A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [151]
Gillie Brown, Ann’s colleague in Jakarta, was hired by the World Bank in 1996 on the strength of the work she had done as Ann’s replacement on the project to strengthen the State Ministry for the Role of Women. By the time Suharto fell in 1998 and the World Bank staff was evacuated from Indonesia, Brown was already planning to resign and rejoin her husband and children, who had returned earlier to Great Britain. But when the bank offered her a job in Washington, she surprised herself by accepting. She left her children in Britain with her husband. She would never have considered a step like that, she told me, if she had not known Ann. Maybe there was more than one way to be a good mother after all, she thought. Ann’s children seemed to have done okay.
Maya, who was twenty-five when her mother died, immersed herself in the profession of her Kansas forebears. She went to work in a new school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that served a largely poor and Latino population. The staff was young, the work demanding, the learning curve steep. She accompanied her students to museums in upper Manhattan to widen their horizons, and to the city jail on Rikers Island, in a few cases, to visit their parents. Near the end of each pay period, she would rummage through her coat pockets for money to cover her commute. Immediately after Ann’s death, Maya had wondered fleetingly if she should remain in Hawaii and help her grandmother. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, Mom wouldn’t have wanted that,’ ” she told me. “ ‘I’m twenty-five years old. It’s time for me to really grow up.’”
Several years earlier, Maya had told Ann that she was thinking of getting married. At the time, she was five years older than Ann had been when she had married Barack Obama Sr. Maya was working toward a master’s degree, but she had barely begun a career. According to Maya, Ann advised her to wait. If marriage was what she really wanted, she should do it, Ann said. But she should know herself well enough to know who would satisfy her for the duration. Women have choices, Ann reminded her. They had gone through the women’s movement, she said, yet they continued to act as if they had no options. They needed to ask themselves what they really wanted, then go out and get it.
“She was reminding me that it was okay to want to do things differently,” Maya told me. “Which was, I thought, very enlightened.”
In 2002, Maya met her future husband at the East-West Center. Konrad Ng, a Chinese-Canadian graduate student in political science, shared an office at the center with Maya’s martial-arts instructor. Maya, who had moved back to Honolulu several years earlier to help her grandmother, was teaching at a charter school and at the university while working toward a Ph.D. The following year, Maya and Konrad Ng married. After the birth of their first child, Maya dispatched her own dissertation—writing between the hours of ten p.m. and two a.m., she told me—and received her Ph.D. She began teaching history and doing curriculum development at a girls’ school, where she developed a class in peace education. She started writing books, including one for children, Ladder to the Moon, in which Ann appears one night to Maya