The Audacity of Hope

live as Indonesians lived—but every so often my mother would take me to the
American Club, where I could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola
to my heart’s content. Sometimes, when my Indonesian friends came to our house, I
would show them books of photographs, of Disneyland or the Empire State Building,
that my grandmother had sent me; sometimes we would thumb through the Sears
Roebuck catalog and marvel at the treasures on display. All this, I knew, was part of my
heritage and set me apart, for my mother and I were citizens of the United States,
beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.
The scope of that power was hard to miss. The U.S. military conducted joint exercises
with the Indonesian military and training programs for its officers. President Suharto
turned to a cadre of American economists to design Indonesia’s development plan,
based on free-market principles and foreign investment. American development
consultants formed a steady line outside government ministries, helping to manage the
massive influx of foreign assistance from the U.S. Agency for International
Development and the World Bank. And although corruption permeated every level of
government—even the smallest interaction with a policeman or bureaucrat involved a
bribe, and just about every commodity or product coming in and out of the country,
from oil to wheat to automobiles, went through companies controlled by the president,
his family, or members of the ruling junta—enough of the oil wealth and foreign aid
was plowed back into schools, roads, and other infrastructure that Indonesia’s general
population saw its living standards rise dramatically; between 1967 and 1997, per capita
income would go from $50 to $4,600 a year. As far as the United States was concerned,
Indonesia had become a model of stability, a reliable supplier of raw materials and
importer of Western goods, a stalwart ally and bulwark against communism.
I would stay in Indonesia long enough to see some of this newfound prosperity
firsthand. Released from the army, my stepfather began working for an American oil
company. We moved to a bigger house and got a car and a driver, a refrigerator, and a
television set. But in 1971 my mother—concerned for my education and perhaps
anticipating her own growing distance from my stepfather—sent me to live with my
grandparents in Hawaii. A year later she and my sister would join me. My mother’s ties
to Indonesia would never diminish; for the next twenty years she would travel back and
forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a
specialist in women’s development issues, designing programs to help village women
start their own businesses or bring their produce to market. But while during my teenage
years I would return to Indonesia three or four times on short visits, my life and
attention gradually turned elsewhere.
What I know of Indonesia’s subsequent history, then, I know mainly through books,
newspapers, and the stories my mother told me. For twenty-five years, in fits and starts,
Indonesia’s economy continued to grow. Jakarta became a metropolis of almost nine
million souls, with skyscrapers, slums, smog, and nightmare traffic. Men and women
left the countryside to join the ranks of wage labor in manufacturing plants built by
foreign investment, making sneakers for Nike and shirts for the Gap. Bali became the
resort of choice for surfers and rock stars, with five-star hotels, Internet connections,
and a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. By the early nineties, Indonesia was
considered an “Asian tiger,” the next great success story of a globalizing world.