Barack Obama’s youth shaped by different worlds

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HONOLULU—The life stories, when the presidential candidate tells them, all have one common theme: a quest to belong.

A boy wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where everyone else is thin, dark where everyone else is light.

A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine.

A young black man struggles for acceptance at an elite prep school where thoughtless children of privilege think it funny to dress up as slaves for Halloween.

These have been the stories told thus far about the first two character-shaping decades of Barack Obama’s life, a story line largely shaped by his own best-selling memoirs, political speeches and interviews.

But the reality of Obama’s narrative is not that simple.

More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.

At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them, sometimes making him look better in the retelling, and sometimes skipping over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.

The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.

In his best-selling autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama described having long, heated conversations about racism with another black student, “Ray,” who once railed: “Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian.” The real life Ray, located by the Chicago Tribune, is actually half black and half Japanese. According to a close friend from high school, that young man was perceived and treated as one of Punahou’s many mixed-race students.

Then there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9: In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, that Life magazine article and photographs don’t exist.

Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories—fuzzy in specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license. Others almost certainly illustrate how carefully the young man guarded the secret of his loneliness from even those who knew him best. And much of Obama’s self-portrait as someone deeply affected by his father’s abandonment yet able to thrive in greatly disparate worlds is born out by reporting.

Still, the story of Obama’s early years highlights how politics and autobiography are not such different creatures: the framework of both is shaped to serve a purpose.

In its reissue after he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004, “Dreams” joined a long tradition of political memoirs, such as John Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” that candidates have used to introduce themselves to the American people.

From his earliest moments on the national political stage, Obama has presented himself as having two unique qualities crucial at this time in history: an ability to bridge the ever-widening gap between Americans of different races, faiths and circumstances and the fact that he is a fresh political face. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way in.

As much as he may have felt like an outsider at times, Obama rarely seemed to show it. Throughout his youth, as depicted in his first book, he always found ways to meld into even the most uninviting of communities. He learned to adapt to unfamiliar territory. And he frequently made peace—even allies—with the very people who angered him most.

Yet even Obama has acknowledged the limits of memoir. In a new introduction to the reissued edition of “Dreams,” he noted that the dangers of writing an autobiography included “the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer . . . (and) selective lapses of memory.”

He added: “I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully.”

It was a complicated time.

Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new state capital of Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard.

Oblivious to all of this was a perpetually smiling toddler the entire family called Barry. In family snapshots, the boy is a portrait of childhood bliss. He played on the beach. He posed in lifeguard stands. He rode a bright blue tricycle with red, white and blue streamers dangling from the handlebars.

In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background—raised for a time in the third world, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics—makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system.

Not as well as known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams.

“Looking back now, I’d say he really is kind of the perfect combination of all of them,” said his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng.

“All of them were imperfect but all of them loved him fiercely, and I believe he took the best qualities from each of them.”

During her son’s earliest years, Obama’s mother, whose full name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy, attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself and rarely saw the group of friends that she and her estranged husband, Barack Obama Sr., had made while attending the university.

Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department and a close friend of the couple, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather, Stanley Dunham.

“Stanley loved that little boy,” said Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii. “In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous.”

A close friend of Obama’s from their teenage years, Greg Orme, spent so much time with Dunham that he, too, called him “Gramps.” Orme recalled that years later, at Obama’s wedding reception in Chicago, Obama brought the crowd to tears when he spoke of his recently deceased maternal grandfather and how he made a little boy with an absent father feel as though he was never alone.

Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii, was more reserved but seemed to love having Obama’s friends over to play and hang out.

“Those were robust years full of energy and cacophony and she loved all of it,” Soetoro-Ng said of her grandmother, who has lived alone since her husband died in 1992.

Ann and the little boy lived with the Dunhams until Obama was nearly 6, giving him a happy life full of doting family. But everything would change quickly when the young divorced mother met and married an Indonesian student studying at the East-West Center, an education and research institution in Honolulu that is devoted to issues of common concern to the Asia Pacific region and the United States.

In one family photo before the mother and son moved to Indonesia, Obama walks barefoot on Waikiki Beach, arms outstretched as though embracing the entire beautiful life around him. The sailboat the Manu Kai—bird of the sea, in English—is about to set sail behind him.

Obama, too, was about to journey far from these familiar shores.

Obama has told the story—one of the watershed moments of his racial awakening—time and again, in remarkable detail.

He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day, while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.”

The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama wrote of the Life magazine photos in his “Dreams.”

Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)

In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than a dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of his race—of the fact that some people might treat him differently simply because of the color of his skin.

Ironically, Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in “Dreams.” He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.

The reality may have been more complicated than that.

Obama and his mother joined her new husband, an initially kind man who would later become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. They lived in a modest, six-room house in central Jakarta, in a neighborhood that resembled a village more than the bustling metropolis the city is today. Electricity had arrived only a couple of years earlier. Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs. The landscape was a jungle of fruit trees: banana, mango and rambutan, a spiky fruit native to Southeast Asia.

Former neighborhood playmates remember Obama as “Barry Soetoro,” or simply “Barry,” a chubby little boy very different from the lean, gangly Obama everyone knows today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood—primarily because he was so different in appearance.

He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was the only child whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in the neighborhood populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal land-owning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.

Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means “cheater.”

When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, “cheater, cheater.” When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled “cheater, cheater.”

Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn’t want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi’s friends to a nearby swamp.

“They held his hands and feet, and said, `One, two, three,’ and threw him in the swamp,” recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. “Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry.”

The other kids would fight him physically sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.

“He was built like a bull. So we’d get three kids together to fight him,” recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, his former neighborhood playmate. “But it was only playing.”

Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews in Indonesia.

Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama’s 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.

The teacher, who still lives in Obama’s old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. “His friends called him `Negro,’” Darmawan said, referring to a slur that wasn’t considered such at the time in Indonesia.

But all of his teachers at the Catholic school described him as a leader. “He would be very helpful with friends. He’d pick them up if they fell down,” Darmawan recalled. “He would protect the smaller ones.”

Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story, in light of current events. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama “wrote he wanted to be president,” Sinaga recalled. “He didn’t say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy. That’s why he said he wanted to be president.”

When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only three miles to the west, but a world away. The elite Dutch colonists once lived here; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school—this time a Muslim one—where he was enrolled. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He drew decidedly American cartoon characters during class.

“He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman,” said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. “Barry liked to draw heroes.”

Then, one day about a year after he had arrived, Obama was gone.

“Suddenly we asked, `Where’s Barry?’” remembered Ati Kisjanto, 45. “And we were told he had already moved away.”

Punahou, the elite private school in downtown Honolulu that was Obama’s next step, was populated heavily by the wealthy, the majority of them white and Asian.

Indeed, during the years Obama attended Punahou, after his mother moved him and his sister back to Hawaii, less than a dozen of the high school’s nearly 1,600 students were African-American.

Then and now, Punahou and Hawaii liked to see themselves as more diverse and colorblind than the rest of the nation. But the reality felt far different for the handful of African-Americans walking the campus.

Rik Smith, a black Punahou student two years older than Obama, remembers a Halloween when white students would dress as slaves, coming to school in tattered clothes with their faces painted dark with shoe polish. “Like being black was a funny costume in and of itself,” Smith, now a doctor who specializes in geriatrics in California, recalled.

“Punahou was an amazing school,” Smith said. “But it could be a lonely place. . . . Those of us who were black did feel isolated—there’s no question about that.”

As a result, the handful of black students at Punahou informally banded together. “The brothers,” as Lewis Anthony Jr., an African-American in the class of 1977 put it, hung out together, often talking about issues involving race and civil rights. They often sought out parties, especially at the military bases on the island, where African-Americans would be in attendance.

Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and Smith. Both of them seemed surprised to hear that in “Dreams”—which neither of them had read—Obama talks about routinely going to parties at the bases in order to hang out with “Ray,” who like Anthony and Smith was two years ahead of him in school.

“We’d all do things together, but Obama was never there,” Smith said, adding that they often took the few other black underclassmen with them to parties at the local army barracks. “I went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them. When I see him today on television, I hardly recognize him.”

Much time is devoted in Obama’s book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou, but, as is the case with his memories of Indonesia, some of these recollections are contradicted by interviews with others who were there in those days.

Any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends—many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents’ apartment, near Punahou, after school let out.

One of those kids was Orme, a smart, respectful teenager from a white, middle-class family. Though Orme spent most afternoons with Obama and considered him one of his closest friends, he said Obama never brought up issues of race, never talked about feeling out of place at Punahou.

“He never verbalized any of that,” Orme said during a telephone interview from his home in Oregon. “He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”

Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was largely his decision.

When his mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of wanderlust, announced she was returning to Indonesia, Obama, then a teenager, asked to stay in Hawaii, according to Soetoro-Ng, who still lives in Honolulu. Once again, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who had been as much parents as grandparents throughout the young man’s life, said he could live with them.

