A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [48]
The households in which Ann and Lolo lived in Jakarta in the late 1960s and early 1970s were neither grand nor impoverished by Indonesian standards. When Ann arrived in 1967, Lolo was in the army, fulfilling the commitment he had made to the government in return for being sent abroad to study. He had been sent to Irian Barat, the contested area that would later become Papua, Indonesia’s twenty-sixth province. He served as a member of a team assigned to map the border. (A photograph taken in Merauke, a former Dutch military post and one of the easternmost towns in Indonesia, dated July 30, 1967, shows Lolo and nine other men in uniform arrayed along a fence line beneath a sign that reads “Operasi Tjenderawasih II (Team Survey Perbatasan),” or “Operation Cenderawasih, Border Survey Team.”) As long as he was in the military, Lolo’s salary was low. On her first night in Indonesia, Ann complained later to a colleague, Lolo served her white rice and dendeng celeng—dried, jerked wild boar, which Indonesians hunted in the forests when food was scarce. (“I said, ‘That’s delicious! I love it, Ann,’” the colleague, Felina Pramono, remembered. “She said, ‘It was moldy, Felina.’”) Lolo’s pay was so paltry, Ann later joked, it would not have covered the cost of cigarettes (which she did not smoke). But Lolo had a brother-in-law, Trisulo, who was a vice president for exploration and production at the Indonesian oil company Pertamina. When Lolo completed his military service, Trisulo, who was married to Lolo’s sister, Soewardinah, used his contacts with foreign oil companies doing business in Indonesia, he told me, to help Lolo get a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company of California. By the early 1970s, Lolo and Ann had moved into a rented house in Matraman, a middle-class area of Central Jakarta near Menteng. The house was a pavilyun, an annex on the grounds of a bigger main house, according to a former houseboy named Saman who worked in those years for Lolo and Ann. It extended straight back from the street, perpendicular to the roadway, into a garden. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a library, and a terrace. Like the households of other Indonesians who could afford it, and of foreigners living in Indonesia, it had a sizable domestic staff. Two female servants shared a bedroom; two men—a cook and the houseboy—slept mostly on the floor of the house or outside in the garden, according to Saman. The staff freed Ann from domestic obligations to a degree that would have been almost impossible in the United States. There were people to clean the house, prepare meals, buy groceries, and look after her children—enabling her to work, pursue her interests, and come and go as she wanted. The domestic staff made it possible, too, for Ann and Lolo to cultivate their own professional and social circles, which did not necessarily overlap.
Lolo (third from left) with the Indonesian border-survey team in Merauke, Irian Barat, July 1967
On August 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be Madelyn Dunham’s only visit to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves, or gown. The doctor, a woman, was wearing a pink suit. “When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief,” Brugger remembered. “Then she stuffed it in my mouth