Life & Professional Coach

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 9: The Teacher Role Isn't My Essence

In ninth and final installment of our interview, yoga teacher Charu Rachlis discusses her deep alignment with and lack of attachment to her role as a yoga teacher, and explores what might be next for her.

Sarah: What is the best part of teaching yoga?

Charu: Oh my gosh, the joy, love, and friendship I receive––this beautiful heart exchange that happens effortlessly. As I said earlier, I’m a shy person. I choose to spend a lot of my time quiet and alone. But when I step into that arena of teaching, I’m not focusing on myself. I feel natural in that role.

Sarah: It seems like you already feel deeply fulfilled. What are you curious to experience in the next phase of your life?

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Charu: That’s my question for myself right now. I’m 62. Since I turned 60, I’ve been noticing subtle changes in my body, manifestations of the aging process. I feel the changes and I see them too. I’m not in a fight with this process. It’s nature. I love nature, and I learn from it.

I’ll see what resonates. I don’t have a lot of clues yet, but I trust that my next steps will make themselves known when the time is right. One idea is to offer yoga classes for people ages 50 and over, so I can share this exploration of the aging process with others. I also imagine living closer to nature and having a dog or two.

Sarah: What do you wish most for yourself?

Charu: I am so honored to have been given the opportunity to teach for the past 25 years and I hope to continue this amazing journey. But if my path changes and at some point I stop teaching yoga, that’s OK, because I know the teacher role isn’t my essence. Ultimately what I wish is that no matter how my life transforms, I continue to open to clarity, love, and truth, more and more over time. That’s my wish for myself.

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The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 8: Machines Spilling Out Teachers

In Part 8 of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis , she discussed her concerns about the trend toward commercialization in yoga training and shared advice for entering the field.

Sarah: How does the need to earn a living interact with the spiritual approach you take to yoga?

Charu: Right now, that is a bit of a conflict for me. I’m not someone who says people don’t need money. Money is energy; money is love; I welcome money. But I don’t like the commercialization and corporatization of yoga.

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Sarah: What is your impression of yoga teacher training? If you could ask for any changes to the teacher training programs you’re familiar with, what would they be? 

Charu: I’ve been invited to be a trainer in some of those programs and my answer has been no. There are many fabulous trainers, but I’m bothered by the machine of teacher-training programs spilling people out after two or three months and giving them the message that they are prepared to go and teach. It takes a lot more than that to form a true teacher. There’s intense marketing to get people to sign up for these training programs. I don’t want to participate in that. People have encouraged me to start my own training program, but I don’t feel called to do that.

Sarah: What advice do you have for people who want to be yoga teachers or who are beginning to teach?

Charu: Being a yoga teacher is so personal. Maybe I’m old school, but I went through a lot of deep searching to be the teacher that I am. Maybe that isn’t the only way. I don’t know exactly. I encourage people who want to become teachers to understand that they are entering a space of great honor. I encourage new teachers to speak from a place of unity, peace, harmony, and truth––not just repeat someone else’s ideas. I encourage them to be true to their own journey.

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The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 7: A Waterfall of Inspiration

In Part 7 of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis , she shared how her own pyscho-spiritual practices keep her grounded and inspired as a teacher.

Sarah: Your classes are often packed. Why do you think that is?

Charu: I feel that people are looking for something more than just the physical practice. They want the same thing I always looked for in a teacher: someone who doesn’t mechanically repeat sequences. I only say things in class that I feel in my heart and that I’ve studied, experienced, and practiced. I’m humbled that this approach resonates for my students.

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Sarah: It must be intense to be the recipient of students’ love and devotion. How do you keep from letting that go to your head?

Charu: I have a very intense meditation practice. I have groups I meditate with and process with. I don’t see myself as a guru or spiritual leader. Teaching is a role, an opportunity, and a responsibility that was given to me. I’m humbled by that.

Sarah: You give the most amazing talks at the beginning of each yoga class, a combination of guided meditation and philosophical reflection. I’m curious if you prepare in advance a theme or topic you want to address.