“I don’t imagine the decision to let him stay behind was an easy one for anyone,” Soetoro-Ng said. “But he wanted to remain at Punahou. He had friends there, he was comfortable there, and to a kid his age, that’s all that mattered.”

There was at least one place where Obama found a sense of community: on the basketball court. A member of the varsity squad, though not a starter, Obama and his teammates brought Punahou the state championship in 1979, his senior year.

Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called “Barry O’Bomber” by teammates. Alan Lum, a teammate who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama for always being the first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing time.

Obama wasn’t shy about advocating for himself and his fellow back-up players, Lum said. “He’d go right up to the coach during a game and say, `Coach, we’re killing this team. Our second-string should be playing more.’”

But it was on the court in the off-season that Obama seemed to be even happier. Back then, Punahou was a completely open campus, with several basketball courts where twenty-something men from Honolulu would come in the late afternoon for what often turned into flashy, highly competitive pick-up sessions. Many of the men were black.

Orme also would stay for the games.

“At the time, it was about basketball,” said Orme, who has remained friends with Obama over the years and who plays basketball with him almost every Christmas when the two return to Hawaii to visit family. “But looking back now I can see he was seeking more from those guys than that. He was probably studying them and learning from them. He was a younger black man looking for guidance.”

Every senior graduating from Punahou gets to design a quarter page in the yearbook. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or quotes that best represent them.

On page 271 of the 1979 Oahuan, Obama’s entry reflects the crossroads he found himself at as he prepared for life beyond Hawaii. He thanked “Tut and Gramps,” his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn’t mention his far-away mother.

He also thanked the “Choom Gang,” a reference to “chooming,” the Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Obama admits in “Dreams” that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.”

In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with only one other Punahou student, “Ray,” the young black man described in detail in “Dreams” as two years older than Obama and perpetually angry at the white world around him. “It’s their world, all right,” Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. “They own it and we in it. So just get the f—- outta my face.”

When asked in an interview about Ray’s identity, Obama confirmed that it was Keith Kakugawa, a biracial track athlete.

Knowing Kakugawa is Ray dampens the impact of certain passages in “Dreams.” For example, Obama recounts Ray complaining that all the girls at Punahou are “A-1, USDA-certified racists.” Ray says they don’t want to date the black guys. Later, he complains about he and Obama not getting enough playing time as athletes and speculates that they’d be “treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or f———Eskimo.”

In fact, Kakugawa is half Japanese. John Hagar, who said he was a close friend and track teammate of Kakugawa, said he was surprised by Obama’s description of the character representing Kakugawa as an angry young black man. “I never picked up on that,” Hagar said. “He was just one of those perfect (ethnic) mixes of everything you see in Hawaii.”

Kakugawa declined comment for this article, directing questions to the head of research for the Obama campaign.

Obama often links his experiences with drugs and partying to his friendship with Kakugawa. While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.

Another story put forth in “Dreams” as one of Obama’s pivotal moments of racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. Obama recounts taking two white friends, including Orme, to a party attended almost entirely by African-Americans. According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of place. The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that whites held a “fundamental power” over blacks.

“One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. And he clearly didn’t appreciate that,” said Orme, who remains friends with Obama. “I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him.”

As Obama’s senior year drew to a close, his mother sent him letters from afar, about life in Indonesia and her work there with non-profit groups doing economic development. She also sent advice about his future. College would be his next stop. She mixed encouragement to keep up his grades with laments about American politics.

“It is a shame we have to worry so much about (grade point), but you know what the college entrance competition is these days,” she wrote. “Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson’s day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? . . . I don’t see that we are producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Instead we are producing Richard Nixons.”

In the spring on 1979, Obama’s mother and Maya, Barack’s younger half sister by almost nine years, flew to Hawaii for his high school graduation. If young Obama had struggled to find a place at Punahou, it was well hidden on this day as well. He laughed and posed for photos with friends.

A trimmed Afro, Hawaiian flower leis around his neck, Obama was surrounded by the disparate people who shaped him. In one photo, he hugs a beaming half-Indonesian sister. In a picture with his mother, she appears slightly blurry.

In a striking snapshot with his grandparents, Stanley smiles proudly, while Madelyn hugs him fiercely, as though she doesn’t want to let him go forth into a world far from the remote island that for so long had been his home.

___

(Chicago Tribune staff reporter Ray Gibson contributed to this report.)