Obama’s Expatriate Experience
“We are shaped by the places we have lived,” begins The New York Times special feature on January 18, highlighting the different places President Obama has spent time, not including Washington DC.
The section on Indonesia was written by Endy M. Bayuni, chief editor of The Jakarta Post, who notes that when Barack Obama arrived there at the age of six in 1967, the country was emerging from major political upheaval. Pro-American General Suharto had seized power from the left-leaning President Sukarno. The army had control of the government and wielded considerable power over people’s lives. Dissent was dealt with harshly.
Most Indonesians were very poor. There were few autos on the streets which were crowded with rickshaws, motorcycles and street peddlers. The future president lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in circumstances far from affluent in the outskirts of Jakarta. They had a small house with enough space for chickens and other birds as well as a pet ape. He went to a public Indonesian school and quickly learned the local language. As Bayurn writes, the local school, like Indonesia itself, would have held a mix of different races, ethnic groups and religions.
Early childhood is a time of much learning, and the mature Barack Obama, writing in his first book, offer more details of his experiences and says of his “rapid acculturation in Indonesia” that “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget and extremely well mannered.....” His mother supplemented his local education with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. Five days a week, she woke him at 4 AM for English lessons which lasted three hours until he went off to school and she to work at the American embassy where she taught English to Indonesian businessmen. She taught him values, too. Before she sent him to Hawaii to live with her parents when he was ten, she had taught him “to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad” and an appreciation of the life chances he would have as an American.
Read more in the Op Ed page of The Times, January 18, and in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
Also see: The American Journey of Barack Obama.
Just heard of this on The Charlie Rose Show, which you can get on line. It’s a book of photos from the campaign Yes We Can: Barack Obama’s History-Making Presidential Campaign.