Charu: No, I’m not in the shower planning what to say. It comes very naturally each time. My teaching is an extension of my personal journey. I’m committed to being consciously aware and to processing what I learn and experience. So when I open my mouth to speak to my students, I’m embodying and expressing whatever it is that I’m reflecting on at that time. What comes out of me when I talk is a flow, a waterfall of inspiration. I’m not interested in holding back or holding on. I think that’s why I’m a teacher. I’m constantly feeding myself and then in turn feeding others.

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Sarah: What do you wish most for your students?

Charu: I want them to understand that this is a lifelong practice. I want them to develop inner strength for whatever comes their way, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I want them to experience the miracle of embodiment. I hope that when they come to class, they can feel more connected with their own hearts. When I teach, the heart is the major target.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 8: Machines Spilling Out Teachers

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 6: Grab the Right Computer File

In Part 6 of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis , she discussed her approach to teaching yoga.

Sarah: What form of yoga do you teach and why?

Charu: I don’t have a specific style that I follow. I’ve studied Iyangar, Ashtanga, and Shadow yoga. I have found what really resonates with me from each of these schools. I always practice,so I feel like I have a body intelligence that naturally filters everything I’ve learned to create my own teaching style. 

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I don’t consciously program my classes ahead of time. I never repeat a class. Obviously I repeat yoga poses—that’s just the nature of yoga—but the way I put them together is always different. What I do in any given class is both in-the-moment and based on my 25 years of experience. And my teaching continues to evolve.

Sarah: How so?

Charu: I’m more and more interested in creating a healing circle, an energy field where others can come to recharge. It’s like a meditation practice for me; my intention is to hold the field without manipulating it. I’m not in charge. Maybe I can explain it by comparing it to a download. Imagine that I have a computer inside me. When I enter the class I feel in my body what pose to guide the class through next, and because I’ve been doing this for so long, I can just reach in and grab the right computer file. “OK, from this pose we’ll move to this pose.” But that computer metaphor is way too mechanistic and linear to describe this creative process, which is magic. My teaching happens at the soul level.

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Sarah: Do you still seek out yoga training?

Charu: Yes. I attend Shadow yoga classes. Shadow yoga is a beautiful and strenuous practice, an inwardly centered experience that really called my name.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 7: A Waterfall of Inspiration

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 2: Openness to the Unseen

In the second part of my interview with yoga teacher Charu Rachlis, she describes the mix of Catholicism, Macumba, and Candomblé she was exposed to as a child growing up in Brazil, and how she selected elements from each to form her own spiritual beliefs and practices.

Openness to the Unseen

S: Did anyone in your childhood model a spiritual approach to life?

C: Yes, my maternal grandmother. I was her first granddaughter. My mom was busy; my younger sister and I are only 11 months apart. So my grandmother took care of me. She was Catholic, but she wasn’t strict about it; she had her own form of devotion. She connected with the divine, addressed the angels. She never tried to indoctrinate me, never said, Let’s go pray—we’d just sit together and I would feel the divine in the way that she was and in the love she had for me. And she’d speak about the angels to me. She lived to be 90 years old. Till the last moment we had a powerful, loving relationship.

Charu with her parents and younger sister.

Charu with her parents and younger sister.

Charu’s maternal grandparents.

Charu’s maternal grandparents.

S: Given that Catholicism is the dominant religion in Brazil, I’m imagining that everyone there stands in some kind of relation to it.

C: That’s true. My father was an atheist and my mother has always believed in God. She goes to church on holidays and lights candles and prays. I attended Catholic school. I was baptized and did first communion and studied the catecismo. But I didn’t really understand much about the religion. I dropped Christianity after confirmation. When I got to be a teenager I really felt disconnected from Christianity. It didn’t feel right to have this god up there in the air judging everybody. It was very limiting and it felt connected to the dictatorship. It didn’t reflect what I was understanding in my own heart. I wasn’t clear about what God is until much later on, when I took up meditation.

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Even though Catholicism is strong in Brazil, many people including our family also have a strong relationship to the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé/Macumba religion. Candomblé is like an umbrella religion with many different branches, including Macumba. Candomblé is closely connected to African culture while Macumba has more Brazilian flavor to it. They’re both very alive in Brazil, more so than Catholicism.

