By the time he was 6, Barry Obama was a hyper-aware boy with much to think about. His mother had returned to school at UH and had received a degree in what her family considered an unlikely major — math. She had divorced Barack Obama Sr., who had finished his graduate work at Harvard and was back in Kenya, now living with a third woman. Stanley Ann Dunham had moved on and was soon to wed another international student, Lolo Soetoro, and follow him back to his home country, Indonesia, bringing Barry along.

Her brief first marriage was in the past, Seattle in the remote distance, and Kansas farther still.

It was at this point that Barry developed a way of looking at his mother that essentially would last until her death 30 years later. His take on her — both the ways he wanted to be like her and how he reacted against her — shaped him permanently and is central to understanding his political persona today, the contrast of an embracing, inclusive sensibility accompanied by an inner toughness and wariness. Starting at an early age, he noticed how his mother was curious and open, eager to find the best in people and situations, intent on softening the edges of the difficult world for her hapa son. There were many times when this made him think that she was naive, sometimes heartbreakingly so, and that he had to be the realist in the family.

To some degree, especially as he tried to explain himself later in "Dreams From My Father," he seemed to use his mother as a foil, setting her up as the quintessential well-intentioned white liberal idealist as a contrast to his own coming of age as a modern black man.

Whether this perception reflected objective reality is open to question. In her dealings later as a community worker and anthropologist in Indonesia and around the world, Ann showed a keen appreciation of the power structure and how to work with it or around it, and her doctoral thesis and other writings reveal a complex understanding of people and their motivations, free of dreamy idealism and wishful thinking. But she certainly tried to present the world in the most hopeful, unthreatening light to her children, first Barry and then his little sister, Maya, the daughter she bore with Soetoro.

As Maya explained recently, looking back on the way she and her brother were raised: "(She wanted to) make sure that nothing ever became acrimonious and that everything was pretty and everything was sacred and everything was properly maintained and respected — all the cultural artifacts and ways of being and living and thinking. We didn't need to make choices. We didn't need to discard anything. We could just have it all and keep it all. It was this sense of bounty and beauty."

WONDERS OF INDONESIA

The son's notion of his loving mother's naivete began in Indonesia, when they arrived in the capital city, Jakarta, in 1967, joining Soetoro, who had returned to his home country several months earlier.

The place was a fantasia of the unfamiliar and grotesque to young Barry, with the exotic scent of danger. Monkeys, chickens and even crocodiles in the back yard. A land of floods, exorcisms, cockfights. Lolo was off working for Union Oil, Ann taught English at the U.S. Embassy, and Barry was overwhelmed in this strange new world. He recalled those days in his memoir with more acuity than he possibly could have had as a 6-year-old, but the words reflect his perceptions nonetheless.

His mother taught him history, math, reading and social studies, waking him at 4 each morning to give him special tutoring, pouring her knowledge into his agile brain. But it was left to his stepfather to orient him in the cruel ways of the world. Soetoro taught him how to fight and defend himself, how not to give money to beggars, how to deal strictly with servants, how to interact with the world on its own unforgiving terms, defining everything not as good or bad but merely as it is.

" 'Your mother has a soft heart,' he told me after she tried to take the blame for knocking a radio off the dresser," Obama quoted Soetoro in his memoir. "'That's good in a woman, but you will be a man someday, and a man needs to have more sense.' " Men, Soetoro explained, take advantage of weakness in other men. "'They're like countries that way.' "

All of this, as Obama later interpreted it, related to the exercise of power. It was power that forced Soetoro to return to Indonesia in the first place. He had been summoned back to his country from Hawai'i in 1966 and sent to work in New Guinea for a year because the ruling regime, after a widespread, bloody purge of communists and leftists, was leery of students who had gone abroad and wanted them back and under control.

To his mother, power was ugly, Obama determined: "It fixed in her mind like a curse." But to his stepfather, power was reality — and he "made his peace" with it.

Which response to the world had a deeper effect on the person Barry Obama would become? Without doubt it was his mother's. Soetoro, described later by his daughter Maya as a sweet and quiet man, resigned himself to his situation and did not grow or change. He became a nondescript oilman, befriending slick operators from Texas and Louisiana who probably regarded him with racial condescension. He went to their parties and played golf at the country club and became Western and anonymous, slipping as far away as possible from the dangers of the purge and the freedom of his student days.

Ann certainly had more options, but the one she eventually chose was unusual. She decided to deepen her connection to this alien land and to confront power in her own way, by devoting herself to understanding the people at the core of Indonesian culture, artisans and craftsmen, and working to help them survive.

Here was an early paradox that helped shape Obama's life, one he would confront again and again as he matured and remade himself: A certain strain of realism can lead to inaction. A certain form of naivete can lead to action.

By the time Maya was born in 1970, Ann's second marriage was coming apart. This time, there was no sudden and jarring disappearance. The relationship lingered off and on for 10 more years, and Lolo remained part of Maya's life in a way that Barack Obama did not for Barry.

As Maya analyzed her parents' relationship decades later, she concluded that she came along just as her mother was starting to find herself.

