NEW YORK (AP) — Above a rooftop in Jakarta or the Indus River in Pakistan, the moon looms large in the childhood memories of Maya Soetoro-Ng, but President Obama's little sister hadn't realized how important those memories were until she was pregnant with her oldest daughter.
It was then she thought about how their mother, Ann
Dunham, would jostle her awake wherever they were — in India or New York,
England or Hawaii — to head outside so they could appreciate the moon. And how
grandmother and granddaughter would never meet.
Suhaila, now 6, was born a decade after Dunham died
of cancer, but Soetoro-Ng has paired her and "Grandma Annie" through
the moon in a picture book out this month.
The dreamily drawn book from Candlewick Press,
"Ladder to the Moon," opens with little Suhaila asking her mother
what her grandmother was like. "She was like the moon," her mother
replies. "Full, soft and curious."
In a telephone interview from her home in Hawaii,
Soetoro-Ng told The Associated Press that she thought of her mother "a lot
during my pregnancy, having come across boxes full of my children's books and
toys that she had saved for me. That moment was a great shuddering moment of
love and longing. I really did want to somehow connect the two of them."
She and husband, Konrad Ng, chose the name Suhaila
because it means "glow around the moon" in Sanskrit.
The book describes how one night, a golden ladder
appears at the girl's open bedroom window with her grandmother, hair flowing
down her back and silver bangles tinkling on her arms. The two climb to the
moon, looking down on a world filled with sorrow, from earthquakes and
tsunamis, poverty and intolerance.
They invite children and others who are suffering
to take refuge on their gray, glowing moon, until it's time for the girl to say
goodbye and climb back into bed, knowing they've helped others heal.
Like Soetoro-Ng, who said she wrote the book to
encourage unity, compassion and peace, Suhaila hopes the book will have an
impact on the world.
"I hope my friends read my moms book,"
the first-grader said in an email, clearly composed on her own, 6-year-old
grammar and all. "And my cousins read my moms book. and my teachers read
my moms book. And when my sister is old enough to read I hope she reads it. I
hope that when they read it they think about peace and no more fiting in the
world and I hope that many peopol like it."
She continued: "I think its awesome that my
name is in the book becuaes I love books and maybe someone like me will read
the book and feel like I am there friend."
Friendship was something that came easily to
Dunham, explained Soetoro-Ng. Her mother lived in 13 different places around
the world, first alone and later with her daughter and son in tow, but felt at
home, "more or less," in each, Soetoro-Ng said.
And how did this affect Soetoro-Ng's famous
brother? "That ability to break down perceived boundaries or cross bridges
is something that he got from her," she said.
Dunham, divorced from Obama's father and years
later from Soetoro-Ng's, died in 1995 at age 53 of ovarian and uterine cancer
before the births of her four grandchildren — Suhaila, her 2-year-old sister
Savita and their famous cousins, Malia and Sasha Obama.
A natural storyteller, Dunham passed on many of her
best to her kids while under the glow of the moon.
"The moon sort of guided us to points of
intersection," Soetoro-Ng said. "She loved the moon so much because
the moon was the same for everybody and all of these people and places were
connected because we shared the same moon." The book takes its title from
Georgia O'Keeffe's 1958 painting of a floating ladder on an aqua background.
Born in Jakarta, Soetoro-Ng attended Barnard
College and the University of Hawaii before earning her master's in secondary
education from New York University. She spent several years teaching and
developing curricula for public middle schools in Manhattan, then returned to
Hawaii and received a Ph.D in international comparative education.
She now lives with her family in Honolulu, working
as a cultural educator for the nonprofit East-West Center and lecturing in the
education department at the University of Hawaii.
So when did she find the time to write a children's
book? In Chicago, at her brother's kitchen table while helping to get him
elected president. Soetoro-Ng had always wanted to write a book for young kids.
At the time, Obama had just signed a contract for "Of Thee I Sing: A
Letter to My Daughters," his picture book released last November.
"I felt suddenly brave, taking the risk of
trying to get published," she said.
Soetoro-Ng, nine years younger than the president,
has always celebrated her multicultural heritage as the daughter of a white
American and an Indonesian dad, but Dunham has brown skin in the book — and
deliberately so.
Soetoro-Ng showed her illustrator, Yuyi Morales,
photos of Dunham and Suhaila before Morales went to work and "asked her to
not be true to those pictures." Morales drew partly on her own Mexican
heritage in creating the drawings.
"I wanted her to try and capture their spirit,
but I told her I wanted them to be ethnically ambiguous," she said.
"I wanted them to be every woman and every child. I wanted a European
child, an African child, an Asian child to be able to feel a certain
familiarity in their visage."
Soetoro-Ng isn't finished yet as an author.
Candlewick also plans to publish her young adult novel about a 16-year-old
healer. No release date has been scheduled.
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/Eugene Tanner)
