IN THE condensed version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. On the campaign trail, he has called her his "single mom."
But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Obama.
Kansas was merely a stop-off in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father.
In Hawaii, she married an African student at the age of 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women's work and helped bring microcredit to the world's poor.
She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4am for correspondence courses in English before school. She brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson and speeches by Martin Luther King. And when Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart – a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in her mother's life.
"She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister.
"That was very much her philosophy of life – not to be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places."
Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
He barely saw his father after the age of two. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Obama.
They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her.
Yet he has also made some different choices – marrying into a tightly knit African-American family rooted in the south side of Chicago, becoming a church-going Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.
Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when the candidates were asked about "prized keepsakes", Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the south shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother's ashes were scattered.
"I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book – less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life," he wrote in the preface to his memoir, Dreams From My Father.
He added: "I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."
"She was a very, very big thinker," said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women's World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. "I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power."
Her parents were from Kansas – her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January.
Stanley Ann (her father had wanted a boy so he gave her his name) was born on an army base during the Second World War. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.
In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college's first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States. Her parents were upset, Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted.
The marriage was brief. In 1963, Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Soetoro and young Barack followed.
Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Soetoro. She never dated "the crew-cut white boys", said one friend, Susan Blake. "She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her."
Her second marriage faded too in the 1970s. She wanted to work, one friend said, and Lolo Soetoro wanted more children.
That both unions ended is beside the point, some friends suggested. Soetoro remained loyal to both husbands and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers.
By 1974, she was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.
"I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again," he wrote in his memoir.
"More than that, I'd arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they'd leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight."
During those years, he was "engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."
Soetoro-Ng recalled her mother's quandary. "She wanted him to be with her," Soetoro-Ng said. But she added: "She recognised that it was perhaps the best thing for him."
That time apart was hard for both mother and son. "She longed for him," said Georgia McCauley, who became a friend of Soetoro in Jakarta. Barack spent summers and Christmas vacations with his mother. They communicated by letters.
"There were certainly times in his life in those four years when he could have used her presence on a more daily basis," Soetoro-Ng said. "But I think he did all right for himself."
Fluent in Indonesian, Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the centre of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Soetoro-Ng calls "life's gorgeous minutiae".
That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.
"She loved living in Java," said her friend Alice Dewey, who recalled accompanying Soetoro to a metal-working village. "People said: 'Hi! How are you?' She said: 'How's your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?' They were friends. Then she'd whip out her notebook and she'd say: 'How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?'"
She became a consultant for the US Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit programme, then a Ford Foundation programme officer in Jakarta specialising in women's work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia's oldest bank to work on what is described as the world's largest sustainable microfinance programme, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.
Soetoro-Ng, who herself became an anthropologist, remembers conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs.
"She gave us a very broad understanding of the world," her daughter said. "She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service."
She died in November 1995, as Obama was starting his first campaign for public office.
After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South Shore in Oahu.
With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Obama and Soetoro-Ng placed their mother's ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.