"She started feeling competent, perhaps. She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian, but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice. So it's perfectly natural that she started to demand more of those who were near her, including my father. And suddenly his sweetness wasn't enough to satisfy her needs."

GRAMPS' INFLUENCE

"Dreams From My Father" is as imprecise as it is insightful about Obama's early life. Obama offers perceptive and subtle observations of himself and the people around him. Yet, as he readily acknowledged, he rearranged the chronology for his literary purposes and presented a cast of characters made up of composites and pseudonyms. This was to protect people's privacy, he said. Only a select few were not granted that protection, for the obvious reason that he could not blur their identities — his relatives. And so it is that of all the people in the book, the one who takes it on the chin the most is his maternal grandfather, Stan Dunham.

It is obvious from the memoir, and from interviews with many people who knew the family in Hawai'i, that Dunham loved his grandson and did everything he could to support him physically and emotionally. But in the memoir, Gramps comes straight out of the plays of Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill, a once-proud soul lost in self-delusion.

When Barry was 10, his mother made the difficult decision to send him back to Honolulu to live with her parents so he could get better schooling. He had been accepted into the prestigious Punahou School, and Madelyn and Stan had moved from a large house on Kamehameha Avenue to the apartment on Beretania, only five blocks from the campus.

Gramps now seemed as colorful and odd as those monkeys in the backyard in Jakarta. He cleaned his teeth with the red cellophane string from his cigarette packs. He told off-color jokes to waitresses. A copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was always near at hand — and only those who lived with him knew the vast distance between his public bonhomie and his private despair. The most powerful scene in the memoir, as devastating as it is lovingly rendered, described how Stan, by then out of the furniture business and trying his hand as a John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance salesman, prepared on Sunday night for the week ahead.

"Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other end explained why Thursday wasn't good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps' heavy sigh after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a card player who's deep in the hole."

By the time Barry returned to Hawai'i, Toot, his grandmother, had become the stable financial source in the family, well known in the local lending community. In the library of The Honolulu Advertiser, no clippings mention Stan Dunham, but Madelyn Dunham crops up frequently in the business pages. A few months before Barry arrived from Indonesia, his grandmother had been promoted to vice president at the Bank of Hawaii along with Dorothy K. Yamamoto — the first two female vice presidents in the bank's history.

FATHER'S RETURN

It was during Barry's first year at Punahou School that his long-lost father stepped briefly into his life, and just as quickly disappeared again. He came for the month of December, and his mother returned from Indonesia beforehand to prepare Barry for the visit.

She taught him more about Kenya and stories of the Luo people, but all of that knowledge dissolved at the first sight of the old man. He seemed far skinnier than Barry had imagined him, and more fragile, with his spectacles and blue blazer and ascot and yellowish eyes.

It was not an easy month, and what stuck in the boy's memory were the basketball that his dad gave him as a present and two events: when his father ordered him, in front of his mother and grandparents, to turn off the TV and study instead of watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," and when his father came to Miss Mabel Hefty's fifth-grade class at Punahou's Castle Hall to talk about Kenya. The first moment angered Barry; the second made him proud. But nothing much lingered after his father was gone.

That visit to Honolulu was bracketed by two trips that Obama's old snack bar friends from UH made to see him in Kenya. Late in 1968, Neil Abercrombie and Pake Zane traveled through Nairobi on a yearlong backpacking trip around the world and stayed with the senior Obama for several days before they made their way on to the port city of Mombasa and to India.

No mention was made of Ann or the boy, but it was clear to Abercrombie that his old friend's life was not turning out as he had planned.

"He seemed very frustrated, and his worst fears in his mind were coming true — that he was being underutilized," Abercrombie said. "Everybody's virtue is his vice, and his brilliance and his assertiveness was obviously working against him as well."

Five years later, in 1973, Zane returned during another trip around the world.

"This time when I met Barack (Bear-ick, he said), he was a shell of what he was prior to that," Zane recalled. "Even from what he was in 1968. ... He was drinking very heavily, and he was very depressed and as you might imagine had an amount of rage. He felt totally vulnerable."

Meanwhile, Barry's circumstances had changed somewhat. His mother, separated from Lolo, was back in Hawai'i with little Maya. Barry joined them in an apartment at Poki and Wilder, even closer to Punahou School. Ann was now fully engaged in the artisan culture of Indonesia and was beginning her master's degree work in anthropology. They had no money beyond her graduate school grants.

Maya's earliest memories go back to those years. Thirty-five years later, she can remember a filing cabinet and a rocking chair, and how she and her big brother would sit in the chair and keep rocking harder until it flipped over, which is what they wanted it to do. There was a TV set across from the rocker, and she would purposely stand in front of it during basketball games to irritate him. There were picnics in the park on Round Top Drive with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Madelyn's homemade baked beans and coleslaw and potato salad with the skins still on. And there was Big Sandwich Night, when Gramps would haul out all the meats and cheeses and vegetables.

After three years in Hawai'i, Ann had to go back to Indonesia to conduct her fieldwork. Barry had absolutely no interest in returning to that strange place, so he stayed behind with his grandparents.

Tomorrow: Part IV, life at Punahou and saying goodbye to his mother.