After stopping in Honolulu to see Stan and Madelyn, they continued westward, with Barack heading to Jakarta to spend a good part of the summer with his mother and sister Maya before meeting up with both Hasan and Wahid Hamid in Karachi, Pakistan. From Pakistan, Obama would fly to France, and then to London, before arriving in New York City for Columbia’s fall semester. Carpenter told Phil Boerner that “knowing O’Bama, he will reach the shores of the ‘empire state’ at the last possible moment if not later.”
In Honolulu, Hasan was struck by how “very small” Barack’s grandparents’ apartment was. Madelyn Dunham was pleased to see her grandson and later told an interviewer “he seemed to have gotten some purpose in life during those two years at Occidental.” Barack ran into Keith Kakugawa and his two young sons. Keith remembered that Barack “told me he was leaving Oxy and going to Columbia.” From there, Barack headed to Indonesia.
Six months earlier, Ann had left USAID contractor Development Alternatives for a two-year stint as a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s regional office in Jakarta. That job came with a comfortable Ford-owned home at Jalan Daksa I/14 in the lush South Jakarta neighborhood of Kebayoran Baru, a considerable step upward from the two houses Barry had lived in with her when she was married to Lolo. The Ford salary gave Ann enough to send ten-year-old Maya to the Jakarta International School, and Ford appears to have paid for Barack’s summer 1981 plane fares after Ann requested that her educational travel for dependent children benefits be used for that purpose.
Ann knew her son needed a place to stay when he arrived in Manhattan in late August, and she heard from a fellow expatriate about an apartment for sublet at 142 West 109th Street, just a few blocks south of Columbia’s campus. Barack spent most of July living with his mother and sister, and he later wrote that he “spent the summer brooding over a misspent youth.” Then he flew to Karachi, where Hasan and Wahid met him at the airport. He stayed for a few days at the Chandoo family’s Karachi home, then for a week or more at Hamid’s before the trio and several relatives set out on a road trip that took them northeastward to Sindh province’s second-largest city, Hyderabad, and then well north to Larkana in interior Sindh. They visited a high school friend of Wahid’s whose famous family, the Talpurs, had played a major role in Sindh’s earlier history and whose feudal lands were still worked by peasants. Barack met one such older man of African ancestry, and traditional hospitality also led to a partridge hunting outing for the visitors.
Obama then flew westward from Karachi. How much time he spent in either France or London is unrecorded, and in subsequent years, he did not write about his three weeks in Pakistan nor did he often mention the visit when recounting his life experiences. But no later than August 24, Barack Obama arrived in New York City for the first time, having just turned twenty years old—five years younger than his father had been when he first arrived there twenty-two Augusts earlier.22
Obama later wrote that he “spent my first night in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway” off Amsterdam Avenue after no one was present at 142 West 109th Street’s apartment 3E when he arrived a little after 10:00 P.M. He did not have enough money for a hotel room, and while he did have Hasan’s friend Sohale Siddiqi’s phone number, Sohale worked nights at a restaurant. After waiting futilely on the building’s front stoop for two hours, he “crawled through a fence” to an alleyway. “I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep…. In the morning, I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet.”
In the morning, Barack called Sohale, who told him to take a cab to his building on the Upper East Side. Sohale remembered Obama arriving “totally disheveled,” and after breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, Obama crashed on Siddiqi’s couch. Within a day or two, Barack gained access to the two-bedroom apartment on 109th, and he immediately invited Phil Boerner, who was still searching for housing, to share it with him: $180 a month per person. Phil arrived on Saturday, August 29, two days before Columbia’s orientation, and his top priority was retrieving a bed from family friends. Phil and Emmett Bassett, a sixty-year-old African American medical school professor, got the bed to 109th Street on top of Bassett’s station wagon. Phil remembers “Barack and I huffing and puffing up the stairs to get half the bed” up to their third-floor apartment; in contrast, “Emmett just grabbed the mattress with one arm and hauled it up no problem.” The next weekend, Phil and Barack spent Labor Day weekend at the Bassetts’ country home in the Catskills. Phil said later that Emmett “was the most impressive person I’ve ever met,” but years later Bassett could not recall Obama at all.
That weekend was a welcome respite from both the sorry state of apartment 3E and the strictures Columbia imposed upon junior transfers. On 109th Street, the downstairs buzzer did not work, forcing visitors to shout their arrival from the sidewalk, as Phil had discovered when he first arrived. The apartment door featured at least five locks, perhaps not a bad idea, as the unit next door was vacant and burned out. The four-room apartment was a railway flat: the front door opened into the kitchen, which led first to Barack’s bedroom, then Phil’s, and lastly their living room. With no interior hallway, there was no privacy whatsoever. The bathroom had a tub, but no shower, and hot water was a rare treat. Hot showers could be taken at Columbia’s gym—phys ed was another requirement—and once the weather turned cold, keeping coats on indoors and taking refuge in sleeping bags could partially compensate for the usually stone cold radiators.
Barack had learned to cook one or two chicken dishes from Oxy’s Pakistanis, but in stark contrast to daily life back on Glenarm, Phil and Barack hosted parties only when someone from Oxy like Paul Carpenter and his girlfriend Beth Kahn visited them. Sometime in September, Earl Chew and a friend came to stay for several nights, but “spent most of their time at a porn theater,” Phil remembered. Chew would not complete his senior year at Oxy and next surfaced eleven years later when he was arrested on a charge of attempted murder outside a Santa Monica reggae club. Jailed for six months before being convicted, Chew pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after his initial conviction was overturned. He was last known to have disappeared from an L.A. halfway house in 2007, three decades after his graduation from Philips Exeter and his arrival at Oxy.23
Registration and the start of classes was not any more welcoming for Barack and Phil than their living conditions on 109th Street. Columbia required them to take a full year of both Humanities and Contemporary Civilization plus a semester apiece of art and music. Two semesters of physical education were reduced to one if you passed a swimming test. A foreign language was mandatory; Barack enrolled in an intermediate Spanish class. In all of those courses his classmates were almost entirely freshmen and sophomores. Additional requirements included two natural science courses plus whatever was necessary for a departmental major.
Columbia would accept up to sixty transfer credits from Oxy toward the 124 needed to graduate, and Phil and Barack each met with assistant dean Frank Ayala to determine which of their Oxy courses satisfied Columbia’s many requirements. Tuition was $3,350 per semester, and with other fees, the cost of a full year was $8,620, independent of food, lodging, and books. Obama may have received some financial aid in the form of federal Pell Grant assistance, and he may have taken out a modest amount of student loans.
A series of headlines in the Columbia Spectator, the excellent student newspaper, told the story of life for the Columbia undergraduate: “Alienation Is Common for Minority Students,” “Students Label CU Life Depressing,” “Striking Tenants Demand Front-Door Locks.” The second of those stories described “the crime and poverty surrounding the school and the immensity of the university bureaucracy.” One classmate later said, “Columbia was a very isolating place,” and another rued “a culture at the college and in the city that wasn’t exactly nurturing.” Several