We would go to Macumba healing circles to participate in cleansing, empowering ceremonies. In this religion, each individual has a special relationship to one of the many orixas, or deities. For example, my orixa is Oxum, the female goddess of sweet waters, which includes lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. She represents love, beauty, intimacy, fresh water. At the healing circles we would receive guidance in making offerings to our orixas. I loved the beautiful drumming and dance that are part of that tradition. Overall, I felt Macumba and Candomblé were much more alive and genuine than Catholicism. A lot of my friends felt the same way.

S: Was your grandmother into Afro-Brazilian spirituality too?

C: Not as much, although she did go to the healing centers. But her son was totally into it––he would receive different deities––and she saw the truth of his experience. She was very respectful of all the ways that people find their own truths.

S: Did Macumba and Candomblé influence your later spiritual path?

C: Absolutely. In Afro-Brazilian religion there are deities of the ocean, the rivers, the rocks, the forests. I developed a capacity to be in touch with these energies connected to nature, and I absorbed the religion’s openness to the unseen. I also really related to the rituals, which are conducted in a circle. When I open my circle in yoga class by guiding my students through a meditation, I feel like I’m channeling the energy of the healing circles I attended as a young person.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 3: In Exile in My Own Country

 

The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 1: Let's Move Around; We'll Feel Better

Once it’s safe to nix the social distancing, I can’t wait to return to Charu Rachlis’s yoga class at Yoga Tree on Stanyan Street, where she’s taught for upward of 15 years. Charu’s teaching always works its magic on me, from her warm, lilting voice as she bathes us in healing words during the guided meditations with which she starts each session, to the clear, kind, and often humorous instruction she provides as we move through each pose.

My fellow practitioners are people of all ages and skill levels. Yet the varying capacities of her students seem to pose the slightest challenge to Charu, who somehow helps each of us work our own edge, always encouraging us to infuse focused effort with mindfulness and self-compassion.

One morning, leaving class, another student glowingly commented, “I feel like I’ve just been to church—a really good kind of church.” I knew exactly what he meant. As we spill onto Stanyan, we collectively exude a sense of grounded joy palpably different from the jittery, fried vibe we entered with 90 minutes earlier. What happens in Charu’s class is way more than a good workout.

So I was happy when Charu agreed to talk with me about the path she has traveled to becoming the extraordinarily gifted teacher that she is. I hope our conversation compels and sustains you while we all wait for the day when we can gather in person.

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Let’s Move Around; We’ll Feel Better

Sarah: How long have you been teaching?

Charu: I started teaching in 1996, a little bit before I gave birth. I had a very intense personal yoga practice. I was in a home birth group with some friends—we’d all gotten pregnant together—and they invited me to teach them. I started to teach formally in 1997.

S: Let’s talk about what led you onto this path. I know you grew up in Brazil—where exactly?

C: I was born in Rio de Janeiro. When I was less than a year old, we moved to Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil, to be close to my mother’s family. Then in 1964, when I was 7 years old, there was a coup d’etat. A military dictatorship was installed and it lasted for the next 21 years.

When you live in a dictatorship, all the freedoms are taken away. You can only imagine how this affects a population. The government censored art, books, music. I loved the music of the singer Caetano Veloso; his music was about integrating yourself spiritually, emotionally, and every way possible. He was exiled in London and could not come back to Brazil for many years. That was a huge blow for me. The dictatorship created so much fear. People were tortured and murdered.

I was still living there as a young woman when democracy returned, and it was beautiful—everyone was in the streets. This moment of great joy and people returning from exile and things opening up again. But my feelings about Brazil were deeply affected by all those years of dictatorship. It was like the dictatorship imprinted itself on me psychologically. Everything that I did there was in some way difficult. When I came to the States, every door opened up in a magical way.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When the coup d’etat happened in 1964, my father (who worked as a piloto de navio, a cargo ship pilot, for the oil and gas company Petrobras) decided we should move back to Rio de Janeiro. That was where his family lived.

S: Why did he decide that?

C:. My guess is that, seeing how the dictatorship was limiting access to opportunities, he felt that returning to Rio and working hard there to advance his career would allow him to make our life as good as possible given the tough circumstances. So we moved back to Rio de Janeiro and he studied in his spare time and eventually became a captain.

S: What was it like for you to move back to Rio de Janeiro?

