”Places He Remembered”

Six writers reflect on how the places Barack Obama has lived might have helped mold the man who will be the next president of the United States.

Printed in The New York Times on 18 January 2009.

“Obama’s Indonesian Classroom”

By ENDY M. BAYUNI

Published: January 17, 2009

Jakarta, Indonesia

WHEN Barack Obama and his mother arrived in Jakarta in 1967, Indonesia was just emerging from major political upheaval and a deep economic crisis that had made it one of the most impoverished nations in Asia. The city’s few high-rise buildings only highlighted the poverty around them. Those who had cars, perhaps more for status than for transport, competed for space on asphalt roads with public buses, motorcycles, three-wheeled rickshaws, pedestrians and hawkers peddling food, cigarettes and whatever else they could sell.

The Indonesia that Barack Obama found was a densely populated country that could barely feed its own people and had to be propped up with huge infusions of foreign aid. Not long before his arrival, hundreds of thousands of people accused of membership in the Indonesian Communist Party had been massacred, and the staunchly pro-American General Suharto had seized power from the left-leaning President Sukarno.

Under Suharto, the army took firm control of the government, and increasingly every facet of people’s lives. Anyone suspected of harboring even the slightest sympathy for the communists risked incarceration. Some of the more serious offenders were sent to a remote prison island named Buru.

Mr. Obama’s family was not exactly poor, but they were not rich either. He lived on the outskirts of Jakarta, and not in the exclusive district where American expatriates mingled with Jakarta’s high society. Instead he lived in a neighborhood that was not particularly affluent but did have houses with gardens. Barry, as he was called by friends back then, went to Indonesian schools. He learned the local language and culture through playing and running in the streets with his Indonesian friends. His height may have drawn some attention, but otherwise he could have easily passed as an Indonesian from the Molucca archipelago, where people have dark skin and curly hair.

Anyone going to a public school in Jakarta would have had early exposure to a vast array of cultures. These schools were microcosms of Indonesia, a nation of many different races, ethnic groups and religions. Indonesia has certainly had its share of religious extremism (and terrorism), but its religious tolerance remains a point of pride. The Muslim-majority nation would have ceased to exist long ago if bigotry got the better of its people.

Sadly, this openness did not extend to politics. By the time Barry left Indonesia at age 10, military control was widespread. Students attended indoctrination classes where they would profess their loyalty to the state. Dissent and criticism were not tolerated in public life. There was barely freedom of thought.

In 1971, Barry’s mother wisely sent him back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His childhood years in Indonesia served him well; growing up respecting cultural and religious differences probably helped prepare him for his return to the United States, a society still divided by race.

Indonesians wish him “selamat” (congratulations) in his new job.

Endy M. Bayuni is the chief editor of The Jakarta Post.

“This Man Is an Island”

By LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA

Published: January 17, 2009

Honolulu

AT Punahou, Hawaii’s most exclusive private school, the class of 1979 would have been mostly über rich “kama aina haole” (land-owning whites with missionary blood), filthy-rich Chinese (the first immigrant group to arrive as contract workers, leave the plantation and become business owners or marry into Hawaiian families with land) and descendants of plantation Japanese workers who rose to political and economical power after statehood in ’59.

Then there was Barack Obama — a scholarship student with a single mother and an absent African father raised by his grandparents. No missionary ancestors, no wealthy Chinese popo and goonggoong giving him $100 lee see for being No. 1 grandson, no powerful government official Uncle Kazu who could pull strings for an easy state job counting bridges on the civil engineers’ planning maps. The other students probably called him “the popolo guy in student gov,” popolo being the word for black nightshade.

In diverse, stratified Hawaii, we all designate each other by race, using references that evolved from sugar plantation pidgin dating back to the late 1870s. When I was young I was the Japanee girl with the big mouth and the Dorothy Hamill hairdo. (Japanee is pidgin for Japanese). And the white guy who ate Rice-A-Roni with butter was the haole who didn’t speak pidgin or eat real rice. There was the pake (Chinese) girl who took calculus at the community college senior year. The hapa (half-blooded) babies fathered by military guys who promptly left. The kuro-chan (literally, black man) who lived across the street. He had green eyes, blond-tipped hair and caramel skin. The bukbuk (Filipino), the yobo (Korean), the borinque (Puerto Rican), the portagee (Portuguese).

