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By Root 1017 0

about her business being successful and didn’t want anybody moving in on her,” he said. Pramono, a Catholic in a country in which one is asked to identify one’s religion in the course of ordinary transactions, such as applying for jobs, felt she detected a mocking quality in Ann’s attitude to her religion. “She would just smile and laugh, you know? And a sneer. I could feel it,” Pramono told me. She chose not to be offended, because she liked Ann and believed she would never intentionally hurt anyone. But Pramono made a practice of avoiding the topic of religion. When Kay Ikranagara complained that her students were not working hard enough, Ann told her to stop taking the lessons so seriously and let the students enjoy themselves. They would learn better that way. “She was absolutely right,” Ikranagara said. “But she was not sympathetic: ‘This is your problem. . . .’”

“She used to tear me apart,” Ikranagara remembered in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. “With everybody she was like that: She would tell them what was wrong with them,” said Ikranagara, who was far from incompetent. (After receiving her Ph.D. in 1975, she went on to a career designing and implementing academic degree and training programs for developing countries.) “I don’t think anyone ever found her annoying, because it was done in a very loving way,” Ikranagara said. “You knew that she was a very outgoing, outspoken person.” Family members were not spared. Some years later, while Ikranagara worried about the influence of Indonesian machismo on her two sons, Ann worried about the pressure for Indonesian girls to be passive and accommodating. “She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role,” Ikranagara remembered. “She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn’t like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that.”

Ann’s forthrightness was in sharp contrast to the preferred Javanese style. The Javanese place great value on keeping the surface of social relations smooth, I was told repeatedly by Indonesians and non-Indonesians alike. Keeping the surface placid is often more important than getting one’s message across. Meaning emerges indirectly, as much from what is unsaid as from what is said. “Here, it’s all on the unspoken level,” said Stephen des Tombes, who moved to Indonesia in 1971. “Showing your anger is considered childish. They simply don’t do it.”

Fortunately, Indonesians do not expect foreigners to be like them. “Indonesians are very generous and very kind as long as you’re not too arrogant,” des Tombes said. “They’re willing to put up with all our Western foibles. We are rather rough and abrasive, as far as they are concerned. We are less able to pick up on the subtext.” After all, Indonesians are accustomed to living in a diverse society in which cultural differences are common. “They’re already used to dealing with Bataks,” Ikranagara told me, referring to the ethnic group from the mountains of North Sumatra known for, among many other things, straightforwardness. “So they’re willing to accept Ann as a sort of Batak.”

Ann had little trouble making close friends, including Indonesian and expatriate men. By the standards of Indonesian society, as well as expatriate society, that may have been unusual for a married woman. But Ann did not seem to care. There was Anton Hillman, an affable Indonesian of Chinese descent, who went on to host an English-language show on Indonesian television and work as an interpreter for the first lady, Ibu Tien Suharto. He is said to have met Ann at USAID and to have encouraged her to move on from her first job to the management school, where he worked part-time. Mohammad Mansur Medeiros, a reclusive and scholarly Subud member from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Harvard, whom Ann hired as a teacher, had immersed himself so deeply in Javanese culture,