A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [44]
From time to time, the East-West Center made an effort to keep track of the marriage patterns of single students on East-West grants. Impulse, a magazine published by and for center students, reported in 1975 that students who married after coming to the center had at least a thirty-three percent chance of marrying across national or ethnic lines. “When you put young people in their twenties and thirties together, guess what?” as Sylvia Krausse put it. Were those marriages strong? No, she answered, without hesitation. For years, she and her husband encountered East-West Center alumni at Asian-studies conferences. In some cases, she said, one member of a couple would have had to make his or her career secondary to that of the other—or give it up. In addition, she said, Asian men who had felt free to be “very flamboyant and open” in the United States returned home to cultural expectations, family obligations, and the influence of parents and relatives. “I think the girls didn’t understand, when they went back,” she said. “Especially the American girls.”
On the night of September 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta in what the army quickly characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Though immediately quashed, the incident unleashed a bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and suspected sympathizers were slaughtered in the following months, often by civilian vigilantes with the support of the army. As Adam Schwarz described the events in A Nation in Waiting, people were killed by knife and bayonet, their bodies often “maimed and decapitated and dumped in rivers. At one point officials in Surabaya in East Java complained to Army officials that the rivers running into Surabaya were choked with bodies.” The Central Intelligence Agency described the massacres as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”
On the serene campus of the University of Hawai‘i, Indonesian students were summoned to be questioned by people whom Sylvia Krausse remembered as visiting representatives of the Indonesian government. A fellow student warned her to show up “or something will happen to your parents.” There were written questions followed by questioning in person. “We were there all day,” she said. “They were looking for Chinese and communist connections.”
Like many students studying outside the country in that period, Lolo was called back to Indonesia. He and Ann had married on March 5, 1964, shortly after she divorced Obama. Lolo had received his master’s degree in geography three months later, but Ann, an anthropology major, would not receive her undergraduate degree until 1967. Andrew P. Vayda, a professor of anthropology and ecology who was visiting the University of Hawai‘i in that period, remembered meeting Lolo for the first time at the university in the spring of 1966, then visiting him on a trip to Jakarta late that summer. The two of them traveled together to Bandung, once a Dutch colonial garrison in the northern foothills of the Bandung Plateau, surrounded by volcanic peaks, hot springs, and tea plantations. The inflation rate was seven hundred percent, and the country felt on edge. On one leg of the trip, they encountered tanks rumbling down the main road. “He and all the Indonesians, you could see the fear on their faces—that something was going to happen,” Vayda remembered. Throughout the trip, Lolo made a point of trying the spiciest and most exotic foods and the most decrepit toilets. “How do you think Ann would react to that?” Lolo would ask.
“That