In those days, I lived on the Big Island, where pop-culture-wise we were always five years behind Honolulu and 10 years behind the mainland. But we had words, our own words for everything, for what we wore, what stink foods we ate, our idiosyncrasies, what cars we drove, what parts of town we inhabited, what bad habits we had or what pagan rites we practiced. Words for the whole list of who we are, and they go on and on.

Even in these politically correct days, we locals still laugh at ourselves, because these pidgin designations taught us to grow thick skins and take punches. (To haoles new to the islands I often say, “If I call you haole, I’m trying to tell someone who you are, i.e. ‘the haole boy with the cowboy boots.’ If I say, ‘the haole with the stupid cowboy boots,’ then you can get offended.”)

I define locals, for the record, as those of us who have been here for a few generations and plan to stay. So my definition does not include Barack Obama. He was not local. At least to me he wasn’t.

He wasn’t until I saw that photograph of him body surfing a break-neck barrel from last August. He had that local-boy reach of the arm as he glided down a huge summer swell, the grace of his relaxed face, proud, turned into the tidal force of current, the way only a local boy can take a real wave and make it his very own ride, sleek and easy. A natural local boy.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka is the author of, most recently, “Behold the Many.”

“The Occidental Tourist”

By MARGOT MIFFLIN

Published: January 17, 2009

WHEN Barack Obama made his first public speech — on Feb. 18, 1981, exhorting the trustees of Occidental College to divest from South Africa — he wasn’t the only speaker. He wasn’t the featured speaker. He wasn’t even the best speaker. But the event crystallized the key values Occidental promoted, which helped shape the man making history this week: critical thought and social justice. It also inspired the kind of social alchemy Mr. Obama later mastered on a national scale: bringing disparate groups together and making serious politics seriously fun.

The protest fell on the kind of sun-bleached winter day you see only in Southern California. The students gathered outside Coons Hall administration building, a glass-paneled monolith dubbed “the Chrysler showroom” because it clashed with the stunning Mediterranean Revival buildings on the rest of the well-manicured campus. While the trustees met inside, the speakers — black, white, Hispanic and South African — delivered their pleas, starting with Mr. Obama, whose speech was cut short when two students hauled him away in a staged display of white suppression. After the rally, a pair of folk singers harmonized as we wandered off to class, feeling groovy.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama wrote that he didn’t think the demonstration made any difference, but he was wrong. Though Occidental’s 1991 divestment was shamefully belated, more than 300 students from every corner of the tiny campus came together that day: I saw geology and art majors, actors and athletes, international students and sandy-haired Californians, shoulder to shoulder, laughing and shouting back at the speakers with the kind of politically inspired camaraderie that also characterized Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign rallies.

Occidental is a fine liberal arts college in Eagle Rock, 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, an intimate campus where we were taught above all to think critically and creatively — it was spelled out in the curriculum. The year before Barry (as we called him) arrived, the freshman “core program” was begun, requiring students to become globally literate through courses on international culture that raised questions like, “How have different societies defined justice, the sacred and the truth?”

The student body was international, although not nearly as racially diverse as it is now. But we were economically diverse, hailing from homes with swimming pools in wealthy Los Angeles suburbs like Brentwood, as well as from blue-collar towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts. We swam in Santa Monica, bowled in Eagle Rock, camped in Mexico, hiked in Joshua Tree National Park and skated at Venice Beach — something that Barry occasionally did with his friend Hasan Chandoo. We partied, but only after we studied. Our professors pushed us to apply for grants that took us around the globe, and worked community service into our course requirements. They wanted us to become citizens of the world.

For Barry, that meant moving on. A few months after the rally at Coons Hall, he left to finish his degree at Columbia, having decided to pursue public policy — in large part, he later said, because of his involvement in the divestment movement. His closest friends had just graduated. His activism had been ignited. And as an aspiring writer, he’d immersed himself in literature with the kind of Talmudic dedication that, I’m convinced, ultimately made him a brilliant speaker. If Occidental’s goal was to make us deep thinkers with a concern for justice and community, Barack Obama earned the degree.

Margot Mifflin, a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, is the author of the forthcoming “The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman.”