C: I was extremely close to my mother’s mother, Mercedes. Leaving her was terrible. And life in Rio de Janeiro was completely different. Rio Grande was a tiny, peaceful town and Rio de Janeiro was a big, bustling city, but it was still a nice place to be—not as hectic as it is now.

S: Were you able to maintain your connection with your maternal grandmother after your family moved away from her?

C: Yes, very much so. Our family would visit her every school holiday. Later on, when my brother and sister and I were teenagers, we began to go see her by ourselves.

S: I know from reading your website bio that even as a child, you felt a lot of joy in movement and you developed an understanding of the healing properties of somatic awareness.

C: From the beginning, I felt the need to do some kind of movement. I seem to have come into this world knowing that the body in motion releases mental and emotional tension and balances us, and that we feel better as a result. My mom told me that when I was five or six years old, I’d be on the floor with my legs forward, or out, or all the way over my head. I had a few ways of stretching. She’d ask, What are you doing? I would tell her, I’m calming myself, I’m being with myself. From the time I was 13, even younger, I would walk on the beaches in Rio de Janeiro. I would feel the strength in my legs, and the energy I was receiving from the sand and the sun. I’d breathe in the prajna from the ocean very consciously, even though I didn’t call it prajna. Then I’d jump into the water to cool off and I’d feel a sense of oneness. I would describe what I was feeling to my brother, sister, and friends. I’d encourage them to join me—especially my brother and a good friend, who were a little bit overweight. I’d say, That’s OK, let’s move around, we’ll feel better. When I became a yoga teacher much later, my siblings and my friends from that time said, We’re not surprised one bit.

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S: Who most supported your way of being when you were a kid?

C: My parents encouraged me to be a good student, but the physical training I had to find on my own. My parents didn’t exercise. My brother is a runner now, and my sister likes going to the gym, but no one in my family shared my interest in yoga and meditation. When I was 14–15 years old, I went looking for a stretching class. At that time, I did not find any yoga classes. They were all about stretching. I wanted to find a teacher I’d resonate with, someone who loved what they were doing. I’d visit a class and say, No, not this one. Eventually I found a teacher, a young mother with kids. I saw that she struggled to earn enough money through her teaching, but her class was so filled with love and truth. She didn’t speak about spirit but it was there in her presentation and in her way of caring for her students. I told my mom about it, but it went in one ear and out the other. She said, As long as you like it, I’m glad you found it. She was busy raising my younger siblings.

Next: The Heart Is the Major Target—Part 2: Openness to the Unseen

Educator Wellness Practice #10: Inhabiting the Dignified Stance of "Adequate"

Emily Dickinson comes through with an empowering definition of “adequate” that we need right now. Check out #10 in the educator wellness series here.

The introduction to the series is here.

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Facebook Live Event: A Conversation About the Impact of Saying Goodbye to Students

I loved joining Peter Brunn and Gina Fugnitto of Collaborative Classroom for a conversation about the impact on educators of saying goodbye to students after many weeks of remote teaching due to the global pandemic. I led participants through a short practice I am calling “Saying Hello to Goodbye.”

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Educator Wellness Practice #4: Listening to Silence

How about rejuvenating and grounding yourself by taking of a quiet minute or three? That’s the focus of this easy and pleasurable practice.

The introduction to the series is here. Thanks to Collaborative Classroom for shining the light on wellness.

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Facebook Live Event: A Conversation About the Importance of Self-Care

I was honored to join Gina Fugnitto and Peter Brunn of Collaborative Classroom for a conversation about self-care. We talked about the concept of “beginner’s mind” first named by Suzuki Roshi, the Sōtō Zen monk and teacher famed for starting first Zen Buddhist monastery outside Asia. I then guided participants through a body scanning practice to support calm and centeredness in the face of COVID-19 stress.

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Educator Wellness Practice #3:

It’s all too easy to habituate ourselves to muscling through our tasks and deferring “real life” till we get through the to-do list. But if your list is anything like mine, it’s endless. So what happens to the quality of our days?

The third wellness practice in my series of blogs on educator wellness offers an antidote.

The introduction to the series is here.

I heart Collaborative Classroom for featuring this series!

