Anggun - Mum’s the word - The Jakarta Post Indonesia

Anggun C. Sasmi has bid a temporary adieu to her Paris home and family to become a judge on the hit talent show X Factor Indonesia.

Anggun arrives a tad late at the lounge of a Central Jakarta hotel. She is trailed by her 5-year-old daughter, Kirana, who is a vision of an urban princess in her white slip dress and tiny tiara, a shopping bag in hand.

“She was looking for shoes,” Anggun sighs as explanation for their tardiness.

Kirana and Anggun’s husband, the French writer Cyril Montana, are visiting from Paris for a week. It is Friday afternoon; Anggun will have to get ready soon for the prime-time production of RCTI’s hit show X Factor Indonesia.

Being away from her daughter and husband is difficult, she admits, even though they Skype daily and she has done the long flight back to Paris twice during the past three months.

Kirana is a beautiful, inquisitive child; like children everywhere, she is not averse to trying to wiggle her way out of eating lunch to go straight to dessert. Firm but not harsh, Anggun speaks to her in Indonesian, and the child responds fluently in both French and her mother’s native tongue.

“She told me that she thinks she is about to get her adult teeth,” Anggun, 38, says. “Oh, the joys of being a mother.”

Anggun, who left Indonesia to pursue an international career at age 20, had a sometimes hard-scrabble childhood financially. Kirana, in contrast, is a child of privilege. The singer and her husband do their best to make her aware of her good fortune, including taking her with them on visits to a homeless community near their Paris home.

The naturalized French citizen said in a recent interview that she would not resist if her daughter wanted to be a bakso seller, just as long as she made the tastiest meatballs on the market.

“I’m not one of those mothers who says, ‘Well, my daughter knows how to read at age 4, my daughter speaks 14 languages.’ More power to you then. Most of all, I want her to be happy, a normal little girl,” she says.

While she calls herself “very protective” of Kirana — her Instagram shots never show the child’s face — she also wants to give her the freedom to find her own way as she grows into an adult.

“I will fully support her in making mistakes. You want to smoke, then go ahead, just don’t do it in front of me.”

In that way, she will be following in the footsteps of her late father, the writer Darto Singo.

“I thank my father for supporting my curiosity. My father always traveled in his head, in his writings, but he never took an airplane. He said to me, ‘go out and see the world’.”

And that’s exactly what she did.

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