That same year, on Aug. 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be the only visit by her mother, Madelyn Dunham, to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soetoro at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves or gown. “When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief,” Brugger said. “Then she stuffed it in my mouth and gave me 11 stitches without any anesthesia.” Ann tried out three different names for her new daughter, all of them Sanskrit, before settling on Maya Kassandra. The name was important to Ann, Maya told me; she wanted “beautiful names.” Stanley, the name Ann felt burdened with as a child, was not on the list.
In Indonesia, Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. “Maybe just her presence — the way she carried herself,” said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Felina Pramono, an Indonesian colleague, put it, “a bit sturdy for a woman.” She had strong opinions — and rarely softened them to please others.
“She used to tear me apart,” says Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. “With everybody she was like that: she would tell them what was wrong with them,” Ikranagara said. Family members were not spared. “She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role,” Ikranagara recalled. “She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn’t like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that.”
Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same attitudes,” she said. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.
But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. His son, Sonny Trisulo, said it may have been “government relations.” Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil-company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil-company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis and dining. Ann was expected to socialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on Lolo. “It’s the society that asks it,” Ikranagara said. “Your husband is supposed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain and kebaya,” a costume consisting of a traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. “You’re supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants.”
Ann begged off. “She didn’t understand these folks — the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil-company dinners, at which, he writes in “Dreams From My Father,” “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore-drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.
“ ‘They are not my people.’ ”
The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil-company job. As Obama describes it, something happened between them when Lolo was called back to Jakarta during the time of unrest in Indonesia and they spent a year apart. In Hawaii, Lolo was full of life, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”
Ann had pieced together some of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the president’s entourage. Lolo would not talk about any of it. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo’s finally explained to Ann what happened when her husband returned from Hawaii. Upon arriving in Jakarta, he was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. It could have been worse: students returning from Soviet-bloc countries were jailed or even vanished. Obama writes that Ann concluded that “power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own.” In response, Lolo made his peace with power, “learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company.”
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