US president-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on Tuesday, sheds light on how he made sense of his mixed ethnic and cultural heritage in this compelling and entertaining memoir published by Three Rivers Press in 1995, which at the time of its release received little attention.
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was reissued nine years later after Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, delivered a keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The book became a best-seller in the US as Obama became a rising political star, and as recently as last week was ranked No. 2 on the New York Times list of best-selling nonfiction paperbacks.
Born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr, the young Obama was subject to a wide range of cultural influences, from Kansas, through his mother’s side, Indonesia, where he lived with his stepfather, Hawaii, where he was born and educated, and Kenya, through his father who died in 1983 and who Obama met only once when he was 10 years old.
Obama begins his memoir aged 6 when he was living with his mother and stepfather in Jakarta. He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and was cared for by his maternal grandparents. There, he became aware of racial prejudice from white students at Honolulu’s Punahou School and began his odyssey of self-discovery, which during his time at university included the use of alcohol and illegal drugs.
After college, Obama settled in Chicago, filled with the desire to engender social change. While working as a tenant’s rights organizer at Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project in Chicago’s South Side, Obama gained firsthand experience of the plight and needs of the city’s poor, black residents, the influence of community churches, the deficiencies of the public school system, and the complexity of social relations in the neighborhood.
Throughout the book, Obama compares and contrasts the socio-economic dynamics he saw at play in Chicago’s South Side with those he found in Hawaii, Indonesia and Africa, and analyzes racial issues as he tackles Altgeld residents’ sense of inertia.
Though candid in sharing the frustration, anger and desperation he felt while working as a community organizer, Obama shows a great depth of courage and fearlessness, which is reflected in the book’s overall message of hope for the future.
Obama’s honesty in sharing his vulnerabilities, the painful path of coming to terms with conflicts of identity, and the loss of his father, is appealing.
After acceptance to Harvard Law School, Obama took several months off to visit Kenya for the first time. On the trip he met his large extended family and discovered a sense of belonging, but also experienced bittersweet feelings when viewing family photos.
“They were happy scenes, all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe that had played itself behind my back,” he writes. “They were reflections, I realized, of my own long held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept secret even from myself. The fantasy of the Old Man’s [Obama Sr] having taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya. The wish that my mother and father, sisters and brothers, were all under one roof. Here it was, I thought, what might have been. And the recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad that after only a few minutes, I had to look away.”
Rather than embracing cynicism or allowing his experiences to turn destructive, Obama transformed his family’s struggles into practical lessons that paved the way for his future success.
Though the fantasies and dreams Obama had about his father failed to materialize, they did help the president-elect construct a system of values.
Dreams From My Father covers many important contemporary issues, but reads like a gripping novel. Obama writes like a seasoned professional and vividly brings his family’s tale and the people he met along the way to life. It is rare that a writer is able to convey his sensibilities and perspectives on so many issues and people both professionally and personally. Even rarer for a future US president to do so.
The government is aiming to recruit 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants this year, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and junior-high instructors to create and teach courses, ministry official Tsai Yi-ching (蔡宜靜) said. Together, they would create an immersive language environment, helping to motivate students while enhancing the skills of local teachers, she said. The ministry has since 2021 been recruiting foreign teachers through the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which offers placement, salary, housing and other benefits to eligible foreign teachers. Two centers serving northern and southern Taiwan assist in recruiting and training
WIDE NET: Health officials said they are considering all possibilities, such as bongkrekic acid, while the city mayor said they have not ruled out the possibility of a malicious act of poisoning Two people who dined at a restaurant in Taipei’s Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 last week have died, while four are in intensive care, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. All of the outlets of Malaysian vegetarian restaurant franchise Polam Kopitiam have been ordered to close pending an investigation after 11 people became ill due to suspected food poisoning, city officials told a news conference in Taipei. The first fatality, a 39-year-old man who ate at the restaurant on Friday last week, died of kidney failure two days later at the city’s Mackay Memorial Hospital. A 66-year-old man who dined
RESTAURANT POISONING? Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang at a press conference last night said this was the first time bongkrekic acid was detected in Taiwan An autopsy discovered bongkrekic acid in a specimen collected from a person who died from food poisoning after dining at the Malaysian restaurant chain Polam Kopitiam, the Ministry of Health and Welfare said at a news conference last night. It was the first time bongkrekic acid was detected in Taiwan, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝) said. The testing conducted by forensic specialists at National Taiwan University was facilitated after a hospital voluntarily offered standard samples it had in stock that are required to test for bongkrekic acid, he said. Wang told the news conference that testing would continue despite
‘CARRIER KILLERS’: The Tuo Chiang-class corvettes’ stealth capability means they have a radar cross-section as small as the size of a fishing boat, an analyst said President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday presided over a ceremony at Yilan County’s Suao Harbor (蘇澳港), where the navy took delivery of two indigenous Tuo Chiang-class corvettes. The corvettes, An Chiang (安江) and Wan Chiang (萬江), along with the introduction of the coast guard’s third and fourth 4,000-tonne cutters earlier this month, are a testament to Taiwan’s shipbuilding capability and signify the nation’s resolve to defend democracy and freedom, Tsai said. The vessels are also the last two of six Tuo Chiang-class corvettes ordered from Lungteh Shipbuilding Co (龍德造船) by the navy, Tsai said. The first Tuo Chiang-class vessel delivered was Ta Chiang (塔江)