letter to Madelyn, Barack, and Maya in Hawaii, listing everyone who had turned out in Jakarta. “The spirits of all these people will be with you in Hawaii today, as you say your farewells to Ann,” she wrote.

In Honolulu, they gathered in the Japanese garden behind the East-West Center, the institution that embodied, more than any other, the spirit of the time in which Ann had come of age and the values by which she had lived. They convened near the stream, whose rambling course beneath the monkeypod trees was intended to signify the progress of a life. The group of several dozen included Madelyn Dunham, Maya and Barack, Michelle, Alice Dewey, the Solyoms, Nancy Peluso, Ann Hawkins, Michael Dove, Benji Bennington, and others—close friends from graduate school, the East-West Center, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Pakistan, and New York. They, too, recounted recollections of Ann. Then they drove east out of Honolulu to the Kalaniana‘ole Highway, the road that winds along the wind-whipped southeastern coast of the island of O‘ahu. They followed it, past the turnoff for Hanauma Bay, to where the coastline turns wilder and great slabs of rock tilt toward the indigo water. At a scenic lookout, they parked and got out. Beyond a low wall built of volcanic rock, the ledges descended toward a distant point the shape of an ironing board jutting into the surf. There, gripping each other against the wind, Barack and Maya carried the ashes of their fifty-two-year-old mother across the water-slicked rocks and delivered them into the rough embrace of the sea.

Epilogue

In the aftermath of her death, the heirs of Bu Ann set their sights on the horizon.

Kellee Tsai, who had left Women’s World Banking for graduate school with Ann’s encouragement, spent two years doing fieldwork in China. She wrote a five-hundred-page dissertation and became a professor of political science and director of East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But she prided herself on being a closet anthropologist, combining in her work large statistical analyses with hundreds of interviews in the field; she had learned from Ann the impossibility of understanding the numbers before talking to and knowing the people. In China, she met an American whom she married and with whom she now has two children. In her dissertation, she wrote that the memory of Ann, along with that of another friend, “followed me into the field and back. Both would have scrutinized every page, footnote, and table in this dissertation.”

For Nina Nayar, Ann’s assistant at Women’s World Banking, it was time to break out of the role of the good Indian daughter. “Losing Ann was a big moment where you say, ‘Well, life is short,’ ” Nayar remembered. “ ‘You have to do what you want to do now.’ ” After nearly twenty years abroad, Nayar decided—against the advice of her family, she