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Educator Wellness Practice #2: Engaging Wisely with News and Media

Here’s the second wellness practice in my series of blogs on educator wellness is. The introduction to the series is here. I appreciate Collaborative Classroom for asking me to write this series! Anyone who wants to get more deliberate about news and social media intake can check out this practice.

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Educator Wellness Practice #1: Breathe ... Keep Breathing

The first wellness practice in my series of blogs on educator wellness is here. The introduction to the series is here. Gratitude to Collaborative Classroom for inviting me to write this series! Non-educators will benefit from this simple breathing practice too.

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Educator Wellness Series for Collaborative Classroom

I've been writing about teacher wellness for the Collaborative Classroom blog. Read the introduction to the series here.

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 8: Do We Want to Be Right in a Dictionary Sense?

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 8, Nani reflects on the goals and challenges of translation and the ups and downs of working abroad.

Sarah: Is “linguist” a fancy name for “translator”?

Nani: Yup. My primary role was to translate and localize content into Indonesian in preparation for the launch of the Indonesian version of LinkedIn. It’s very interesting work to me because it requires awareness of contextual issues. For example, let’s say we want to point a user to the home page. You can’t use the Indonesian word for “home, ” or “rumah,” because that literally means “house.” I decided to use “halaman utama,” which means “primary page.”

Sarah: Tell me about the challenges involved in translation work of that type.

Nani: One challenge was that by the time I got the job at LinkedIn, I’d lived in the States for a long time. I still spoke ‘90s Indonesian. As I grappled with that challenge, lot of things I’d learned in my linguistics courses as an undergrad became real to me. Because of that training, I remembered to step back and ask myself: What is our objective with this translation? What factors should be considered in arriving at the best translation? Indonesian is much more fluid than English. There are often two or more ways to spell one word. There’s the official listing in the government-sponsored dictionary, but that’s different from the spelling people use in daily life. Besides spelling, there are all sorts of issues such as degree of formality and influences of regional languages in Indonesia—for example if you’re addressing elders versus younger people; ways of speaking between people in big cities versus not; and of course the nuances of language on more than 17,000 islands that are part of Indonesia. Even if you try to come up with the lowest common denominator for a particular term, it still won’t necessarily do the work you need it to do.

I tried to fold all these nuances into my translation work. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m seen by the Indonesian translation community as a hard person to work with, because I often challenged the external translators I was managing.

I once applied for a position at a different tech company, and part of the application process was to take a test, translating English into Indonesian. Surprisingly, I did not do well. But because the company I applied for had a policy of transparency, the hiring manager told me how the test was evaluated. It turned out the reviewer was evaluating my work based on what’s officially correct in Indonesian language, but not necessarily how people speak day-to-day. I illustrated this point by running a Google search for the two terms. The one I chose yielded hundreds of thousands of results, while the one the evaluator considered correct only yielded about 20. This showed not only that spelling in Indonesian language is fluid, but also that the way everyday people spell Indonesian words may not be the same as how those words appear in the dictionary.

As a translator, I think it’s important to ask, Do we want to be right in a dictionary sense, or do we want the most engagement from the people we are trying to reach?

At an art exhibit in Stockholm.

At an art exhibit in Stockholm.

Sarah: In spite of the fact that you considered going to another tech company, you’ve stayed at LinkedIn.

Nani: Yes. I feel that LinkedIn has always supported my professional development and they’re open to my ideas. For example, when I’m ready for a new challenge, I’m given one. I told my previous manager that I was interested in being promoted, and he suggested that I take on a new project. I ended up working with the research team to conduct qualitative research in Indonesia. I also led an international research project in which my team members interviewed members from different parts of the world. It was great because I was able to use research skills I’d learned in anthropology—gathering ethnographic data through one-on-one interviews, doing archival research, creating reports. Because of that work, as well as my collaboration with a cross-functional team, Customer Operations, I was promoted to a senior position. After working with Customer Operations for a couple of years, I also started working with a new team, Marketing. Not long after that, I became a Marketing Localization Program Manager. As a program manager, I streamline processes to help improve communications and operations among multiple teams in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Sarah: That’s a consistent theme in your career trajectory. You love streamlining operations in organizations.

