A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [46]
“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “It’s because of his Indonesian background. I think he’s a mixture of cultures, and that makes him more worldly. He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans—being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”
Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. After centuries of domination by the Dutch, followed by Japanese occupation and a four-year revolution, the 17, 500 islands that make up what is now Indonesia had become an independent nation in 1949. By the early 1960s, inflation was soaring, foreign investment had stagnated, and poverty was widespread. People waited in long lines to buy basics, such as kerosene and rice. The Communist Party had grown into the third largest in the world. In 1963, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, suspended elections. The following year, he declared “the year of vivere pericoloso,” borrowing the Italian phrase for “living dangerously” from a speech by Mussolini. The details of the September 30, 1965, coup and counter-coup remain in dispute, as do the particulars of the slaughter that followed. There is disagreement over who planned the attack on the generals and for what purpose; and estimates of the number of communists, suspected communists, and others killed in the ensuing bloodbath range from 100,000 to more than a million. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of A History of Modern Indonesia, militias went door-to-door in villages in Bali, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. The army became the dominant institution in the country. Soldiers were ubiquitous, armed with machine guns on buses and trains and in public buildings. Major-General Suharto, who took power when Sukarno was sidelined, exercised tight control over internal security and community life. Trials and imprisonments dragged on for years. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened. Bill Collier, who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent fifteen years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers would be told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. He recalled how a well-dressed stranger knocked on the door to his house in Bandung in 1968, at a time when many educated people even remotely suspected of communist ties had lost their jobs. The man’s children were hungry, and he had no food in the house. Could Collier spare some rice? he wanted to know. Four decades later, slumped in a chair in the extravagantly appointed lobby of a hotel in Jakarta where we met, Collier recalled saying no—an act of such stupidity, he said, that the memory haunted him to that day. “I have wished a thousand times that I had given him all the rice in the house,” he said.
The sixteen-million-man megalopolis of glass bank towers, shopping malls, and traffic-choked boulevards where I met Collier was nothing like the city that greeted twenty-five-year-old Ann Soetoro and her six-year-old son. Jakarta was a tapestry of villages—low-rise and sprawling—interwoven with forests,