A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [57]
For Barry, Ann tried two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. Though she eventually sent him back to Hawaii, the experience of an Indonesian education cannot have failed to have left a mark. Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s, told me he discovered, as an American with allergies teaching in Java, that to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control, Dove said: “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily.” Self-control is inculcated in part in Indonesian schools, Kay Ikranagara and her husband told me. And it is done through a culture of teasing. “People tease about skin color all the time,” Kay Ikranagara said. Having dark skin is a negative—as would have been plumpness and curly hair. If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. Kay Ikranagara’s husband, Ikranagara, who grew up in Bali, said he was teased mercilessly about being skinny. He learned to compensate by being clever. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay Ikranagara told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”
As Obama tells it, Ann’s attitude toward his future gradually shifted.
She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.
Ann’s efforts to prepare Barry for his return to school in Hawaii are the subject of an oft repeated story told in Dreams from My Father and recounted occasionally in President Obama’s speeches. The story concerns what Obama describes as a common practice in the Jakarta household (a practice which Saman, the houseboy, said he did not remember). Five days a week, Obama writes, Ann would enter his bedroom in Jakarta at four a.m., force-feed him breakfast, and teach him English lessons for three hours before he left for school. When he resisted, Ann would tell him: “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”
In early 1971, Ann told Barry, then age nine, that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou Academy, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. His application had been considered, Obama says, only through the intervention of an alumnus who was Stanley’s boss. “It was time for me to attend an American school, she had said,” he writes. “I’d run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon—a year, tops—and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas.” Madelyn’s brother Charles Payne told me he suspected that Madelyn played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture—that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”
Ann, too, may have doubted the wisdom