Dreams From My Father. Barack Obama

Hanuman,” Lolo said as we circled the statue, “the monkey god.” I turned around in my seat, mesmerized by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun, poised to leap into the sky as puny traffic swirled around its feet. “He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said firmly. “Strong as a hundred men. When he fights the demons, he’s never defeated.”

      The house was in a still-developing area on the outskirts of town. The road ran over a narrow bridge that spanned a wide brown river; as we passed, I could see villagers bathing and washing clothes along the steep banks below. The road then turned from tarmac to gravel to dirt as it wound past small stores and whitewashed bungalows until it finally petered out into the narrow footpaths of the kampong. The house itself was modest stucco and red tile, but it was open and airy, with a big mango tree in the small courtyard in front. As we passed through the gate, Lolo announced that he had a surprise for me; but before he could explain we heard a deafening howl from high up in the tree. My mother and I jumped back with a start and saw a big, hairy creature with a small, flat head and long, menacing arms drop onto a low branch.

      “A monkey!” I shouted.

      “An ape,” my mother corrected.

      Lolo drew a peanut from his pocket and handed it to the animal’s grasping fingers. “His name is Tata,” he said. “I brought him all the way from New Guinea for you.”

      I started to step forward to get a closer look, but Tata threatened to lunge, his dark-ringed eyes fierce and suspicious. I decided to stay where I was.

      “Don’t worry,” Lolo said, handing Tata another peanut. “He’s on a leash. Come—there’s more.”

      I looked up at my mother, and she gave me a tentative smile. In the backyard, we found what seemed like a small zoo: chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and finally two baby crocodiles, half submerged in a fenced-off pond toward the edge of the compound. Lolo stared down at the reptiles. “There were three,” he said, “but the biggest one crawled out through a hole in the fence. Slipped into somebody’s rice field and ate one of the man’s ducks. We had to hunt it by torchlight.”

      There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the village. Groups of giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a few barefoot old men came up to shake our hands. We stopped at the common, where one of Lolo’s men was grazing a few goats, and a small boy came up beside me holding a dragonfly that hovered at the end of a string. When we returned to the house, the man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.

      “Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

      Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass.

      Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop. Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.

      “The first thing to remember is how to protect yourself.”

      Lolo and I faced off in the backyard. A day earlier, I had shown up at the house with an egg-sized lump on the side of my head. Lolo had looked up from washing his motorcycle and asked me what had happened, and I told him about my tussle with an older boy who lived down the road. The boy had run off with my friend’s soccer ball, I said, in the middle of our game. When I chased after him, the boy picked up a rock. It wasn’t fair, I said, my voice choking with aggrievement. He had cheated.

      Lolo had parted my hair with his fingers and silently examined the wound. “It’s not bleeding,” he said finally, before returning to his chrome.

      I thought that had ended the matter. But when he came home from work the next day, he had with him two pairs of boxing gloves. They smelled of new leather, the larger pair black, the smaller pair red, the laces tied together and thrown over his shoulder.

      He now finished tying the laces on my gloves and stepped back to examine his handiwork. My hands dangled at my sides like bulbs at the ends of thin stalks. He shook his head and raised the gloves to cover my face.

      “There. Keep your hands up.” He adjusted my elbows, then crouched into a stance and started to bob. “You want to keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target. How does that feel?” I nodded, copying his movements as best I could. After a few minutes, he stopped and held his palm up in front of my nose.

      “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see your swing.”

      This I could do. I took a step back, wound up, and delivered my best shot. His hand barely wobbled.

      “Not bad,” Lolo said. He nodded to himself, his expression unchanged. “Not bad at all. Agh, but look where your hands are now. What did I tell you? Get them up….”

      I raised my arms, throwing soft jabs at Lolo’s palm, glancing up at him every so often and realizing how familiar his face had become after our two years together, as familiar as the earth on which we stood. It had taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers’ bamboo switches. The children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines—the loser watched his kite soar off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads toward the sky, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

      That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. In letters to my grandparents, I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilizing packages of chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow. But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain. I didn’t tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind—the terror that danced in my friend’s eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers;