Barack Obama

I think you will love this.



“You can go anywhere as long as you’re respectful.”

Soetoro-Ng’s children’s book, Ladder to the Moon , came about as the author’s way of introducing her six-year-old daughter Suhaila to her deceased grandmother (Soetoro-Ng and President Barack Obama’s mother). Suhaila is the heroine of the story, which opens on a scene in which her mother (Soetoro-Ng in illustrated form) tells her that she has her grandmother’s hands. I wonder what else I got from her , Suhaila wonders. Just then, she sees a ladder extending to the moon, with her grandmother at the bottom, and so a magical adventure begins…

Soetoro-Ng’s mother passed away in 1995, almost a full decade before Suhalia’s birth. This fact still saddens the author, who would have loved for her mother to meet Suhaila and her younger sister Savita and, she says, “teach them their own power.” This is exactly what her mother did for Soetoro-Ng as she was growing up, half white and half Indonesian, all over the world, forming her own identity under the influence of mainland, Hawaiian, and Indonesian cultures.

Throughout her life, her mother served as a “tether,” a safe space in which she could always have a home. “She told me… that I had been given a gift of belonging to more than one world, that I had a flexibility that she never had, an ability to shape-shift and move through doors or fences that for her were obstructions,” writes Soetoro-Ng in her foreword to Fulbeck’s book, Mixed .

As a result, Soetoro-Ng has grown into a woman who radiates strength. Her voice is deep and soothing, and she speaks to her audience in poetic language that penetrates like mint tea or the touch of a mother’s hand on the forehead. For a multiracial person, she says, exploring different parts of one’s heritage is important simply because it “could lead to finding something you love… whether it’s a corner the size of your elbow or the size of your calf.”

http://www.discovernikkei.org/pt/journal/2010/08/26/maya-soetoro-ng/