Barack Obama: America's Multicultural President & His Asian Connections

Barack Obama has been hailed as America's first black president, and his candidacy and election have led some commentators to even proclaim America as a post-racial society, in which race no longer matters. But perhaps he should be better identified as America's most multicultural president, if not the first multicultural president, given his own living experiences in communities ranging from Honolulu to Jakarta to Chicago, and the extensive African and Asian connections in his immediate and extended families. As Time observes in detailing his family tree, "With roots in Kansas, Kenya and beyond, [Barack Obama] is a one-man melting pot."

Barack Obama's African Family, With Stepmother Kezia in Front of Him

The African and Midwestern roots of Obama's life are well known: his father Barack Obama Sr., a bright Kenyan villager who was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and later pursued graduate studies in economics at Harvard; his extended family in Kenya through his father, including, among others, his stepmother Kezia who was Senior's first wife; his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who married and divorced two men from foreign cultures, "was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology," and helped build the microfinance program in Indonesia from 1988 to 1992; Ann's parents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, who raised Obama in his mother's absence; Obama's community roots and work as community organizer, civil rights lawyer, law professor and state senator in Illinois; his immediate family composed of wife Michelle, and daughters Malia Ann and Natasha; and his brother-in-law Craig Robinson, the basketball head coach of the Oregon State Beavers.

Much less in the public consciousness are Obama's connections to Asia. Aside from his stepfather Lolo Soetoro and his half-sister Maya Soetoro who are from Indonesia, he has a half-brother-in-law Konrad Ng who is a Malaysian Canadian of Chinese ancestry, and an African half-brother Mark Ndesandjo, who is a businessman in Shenzhen, China.

Barack Obama, right, with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro, mother Ann Dunham, and half-sister Maya Soetoro

After Ann divorced Barack Obama Sr., who had returned to Kenya, she fell in love with another fellow student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro. They married and moved to Lolo's native country Indonesia, where Barack Obama Jr. would live from 1967 to 1971, when he returned to Hawaii to be under the care of his grandparents and to attend Punahou School.

Obama recalls his stepfather as one who "possessed the good manners and easy grace of his people." When Obama returned home one day with "an egg-sized lump" after being hit by a rock in a fight, Lolo Soetoro taught him how to box.

[Then] the stepfather mused about the nature of things, and about what it took to survive in a difficult and dangerous world: "Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They're just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man's land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man's woman is pretty, the strong man will take her ... Which would you rather be?"

Obama told Newsweek's Jon Meacham: "I remember that very vividly, and my stepfather was a good man who gave me some things that were very helpful. One of the things that he gave me was a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works."

Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro credits Obama with driving her to excel: "He was always pushing me to sort of, at that point, exceed my own lazy inclinations. My mother and father divorced when I was 9, so I think he started giving me a great deal of guidance as a big brother. And he helped me find my voice and my passion and helped to work to offer a lot of guidance."


Maya met her future husband, Konrad Ng, while both were pursuing Ph.D. degrees at the University of Hawaii. Konrad's parents were originally from Sabah, Malaysia, who moved to Canada where Konrad was born in 1974. Konrad and Maya married in 2003, and have a four year old daughter Suhalia. Today Maya Soetoro-Ng, who has a Ph.D. in education from the University of Hawaii, teaches U.S. History, global studies and peace studies at La Pietra Hawaii School for Girls. Konrad Ng, holder of a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii, is an assistant professor in the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawaii, where he teaches courses in the Critical Studies track.

Konrad Ng's Message in Support of Barack Obama

A Times of London story, pejoratively entitled "Barack Obama’s brother pushes Chinese imports on US," is probably the first media report on Mark Ndesandjo, the son of Barack Obama, Sr. and his third wife Ruth Nidesand, an American woman who now "runs the up-market Maduri kindergarten in Nairobi." Journalist Michael Sheridan points out that Obama and Ndesandjo have contrasting views towards their African heritage. Moreover, "while Obama chose to live in the glare of publicity, his half-brother submerged himself in the crowds of the most cosmopolitan city in China." (Thomas Crampton, a former correspondent with International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, has compiled the most extensive biographical information on Mark Ndesandjo.)

Mark Ndesandjo and His Business Partner and Close Friend Sui Zhengjun

Like Obama, Ndesandjo received an elite education in the United States, graduating from Brown University, and then earning an M.S. in physics from Stanford and an M.B.A. from Emory University. The half brothers met for the first time when Obama went to Kenya in 1988. While Obama celebrated his "rediscovery of his African inheritance," Ndesandjo dismissed Kenya as “just another poor African country” to which he felt little attachment, and also the notion of racial identity: “life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.”

