A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [67]
“It was terrible for her to leave Barry in Hawaii,” recalled her friend Kadi Warner, who knew Ann during that period and lived with her and Maya several years later in Java. “But I think she agreed with his decision. It would have appealed to her intellect: Of course, this is the thing to do if you’re in a great school. That’s easy to say on one level, but it means you’re leaving a child behind. She did trust her parents. There was no question in her mind that he would be well taken care of and nurtured. Looking back, with her first marriage, when everything fell apart there, they were extremely supportive and helpful. They enabled her to go back to school; there were no recriminations. So she knew Barry was in a situation where he was well taken care of. But nonetheless, to leave him—she adored him, she loved him terribly. She wanted to be his mother.”
Ann, however, was not inclined to regret.
“Might she have tried to do things differently?” Maya said. “Perhaps, yeah. But at that time, I don’t think she thought that there was any real alternative. That’s how I think she thought about everything—the dissolution of her marriages to Barack Obama Sr. and my father. She was sad about that, just like she was sad about leaving her son in his high school years without her. It was one of those things where she felt like, ‘Well, life is what it is.’ She gained a great deal—not only the experiences in the world shared by her husband, but also her children. I think that’s how she felt about Indonesia: ‘The transition may have been difficult, but look . . .’”
Did Maya ever question Ann’s judgment, in retrospect? I wondered.
“I think she did the very best that she could,” Maya said. “And that she wanted only the best. And that she made some good choices, given what was available to her.”
Ann returned with Maya to Jakarta and resumed teaching English at the management school in the late afternoons and evenings, banking her East-West Center grant money until she was ready to go into the field. She spent much of 1975 laying the groundwork required before she could begin her research. She needed a formal proposal and letters of reference certifying that she was a student and that she had funding. She needed the approval of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, which often took months. She needed permission from every level of government, each of which levied its own fee. She set about clearing the twenty-two research permits needed to enable her to do intensive survey work in cottage-industry villages. She lined up an Indonesian government sponsor. She interviewed government officials, buyers, exporters, and aid-agency representatives. In the end, said Terence Hull, an American-born demographer who was working in Indonesia at the time, “You’d wander around with this great file of letters of permission so you could talk to an illiterate farmer about what the harvest was like.”
By January 1976, Ann had moved to Yogyakarta, a short distance from the villages she intended to study. She settled temporarily in her mother-in-law’s house in the heart of the city. The house stood inside the compound that encompassed the sultan’s palace, or kraton, and its surrounding neighborhood,