LIVING IN INDONESIA AND A NEW FATHER

I have wonderful memories of the place [Indonesia], but there’s no doubt that, at some level, I understood that I was different. It meant that I was, maybe, not part of the community as much as I might have been, otherwise. On the other hand, it also gave me an appreciation of what it means to be an American. 4

Barack was two when his father left for Boston and Harvard Law School. When he was four, his mother met an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, also a student at the University of Hawaii. They dated for two years and were married. During the two-year courtship, Lolo spent

a great deal of time at the Dunham household, and, by the time Ann told Barry that she and Lolo were to be married and would be moving to

a faraway place, Barry, now six, wasn’t surprised and didn’t object. Lolo returned to Indonesia, and Ann remained in Hawaii to make necessary preparations to move. Arriving in Jakarta, Ann and Barry were met at the airport by Lolo and groups of soldiers wearing brown uniforms and carry- ing guns. In anticipation of their arrival, a new home had been built, and Barry was already enrolled in a school. As they rode to their new home in

a borrowed car, Barry gazed at the landscape of the new place—the vil- lages, forests, rice paddies, water buffalo, congested streets and markets, and men pulling carts loaded with goods.

The new house, located on the outskirts of town, was made of stucco

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the new home, Barry’s stepfather presented him with a gift: an ape named Tata, brought from New Guinea. Another surprise were the animals in the backyard, including chickens, ducks, a yellow dog, two birds of paradise, a cockatoo, and two baby crocodiles in a pond at the back of the property. Dinner on their first night in their new home included a hen that a friend of Lolo’s killed while Barry watched. Later, lying beneath a mosquito net canopy, Barry tried to sleep as he listened to chirping crickets. He could barely believe his good fortune.

Barack writes in his memoir that, after being with Lolo for two years, his face had become familiar. In less than two years, Barack had learned the language, customs, and legends of Indonesia. He survived chicken pox, the measles, and the scratches suffered from his schoolteachers’ bam- boo switches. His best friends were the children of the farmers and the servants, and together they ran the streets, looking for odd jobs and fly- ing kites. Lolo had taught him to eat raw green peppers, dog meat, snake meat, and grasshoppers. He wrote to his grandparents and gladly accepted the boxes of chocolate and peanut butter they sent. In his letters, Barack didn’t mention some aspects of his life—those that he found too difficult to explain—like the faces of the farmers when the rains didn’t come or when the rains lasted for over a month and the farmers had to rescue their goats and hens as their huts were washed away. He didn’t describe the fre- quently violent world that he was quickly learning about, the world that was sometimes cruel and often unpredictable.

At the end of the day, when she returned from her work at the Ameri- can Embassy, he talked with his mother about what he had seen, and she would stroke his forehead and try to explain to him as best as she could. He turned to Lolo for guidance and instruction, finding him easy to be with, glad that Lolo introduced him as his son to his family and friends. When Lolo explained the scars on his legs that came from the leeches that stuck to him and his fellow soldiers as they marched through the swamps in New Guinea, he told Barry that it hurt when the skin was singed after using a hot knife to remove the leeches. He said, “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.” He told Barry that he killed a man because the man was weak. He said, “Men take advantage of weakness in other men . . . better to be strong . . . if you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong . . . but always better to be strong yourself. Always.” 5

Before Ann and Barry moved to Indonesia, she tried to learn all she could about life there. She was prepared for most of what she encoun- tered, but she didn’t expect the loneliness. Lolo had changed since he left Hawaii. When he left Hawaii to prepare a home for his bride and her son,

F O R M AT I V E Y E A R S I N H AWA I I A N D I N D O N E S I A 21 they were apart for a year. During that time, he lost the energy he had as a

student in Hawaii, and his dream of teaching at a university upon his return to Indonesia also vanished. Ann later found out that Lolo and all the Indonesian students studying abroad were ordered to return home by the Indonesian government. When he landed in Jakarta, Lolo was questioned by army officials and was conscripted to serve in the army in the jungles of New Guinea for a year. The vitality that had attracted Ann to Lolo while they were students at the university was gone, and, as a result, Ann was lonely; her life wasn’t what she’d hoped it would be.

Her job at the American Embassy helped her cope, as did the money she earned there and the friendships she made. At the embassy, Ann learned what was going on in the government—news and information she couldn’t get otherwise. Knowing she could leave if she wanted or needed to, and knowing her white race and American passport protected her, she felt some comfort. What worried her more was what the situation was doing or might do to her son. Lolo, who had been working as a geologist, obtained a job in a government relations office of an American oil com- pany with the help of his well-connected brother-in-law. A higher income enabled the family to move to another neighborhood, purchase a car and

a television, and obtain a membership in a country club. All this did little to help Ann understand and cope. She decided she needed to concen- trate on Barry’s education, outside of what he learned at the Indonesian school. There was no money to send Barry to the International School that most of the foreign children attended, so she supplemented his education with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. Five days a week, at four o’clock in the morning, while Barry ate his breakfast, she gave him English lessons before he left for school and she left for work. As well, she would remind Barry of his heritage, describing how his father grew up poor in a poverty-stricken country, telling Barry that hard work and living life according to strict principles was how his father lived, and Barry had no choice but to do the same. Besides the correspondence course, she brought home books on the civil rights movement, music recordings of black singers, and copies of speeches by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; she told him stories about the black children in southern U.S. states who were forced to read books discarded by the white children. They succeeded despite their hardships, she said. She told Barry that to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance and a special destiny. 6

Ann spent many hours supplementing what Barry was learning in the Indonesian school. She was adamant that he learn about race, heritage, and about being an American. All of the information confused Barry about who he was, where he came from, and his mixed-race heritage.

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When he looked in the mirror, he wondered if something was wrong with his reflected face. Watching television shows with black actors and thumbing through the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog his grandparents sent to him only confused him further. Most of what he felt and observed

he kept to himself, believing that either his mother didn’t see or feel the same way or she was attempting to protect him. Through it all, he trusted his mother’s love for him, despite feeling that what she had taught him was incomplete somehow. Barack lived in Indonesia for four years. Dur- ing that time, Ann gave birth to a daughter named Maya. When Barack was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, believing

he needed to attend school there rather than continue his education in Indonesia. She promised her young son that she and Maya would soon join him in Hawaii.

Barack’s time in Indonesia stayed with him long into adulthood. In his book The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, he writes that he is haunted by memories of his life in Bali. He thinks about how packed mud felt beneath his bare feet as he walked through rice paddies, of how the sky at sunrise looked behind volcanic peaks, fruit stands along the road, and the muezzin’s call at night. He writes that he hopes to take his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters there someday, so he can share something of his life as a child with them. But his plans, he says, are always delayed, and he worries that what he might find there now wouldn’t match his memories. He adds that, even with today’s cell phones, direct flights, and 24-hour news coverage and Internet cafes, Indonesia feels more distant to him than it did 30 years ago. He fears, he says, that the land where he spent four years of his childhood has become a land of strangers. 7

LIVING IN INDONESIA AND A NEW FATHER