Obama and Ndesandjo's stands towards China are not consistent either. The financial meltdown has dominated the attention of the American public and the presidential candidates to the degree that the topic of U.S.-China relations, arguably the single most important issue in American foreign policy, has hardly surfaced at the presidential debates. However, during the campaign Obama has repeatedly charged China with trade measures that were detrimental to American workers: dumping goods; not opening their own markets; theft of intellectual property; undervalued currency. While stating his commitment to free trade, he also called for confronting China on its alleged unfair trade practices. Ndesandjo, on the other hand, has a company that provides services to Chinese companies to help them to export to the United States.

USC US-China Institute, "Election '08 and the Challenge of China," Part 8: Obama and China

After working at Lucent Technologies and Nortel, Ndesandjo went to Shenzhen in 2002 to teach English as a volunteer in a U.S.-China cultural exchange program, and fell in love with China so much that he settled and established roots in Shenzhen. He has developed fluency in Mandarin Chinese, and learned to write Chinese characters in cursive script with a brush. A self-taught pianist, Ndesandjo has taught orphan children how to play the piano at Shenzhen Social Welfare Center since 2002. He has recently married a Chinese woman from Henan province. With his friend and business partner Sui Zhengjun (隋政军), Ndesandjo founded a eatery chain called Cabin BBQ, with its first outlet in Shenzhen in 2003 and seven branches today. Their consulting firm, Worldnexus (天下), "has provided corporate communications and website design to Chinese firms seeking customers in English-speaking markets."

Mark Ndesandjo Teaching Orphans How to Play the Piano

Ndesandjo became the subject of considerable attention from the media towards the end of July after his fraternal connections to Obama became known, to the degree that he disappeared from public view，in order to avoid any negative impact on Obama's campaign. He was also approached by the wine producers of Shenyang Dragon Medical Co. Ltd., Liaoning Province to be their product spokesman, but he declined.

Chinese TV News Program on Mark Ndesandjo (in Cantonese), Showing Him Teaching Piano at an Orphanage and Doing Chinese Calligraphy

Pete Rouse, White House Senior Adviser-Designate

In addition to the Asian connections in Obama's family members, those in his staff and cabinet nominations may also be noted. At least two of his senior advisers have Asian American roots. Pete Rouse, Obama's Senate Chief of Staff, Co-chairman of the transition team and Senior Adviser-Designate in the White House, who "helped Obama find the delicate balance between being a rank-and-file senator and high-profile national figure," has a white father and a Japanese mother. Chris Lu (盧沛寧), Legislative Director of Obama’s Senate Office, Executive Director of his transition team and Cabinet Secretary-Designate of his White House staff, is a Chinese American classmate of Obama's at Harvard Law School, and responsible for his legislative work in congress.

Chris Lu, Cabinet Secretary-Designate of Obama's White House Staff

Eric Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs-Designate

Two distinguished Asian Americans have been nominated by Barack Obama for his cabinet. Eric Shinseki, nominee as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, was a four-star general serving as Army Chief of Staff who in February of 2003 recommended that the U.S. should deploy several hundred thousand troops "to ensure that it could maintain order and genuinely control Iraq's sizable territory and potentially fractious society after it ousted Saddam" Hussein, and was publicly rebuked by Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. As James Fallows, journalist for The Atlantic Monthly points out, Shinseki is "the first Asian-American in a military-related cabinet position, not to mention a Japanese-American honored for lifelong military service on Pearl Harbor Day," and also "the man who was right, when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al were so catastrophically wrong." The fact that "a Japanese-American patriot from Hawaii should receive this news [of his nomination] on December 7" was "karmic justice."

Fallows describes the nomination of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy as "An even more impressive pick than Shinseki." According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, of which the Chinese American physicist is the Director, Chu is "is a Nobel laureate physicist and a Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He is also one of the nation’s foremost and outspoken advocates for scientific solutions to the twin problems of global warming and the need for carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy." Fallows observes that Chu is a "scientific explainer-in-chief" who is "Modest, funny, and willing to explain the work of of a scientist in terms and images most people can understand." In Fallows' judgment, "policy politics," not "identity politics" or political loyalty or ideological purity, was the most important reason for the selection of both Shinseki and Chu. The fact that Barack Obama makes professional expertise the most important criterion for his personnel decisions, and that he comes from by far the most multicultural background of any president in U.S. history, is an encouraging harbinger for the future of our increasingly multicultural nation in an increasingly multipolar world.

"Conversations with History: Steven Chu, A Scientist's Random Walk," U.C. Berkeley, Feb. 13, 2004