“New York Was So Much Older Then”

By KEVIN BAKER

Published: January 17, 2009

I CAME to New York, and to Columbia University, just a few years before Barack Obama arrived in 1981. Like him I was a poor boy, eager to get to the city and start my life as an adult.

It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting — more accessible to poor, eager young people. We lived four and five to a railroad apartment, the bathtub in the kitchen in some places, the floors lined with clumpy chalk lines of boric acid that were our useless defense against the cockroaches.

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

We lived dangerously, I suppose. Everyone’s apartment was broken into. We were told that if we got out of the subway at East 116th Street to never, ever try to walk through Morningside Park back to Columbia. Women would go out to lunch and come back to the office to find their wallets somehow missing from the pocketbooks they had held tightly between their knees throughout the meal.

Late one night, leaving a party on the Lower East Side, we saw a hulking, derelict figure emerge from under a stairwell, ready to do mayhem. When he saw how many we were he frowned and retreated beneath the stairs without saying a word, waiting for the next victim.

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

Like Barack Obama we read everything we could get our hands on. It was a movie-mad town then, and we lined up for hours in the cold on the East Side to see the latest Fassbinder or Fellini, the new Woody Allen. We nailed long, flapping schedules of all the revival houses to our walls, from the Thalia and the New Yorker, Theater 80 St. Marks and the Bleecker Street Cinemas. I saw my first Broadway show, “Equus,” for $3, and sat on stage.

We danced all night at Danceteria, and ate breakfast served by the transvestite waiters. I fell in love with an artist who lived at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline residence for women, and we walked the slate-blue paving stones around Gramercy Park for hours, talking about art. Everything seemed like a revelation, right from the first day at Columbia, when my art humanities professor took us to St. John the Divine and explained what a Gothic cathedral was.

I’d like to think that New York taught Barack Obama how indomitable people can be, even in a city that has been written off, consigned to a dozen cinematic apocalypses. It was a poorer town then, a harder one, but still a place of vaulting ambition, of indelible beauty. We thought we could do anything. We felt such pride to be there.

Kevin Baker is the author of the novels “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.”

“Ordinary People”

By JOHN MATTESON

Published: January 17, 2009

I DON’T know how Barack Obama reacted when he received his acceptance letter from Harvard Law School. When I got mine, I dashed around the room high-fiving everyone and everything in sight — including a large brass chandelier, whose bottom half I knocked clean off.

From then on, I naïvely thought, no challenge would be particularly great, and no fortune would come as a surprise. Perhaps our current president-elect felt the same way. Again, if he was like me, he was far from anticipating the hardest, most precious lessons taught at Harvard Law: the finitude of one’s own powers; the twin, paradoxical necessities of self-reliance and interdependence; and the humanity that comes when one finds oneself a long way from perfection, and then finds new ways of striving.

Far from being a place for feeling exceptional, my Harvard Law was a place for feeling strangely ordinary. Inside the Ivy League, an Ivy League pedigree makes one precisely as distinctive as being Chinese in Shanghai. The means of distinguishing oneself become progressively scarce and difficult. And while Harvard Law affords every possibility, almost every student starts out chasing a similar vision and the occasions for disappointment outnumber the prospects for glory.

If the domineering, humiliating Kingsfields of movies like “The Paper Chase” ever existed, they were no longer much in evidence by the time I got to Cambridge, Mass., in 1983. The faculty had largely adopted a no-hassle policy. Didn’t do the reading? Just say so; no hard feelings. Yet their almost exaggerated gentleness didn’t make things easier. Rather, our professors taught us to take sole responsibility for our own failings. Called on to state a case in class, but don’t feel you can do it? Go ahead, pass; but the word “pass” will burn in your throat.

Our future president probably also discovered, as I did, that wonderful community known as the law school study group, where overworked students divide responsibility for portions of a syllabus and then pool their notes and interpretations. Foxhole alliances rapidly form. Out of necessity, you learn to trust. Out of honor, you make your work trustworthy. One may stand or fall on one’s own merits, but the wise do not try to stand alone.

Still, if one has a character flaw, Harvard Law will expose it. The long hours, the quantity and difficulty of the work, and the pressure to excel are a recipe for frayed nerves, shortened tempers and durable frustrations. I maintained very respectable grades for a semester but lagged thereafter. To my considerable pain, my argumentative agility and my competitive fire — qualities I thought I possessed in abundance — were not strong enough to place me at the top.

