NEW YORK: Above a rooftop in Jakarta or the Indus River in Pakistan, the moon looms large in the childhood memories of Maya Soetoro-Ng, but US president Barack Obama’s little sister didn’t realise how important those memories were until she was pregnant with her 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 six, 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 published 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.”
Soetoro-Ng said she had 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 the grandmother, hair flowing down her back and silver bangles tinkling on her arms, appears on a golden ladder at the girl’s open bedroom window. The two climb to the moon, looking down on a world filled with sorrow caused by earthquakes, poverty and intolerance.
They invite children and others who are suffering to take refuge on their grey, glowing moon until it’s time for the girl to say goodbye and climb back into bed, knowing they’ve helped others heal.
Dunham 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 53 of ovarian and uterine cancer before the births of her four grandchildren, Suhaila, her two-year-old sister Savita and their famous cousins, Malia and Sasha Obama.
A natural storyteller, she passed on many of her best to her children while under the glow of the moon.
“The moon sort of guided us to points of intersection,” said Soetoro-Ng. “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 masters degree in secondary education from New York University. Later she returned to Hawaii and received a PhD in international comparative education. – Sapa-AP