A Singular Woman by Janny Scott Page B

number of international students enrolled at the university and brought in millions of dollars in federal money. It influenced course offerings in fields ranging from Asian studies and American studies to tropical agriculture and language studies. Hindi, Sanskrit, and Javanese entered the curriculum in 1961. The center attracted speakers like Dick Gregory and Gloria Steinem. There were weekly discussions of topical issues, such as civil rights, internationalism, and the conflict between India and Pakistan, with panels of students and scholars from the countries involved. “Some of the most politically active students the university had were on East-West Center grants,” said Jeannette “Benji” Bennington, who worked for the center from 1962 until her retirement in 2004. Its open-air cafeteria, on the ground floor of Pei’s Jefferson Hall, became a magnet for students from all over the campus. The grant recipients were strongly encouraged to mix. “We said, ‘If we see a whole table of you and you’re all Korean, we’re going to say something to you,’” said Bennington, whose first job, as a resident assistant in an East-West Center dorm, entailed helping students acclimate. “‘The reason you’re here is to learn about other peoples and nations, so you should always be mixing.’ And you did! If you were an American, you were usually trying to explain idioms to about six different nationalities. It was a very enriching type of experience to go down there.”
    In that climate, international students were a source of fascination. They were invited to speak in schools, march in the Aloha Week parade, share Thanksgiving dinner with Duke Kahanamoku. Bill Collier, a veterinarian’s son from a family of Indiana farmers, who would later work with Ann in Indonesia, had discovered the University of Hawai‘i in the late 1950s in a magazine in a library in Huron, South Dakota. He was in his third year at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology at the time and had exhausted his interest in surveying and math. Look magazine published a photo spread of the multiethnic beauty queens at the University of Hawai‘i. “What the hell?” Collier thought. “I’m going.” He enrolled as an undergraduate, studied Indonesian, and became vice president of the international students’ association and eventually an East-West Center grantee. He spent his study tour in Thailand, Malaysia, and British Borneo, married a Chinese woman, and moved to Indonesia in 1968. “I was fascinated by all kinds of different nationalities,” he told me when I met him in Jakarta in January 2009. “I even participated in this beauty-queen contest. They have a big dance afterward, they’re all in different costumes. I must have been dressed as a haole and been square-dancing.”
    Many years later, after Ann’s death, her family and friends would choose the Japanese garden at the East-West Center for a memorial service celebrating her life. Laid out in 1963 on a sloping stretch of land behind Jefferson Hall and in the shadow of Wa‘ahila Ridge, the garden was intended to provide a window into Japanese culture. Like nearly everything at the center, it was a joint project—conceived by a vice chancellor, paid for by Japanese corporations and individuals, designed by a landscape architect in Tokyo, and constructed by a nursery and landscaping firm in Honolulu. There were lawns, privet hedges, paths, steps, much of it under a canopy of monkeypod trees. A stream, diverted from a Mānoa stream, wound through the garden’s three levels. Formosan koa, strawberry guava, mondo, yeddo hawthorn, red bottlebrush, walking iris, juniper, and rose-flowered jatropha graced the garden, along with a coral shower tree planted by the Japanese crown prince. The stream was said to represent a river, a Japanese symbol of life—beginning in turmoil,