Resigning myself to the second tier, I began to define myself as something other than a law student. I taught myself French cooking; for the first time, I fell seriously in love. Instead of taking all my third-year credits at the law school, I enrolled in a pair of superb graduate literature seminars — and began to understand that I was really meant to be an English professor. The self that I imagined on The Law Review never came to be, but I found other answers to my inner riddles.

I can’t tell whether Barack Obama suffered into self-knowledge at Harvard Law the way I did. Whereas I never discovered an academic comfort zone in Roscoe Pound Hall, he became president of The Law Review — a feat of intelligence and dedication I can regard only with awe.

Yet something tells me that Mr. Obama, too, confronted the largeness of the tasks he faced and the immensity of the expectations that called to him and, in those lonely, palpitating moments, discovered who he was. He appears to have learned that he, to a degree quite rare, possessed the confidence, the serenity and the supreme resiliency to accomplish goals to which he may have feared he was not equal.

Any thoughtful president must surely have infinitely greater moments of inwardly perceived inadequacy. If he triumphs in those moments, he does so not by ceasing to question himself but by confronting his questions with a courage born from humility and honesty. During the next four years, I hope that Mr. Obama will remember the crucible of character through which he passed at Harvard Law and that those recollections will serve him well.

John Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the biography “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.”

“United States of Chicago”

By ALEKSANDAR HEMON

Published: January 17, 2009

Chicago

IN the early ’90s, around the same time that Barack Obama settled in Chicago, I found myself stranded there, unable to return to my native Sarajevo because of the siege during the Bosnian war. It quickly became clear to me that I would have to make the transition from being a misfortunate tourist to being a Chicagoan, and my Sarajevan urban instincts compelled me to seek the ways in which I would attach myself to the city and make it my adopted hometown.

Early on, before any gainful employment, I would pick a neighborhood and roam around in loosely concentric circles, learning its human geography. When I got my first (legal) job canvassing for Greenpeace, I visited and wandered in all the spaces between the consumerist garishness and the heartbreaking blight. I learned that the beauty of Chicago comes in cruel chunks, as does its ugliness. Loving Chicago, Nelson Algren wrote, is “like loving a woman with a broken nose.”

Once, on a very cold winter day at a North Side El stop, I saw three or four freezing Chicagoans huddled together under the heating light like newly hatched chickens. It was 30 below zero, with wind chill, the kind of cold that makes your bones hurt because the frozen flesh is beyond the reach of pain. There was closeness in the huddle, but no touching; there was solidarity, but no eye contact. And I realized I, too, could huddle along and partake in the scarce warmth; I was no longer a tourist. At 30 below zero we were all Chicagoans.

Ever since, it has been clear to me that the gruff solidarity of survival is an essential part of living in Chicago: we huddle together against calamity, be it bone-breaking winters or hopeless public transportation; greedy, corrupt civic leaders or fantastically hot summers. But once the hardship seems to have retreated, we break apart and return to our cherished individualities and sad distances. There is unlimited access to the hard facts of life here, plus the kind of pride that can never be purged of shame. Enjoying a sunny day by the lake, a friend once overheard the following line, which was seasoned by an expletive: “Don’t you smile at me — get off the bike path!”

Chicago is the only city in America I can imagine declaring independence one day and becoming a city-republic, only to be riven, no doubt, by a rich repertoire of internal conflict. Saul Bellow once wrote, about the experience of the city: “Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space.” This “something in American space” is held together by a common civic spirit that often feels temporary, negotiated and limited, but is nevertheless ceaselessly humming against all the individualistic noise. Chicago is the city that always works at being a city.

But that is exactly what makes Chicago a model American place. It is hard to keep it assembled, because it keeps changing, like America. This is a nation that never stops working at being a nation, its common purpose defined by constant flux, conflict and transformation — it is what it is because it never settles for what it appears to be.

What Mr. Obama should have learned living in Chicago is that it takes far more than gut feeling and bullying, more than fuzzy-warm nationalism and fantasies of greatness, to run a country as vast and complicated as Chicago is a city. I have no doubt he did learn what he needed to, for this city makes you learn.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of “The Lazarus Project,” a novel.