A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [66]
In late 1974, Ann passed the oral exams for her master’s degree, moved on to the Ph.D. program, and received approval to study the role of cottage industry “as a subsistence alternative” for peasant families on Java. Ann’s choice of subject was unusual, Dewey told me, in its focus on the production of handicrafts and on their economic dimension. “People have been so overawed by their beauty that they talked about them as art—but not the market, not the business,” Dewey said. Under the terms of her grant from the East-West Center, Ann had been required to take a course in entrepreneurship. The institute of which she was a part—the technology-and-development institute within the East-West Center—also had a particular focus on entrepreneurship. “She, I think, knew that these guys were smart businessmen,” Dewey said. “But I don’t think she knew the background literature.” Dewey pointed her to the work of two of the most influential names in Javanese development—the Dutch economist J. H. Boeke and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Dewey’s colleague from the Modjokuto project. In Dewey’s view, both had left a powerful but incorrect impression, picked up by Indonesian government officials, that the traditional handicraft industries were dying out, taking the cottage-industry villages with them. “The best scholars said it was crap, but the middle-level bureaucrats took it as the bible,” Dewey told me. So she suggested to Ann: Bounce your data off the work of Boeke and Geertz.
In early 1975, Ann set off for Indonesia to begin her fieldwork. Maya went with her. Barry, who at that point had spent twelve of his thirteen years with his mother, remained behind. As Obama tells it in his book, the choice was his. “But when my mother was ready to return to Indonesia to do her fieldwork, and suggested that I go back with her and Maya to attend the international school there, I immediately said no,” he writes. “I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again.” Furthermore, there were advantages to living with his grandparents: They would leave him alone, he says, as long as he kept what he calls his “trouble” out of sight. The arrangement suited him, he says, because he was engaged in a solitary project of his own. He was learning to be a black man in America—in a place where there were few people to turn to for guidance.
Ann’s decision to leave Barry, at thirteen, with her parents in Hawaii offends the sensibilities of many Americans who know almost nothing else about her. When people learned that I was working on a book on the president’s mother, the question I encountered most often was: “Do you like her?” Sometimes people asked, “Was she nice?” The line of questioning puzzled me: Why were those the first things people wanted to know? Gradually, it became apparent that those questions were a way of approaching the subject of Ann’s decision to live apart from her child. They were followed by ruminations on how a mother could do such a thing. As many Americans see it, a mother belongs with her child, and no extenuating circumstances can explain the perversity of choosing to be elsewhere. Ann’s decision was a transgression that people thirty-five years later could neither understand nor forgive.
For Ann, leaving Barry behind was the single hardest thing she had ever done, Maya told me. But Ann felt she had no choice. Barry,