A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [45]
Four
Initiation in Java
The luncheon invitation was delivered by bicycle one morning in early 1971. Elizabeth Bryant, an American in her early thirties, was living in a converted rice storage facility in the city of Yogyakarta in Central Java. Her husband, Nevin, was doing research in Indonesia on an East-West Center grant. Like pretty much everyone in Indonesia in those years, they had no running water, no plumbing, no telephone service. To brush their teeth, they pumped water from a well, boiled it on a single kerosene burner, and spat it off the front porch. Their three servants, living in what had been the guardhouse, had fenced a five-foot pit in the yard for use as their toilet. Bushes served as a clothesline for the Bryant baby’s diapers. Life may not have been easy, but it was good. The Bryants’ house was next to the kraton, the walled compound surrounding the palace of the sultans of Yogyakarta, the lively center of traditional Javanese arts and culture. In the evening, the aqueous sounds of the gamelan practice drifted out of the compound; neighbors dropped by to lure the Bryants out to an all-night shadow-puppet performance based on tales derived from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. On this particular morning, the invitation to Elizabeth Bryant came by messenger from an older American woman in Yogyakarta whose husband was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Jakarta office had asked her to extend her hospitality to a young American and her nine-year-old son, visiting from their home in Jakarta. Could Mrs. Bryant join them for lunch? the older woman wanted to know. The guest of honor was showing her son around Java before sending him back to Hawaii for school. He was half Kenyan and born in Hawaii, Bryant recalled her hostess telling her in advance. Bryant knew enough about Hawaii to know that a half-African child would have been a rarity. Are you sure? she asked.
It was a memorable lunch—one that Bryant was able to describe in detail when I reached her in Southern California thirty-eight years later. Ann Soetoro arrived at the house with the young Barack Obama. She was dressed in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric—not the sort of sundress that Mrs. Bryant had noticed that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. She instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she had brought along. She was sending him back to Hawaii for an English-language education, Bryant remembered her saying. She was also deciding whether to go back herself. “She said, ‘What would you do?’” Bryant told me. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn’t agree with me.” Ann had left her infant daughter, Maya, in Jakarta with a servant—a choice that startled Bryant, unaccustomed as she was to Indonesian child-rearing. She wondered, too, why Ann, with an Indonesian husband, would consider moving to the United States. Over lunch, Barry sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was thirteen months old. After lunch, the group took a walk near Gadjah Mada University, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction, ducking behind a wall and shouting racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodgeball “with unseen players,” Bryant remembered. Ann did not seem visibly to react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s okay,” she remembered Ann saying. “He’s used to it.”
“I’ll tell you what both of us felt,” Bryant told me. “We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia,