A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [43]
With Lolo and Sylvia Engelen, “Indonesian Night” at the East-West Center
Like some Javanese, Lolo had been given one name, Soetoro, at birth. Like the names of his nine siblings—Soegijo, Soegito, Soemitro, Soewarti, Soewardinah, and so on—his began with the soe-prefix, meaning “good” or “fortunate,” or some combination of both. Born in Bandung in 1936 and raised in Yogyakarta, he was the youngest of the ten. “Everybody loved him, maybe because he was the youngest boy,” one of his nieces, Kismardhani S-Roni, told me. His childhood nickname, Lolo, came from the Javanese word mlolo, a verb meaning “to gaze wide-eyed.” All the boys and several of the girls in the family went to college, according to Lolo’s nephew, Wisaksono “Sonny” Trisulo. From there, they moved into jobs in fields such as the law, the oil industry, and higher education. Lolo studied geography at Gadjah Mada University, the most respected university in Yogyakarta. He became a lieutenant in the Indonesian army, according to Bill Collier, who knew him at the University of Hawai‘i and later in Indonesia. With the support of the Indonesian government, he became the first member of his family to study outside of the country. In the fall of 1962, he was sent to the University of Hawai‘i on a two-year East-West Center grant to get a master’s degree in geography. In return for which, Sonny Trisulo said, Lolo was expected to devote four years to government service on his return.
Lolo and Stanley, Hawaii
Lolo was in many ways the opposite of Barack Obama Sr. He lacked Obama’s intimidating intensity, his ambitions, the force of his intellect. He was kind and considerate. By temperament, and by culture, he was not inclined to argue. He was calm. All of that was part of his appeal to Ann, whose gale-force encounter with Obama had shaken her up. “It was kind of a reaction to her first husband, who was exciting, but he wasn’t exactly a family man,” said Kay Ikranagara, who would become a close friend of Ann’s in Jakarta in the 1970s. “Lolo was stable, would work, support the family. She thought that was really appealing.” If Lolo had a tendency to open the newspaper straight to the sports pages and stop there, Ann did not mind that, for a time. He was from a part of the world that was increasingly interesting to her. He was hoping to return to Indonesia, which had emerged from three hundred fifty years of Dutch domination, to teach at the university and become a part of his country’s future. “That was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left,” the younger Obama would write, “the promise of something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place beyond her parents’ reach.”
Whether Ann was looking forward to a lifetime in Indonesia or simply reaching for an escape hatch is difficult to know.
Intermarriage was not unusual among East-West Center students. Gerald Krausse, who had been working as a busboy in Waikiki, had got tired of food service and enrolled as an undergraduate at the university. “I was mesmerized by all these foreign students,” he told me. “I wanted to be part of it.” He got a job as a grill cook in the East-West Center cafeteria and as a guard in the center’s men’s dorm, where students would descend from their rooms in pajamas at two a.m. during the Muslim fasting period and start cooking in order to finish eating by dawn. Krausse became interested in Asia. Soon he met Sylvia Engelen, an Indonesian from Manado who had arrived in February 1961 on an East-West Center grant and was studying German and French. When they married