A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [56]
One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place—sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was eight or nine at the time, had asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann’s attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.
“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Barack has famously mentioned that she said to him, always, ‘Well, how would you feel if X, Y, and Z? How would that make you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever towards empathy and those kinds of things, and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”
It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave and bold he was. Felina Pramono sensed that Ann had plans for his future. Benji Bennington, from the East-West Center, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I remember her saying that.” Samardal Manan remembered Ann saying something similar—that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman, the houseboy.
“Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.
What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children’s education—just as it had mattered to generations of her Kansas forebears. But that was not simple. Because they were living in Indonesia, she wanted her children to know the country, have Indonesian friends, and not grow up in an expatriate bubble. At the same time, she wanted them to have the opportunities she had, including the opportunity to attend a great university. For that, they needed to be academically prepared. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate. There were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. They were paid so little that many also worked second jobs, dividing their time, energy, and attention. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, which offered what many say was an excellent education. But the school was expensive and difficult to get into. At its founding, money had been raised by selling bonds to institutions such as the Ford Foundation. Slots went to the children of diplomats, executives of foreign firms, and employees of international organizations including Ford. Without a job in one of those institutions, few people could get a child in or afford the tuition. Furthermore, there were few if any Indonesian students in the school. There were not many educational options in Jakarta that would have provided