A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [52]
Manan was new to Jakarta when he met Ann at the binational organization where she was working in 1968. He was a nervous, dark-skinned young man from a traditional Muslim family, trying to be somebody in the big city. He lacked confidence in dealing with people whom he considered to be of higher status. He had studied English at a teachers’ college in Bukittinggi, funded by the Ford Foundation, where he had first encountered Peace Corps volunteers. “We Indonesians admired Americans, especially women,” Manan recalled. “We knew that Americans were very, very civilized people, very educated, very intelligent. There were a lot of things we could learn.” Ann was a magnet for people, including him, he said. Decades later, he remembered her, and conversations they had, in vivid detail. She encouraged him to be more confident, expressive, and outgoing. She told him that he worried too much. She staged a mock television interview show and interviewed him in front of their colleagues. They often talked about Indonesia. She told him she admired Indonesia’s Bataks for their frankness, pragmatism, and willingness to assume responsibility. She also made it clear that she hated corruption. “She said the only way to solve this problem was through education and making people aware that corruption was bad,” Manan said. “I believe she taught her students that, because she spoke her mind very freely.”
Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who had taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She had lived in Jakarta as a teenager; studied anthropology and linguistics at Berkeley in the 1960s, where she had been jailed for political activism; then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband, Ikranagara, then a freelance journalist and actor. She met Ann while teaching part-time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Kay Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same attitudes,” she remembered. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.
But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into that oil company culture. Foreign firms doing business in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. In many cases, the exercise struck some people as a sham: Companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well, and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. It may have been “government relations,” his son, Sonny Trisulo, said. Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil company people