A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [58]
Now she was dispatching him, alone, on a trip halfway around the globe. As he later described his send-off in Dreams from My Father, an Indonesian copilot who was a friend of Ann’s escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”
Ann’s decision to marry Lolo had required that she uproot Barry, at age six, and transplant him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely ten, and sending him back. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later. When we spoke, Obama recalled those serial displacements. He was less aware at that time, he said, of the toll they took than he would become many years later.
“I think that was harder on a ten-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, folded into a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see—you know what?—that would be hard on a kid.”
With Lolo, Maya, and Barack, 1970
The years in Jakarta had marked them all. For Ann, who would return repeatedly as an anthropologist and as a development consultant over the next twenty-five years, the experience had given her powerful insight into the lives of ordinary Indonesians that few Western advisers would ever be in a position to acquire. She would never adopt what Yang Suwan thought of as typical expatriate attitudes—acquisitiveness, arrogance, and an insistence on having the last word. She would never become one of those infatuated “Java junkies” or “Java freaks.” She had lived through a dark period in the country’s history. She had lived like an Indonesian woman, worrying at times about how to feed, protect, and educate her children. As Yang put it, “She knew how to solve problems that other expatriates don’t know exist.”
Barry, too, had been shaped in ways that would remain with him, for better or for worse. One colleague of Ann’s in Indonesia in the late 1970s, John Raintree, who raised his two children abroad, said Ann, by the choices she made, gave Barry not one but two important experiences: First, she gave him an extraordinary adventure and the chance to be broadened and strengthened by living overseas; then, by enabling him to return to the United States and live out his teenage years there, she allowed him to begin to develop his identity as an American.
In Indonesia, June 1972
A few weeks before the presidential election in 2008, I traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to meet Michael Dove, a professor of anthropology at Yale and a longtime friend of Ann’s. Dove had spent his mid-twenties in Kalimantan, his thirties in Java and Pakistan, his forties in Hawaii—and had known Ann in almost all of those places. Expatriate life has its advantages, he told me: It’s exciting, there is boundless hope, you leave things behind. You are in limbo overseas. “I didn’t know how many family problems I had until I came back from Asia,” he said. Your American values are thrown into relief, he suggested. You think about them in new ways. Dove had been thinking about the suggestion that Lolo had become more American and Ann more Javanese. “I think it’s more complicated than that,” he said. “By becoming more Javanese, she was getting more insights into what it meant to be an American, both the good and the bad. Because, of course, we never become Javanese. That lies beyond us.”
Five
Trespassers Will Be Eaten
In the summer of 1973, Ann touched down on the U.S. mainland for the first