Obama doesn't talk about Maya much in his book, Dreams From My Father (PDF link to online book). If you do a word search for "Maya", there are only about 12 references to her throughout the book. However, I found this passage from Chapter 2, page 29 most interesting:
Looking back, I'm not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them. He was not a man to ask himself such questions. Instead, he maintained his concentration, and over the period that we lived in Indonesia, he proceeded to climb. With the help of his brother-in-law, he landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company. We moved to a house in a better neighborhood; a car replaced the motorcycle; a television and hi-fi replaced the crocodiles and Tata, the ape; Lolo could sign for our dinners at a company club. Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout.Chapter Three (page 32) starts with this passage:
They are not my people.
Such arguments were rare, though; my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya, through the separation and eventual divorce, up until the last time I saw Lolo, ten years later, when my mother helped him travel to Los Angeles to treat a liver ailment that would kill him at the age of fifty-one. What tension I noticed had mainly to do with the gradual shift in my mother's attitude toward me. She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.
I T TOOK ME A while to recognize them in the crowd. When the sliding doors first parted, all I could make out was the blur of smiling, anxious faces tilted over the guardrail. Eventually I spotted a tall, silver-haired man toward the rear of the crowd, with a short, owlish woman barely visible beside him. The pair began to wave in my direction, but before I could wave back they disappeared behind frosted glass.Now, if you can believe anything Obama writes, his sister was born before he left Indonesia. He was supposedly back in Hawaii before the beginning of the school year which normally begins at the end of August/1st week of September. If Maya was born August 14, 1971, she would have been only a week or so old when Obama left Indonesia. Stanley and Lolo's marriage was already in trouble. On page 33 is this little tidbit:
I looked to the front of the line, where a Chinese family seemed to be having some problems with the customs officials. They had been a lively bunch during the flight from Hong Kong, the father taking off his shoes and padding up and down the aisles, the children clambering over seats, the mother and grandmother hoarding pillows and blankets and chattering endlessly to one another. Now the family was standing absolutely still, trying to will themselves invisible, their eyes silently following the hands that riffled through their passports and luggage with a menacing calm. The father reminded me of Lolo somehow, and I looked down at the wooden mask I was carrying in my hand. It was a gift from the Indonesian copilot, a friend of my mother's who had led me away as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate. I closed my eyes and pressed the mask to my face. The wood had a nutty, cinnamon smell, and I felt myself drifting back across oceans and over the clouds, into the violet horizon, back to the place where I had once been….
The new arrangement hadn't sounded so bad when my mother first explained it to me. It was time for me to attend an American school, she had said; I'd run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon-a year, tops-and that she'd try to make it there for Christmas. She reminded me of what a great time I'd had living with Gramps and Toot just the previous summer-the ice cream, the cartoons, the days at the beach. “And you won't have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.Could the reason for his mother's trip back to Hawaii at Christmas have been for the purpose of registering her daughter's birth in Hawaii? Was it just a coincidence that Barack Sr. also decided to visit after 10 years? Who's listed as the father on Maya's Hawaii birth certificate?
I believe that Maya is acknowledged to have been born in Jakarta on August 14, 1970. It is quite possible that if Ann Dunham petitioned for a Hawaii COLB for Maya in December 1971, she might have claimed a home birth on August 14, 1971 rather than try to explain a one-year plus lag in notifying the state of the home birth.
It would be easier in the long run to have a child apparently larger or fitter, or more developed than normal for her ostensible age than to try to deal with the impracticalities of havein a child with a different nationalty than herself.
Nothing about this woman suggests to be that she would have seen authority as anything more than something to be gamed.
I think you need to back up a bit. According to the Ministry of Truth, Maya was born in Jakarta, Indonesia on August 15, 1970.
Contradicting that is a US Public Records index record taken from an Ancestry.com database which lists Maya's birthdate as September, 1971. (Those records don't indicate a place of birth, but they do indicate that at some point in time, on some document/application in the US, she gave her birth as that date).
Given what John Valentine has said, and others familiar with Hawaii have posted at TexasDarlin about Hawaii's laxity, it's possible that Ann's parents could have registered Maya's birth in Hawaii.
And that .pdf link to the book from that "obamalover" site -- it's copyright infringement, so I'd be sort of thinking twice about passing it along.