Nani: LinkedIn has given me the green light to make those kinds of improvements. I’ve worked there for more than seven years now and I attribute my longevity to that. I feel valued. I’m also grateful that the company has sent me to Dublin for an assignment; I had always wanted to experience living in Europe.

With colleagues in Dublin.

With colleagues in Dublin.

Sarah: What’s it like to live in Dublin?

Nani: It was difficult at first. I felt overwhelmed by the foreignness, the short days and cold rainy weather, the loneliness. It triggered memories of being 17 and having just moved to the U.S. I remember after a few weeks of being in San Francisco, I broke down in my brother’s kitchen, taking in the fact that I was now in a new place, with no friends, where even communicating was a challenge.

What I’ve realized is that loneliness follows you, no matter where you are. For better or worse, I’ve often experienced loneliness, ever since I was a child. It’s not the kind of loneliness where you feel you have no one to spend time with. It’s more a feeling of alone in the world—what a friend of mine calls “existential loneliness.” Perhaps I thought if I moved away, I would lose this feeling. It turns out it’s still there, but with newer, different distractions. I’m feeling more at peace and accepting of this fact over time.

With colleagues in Sunnyvale.

With colleagues in Sunnyvale.

What I love about living in Europe is the ability to travel to other countries—both the planning and the experience of traveling. Since I arrived in December, I’ve been to eight countries in Europe, including countries I’d never been to before that I’d always been curious about, like Hungary, Austria, and Denmark. I’ve learned more about myself and what kind of traveler I am.

Being based in Dublin has its own challenges in terms of my job. For example, time zone differences between the U.S. and Ireland affect my work hours, which means I sometimes work until 7, 8, even 10 at night. On the positive side, if I plan ahead, my schedule is more flexible. For instance, when I know I’ll need to work late, I do other things in the morning. I once spent a weekday morning swimming in an outdoor pool in Vienna—that was lovely.

With friend Marina in Dublin.

With friend Marina in Dublin.

What I continue to love the most about life, no matter where I am, are those rare moments that give me feelings of gratitude and contentment. A few weeks ago, on a Friday, I attended a company party at an outdoor park. It was almost eight in the evening, but it was still bright, and the air was balmy, very rare for Dublin. I was on my way home, walking to the train station, but changed my mind and decided to walk home, even though Google Maps said it would take an hour. I strolled through Sandymount, a coastal suburb in Dublin, surrounded by elegant houses with shiny windows and beautiful front gardens. I didn’t have any obligations waiting at home; there was nothing I needed to do except enjoy the moment.

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 7: You Just Need to Find a Good Husband

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 7 Nani describes her post-grad-school gigs, including a tutoring job that led her to a position at LinkedIn.

Sarah: What did you do after you received your master’s degree?

Nani: I felt a little lost. My family didn’t understand why I studied anthropology, so they didn’t have hope that I’d find a job that would pay well. During a visit to Indonesia, I got dengue fever, and when a well-meaning aunt visited me in the hospital, she said, “You don’t need a PhD—you just need to find a good husband.”

For a period after I graduated I was moving around constantly, mostly in the Mission and Chinatown in San Francisco. I house-sat and subletted rooms. While the uncertainty created by my lack of a job and my nomadic lifestyle was challenging, there were things I liked about that period. I got to explore San Francisco in ways I hadn’t done before. 

I also busied myself by volunteering at film festivals. I went from festival to festival—the Asian American International Film Festival in March; the International Film Festival in May; and then in June the Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival. I earned lots of free tickets. At one point I saw about ten films in one week and I remember  feeling so happy. I was really getting into that whole world—cinematography, directors, international and independent films.

I also reached out to someone I’d taken a writing class with at the American Language Institute; she was the director of a nonprofit called Refugee Transitions, where I ended up working part-time as an executive assistant. While working there I dabbled with teaching English to refugee children and with fundraising. Around the same time, I also got another part-time job through Craigslist as a financial researcher at an obscure hedge fund. I had zero experience in finance, but I was curious about the field. In the interview, the owner asked unusual questions like, What do you like to read? I said, Oh, I like to read the New Yorker. It turned out he loved the New Yorker! I ended up working with these guys in the home office of one of them. They spent all day looking at graphs, and I tried to learn from them about the patterns of international stock markets. I’m still a little bit confused about it. But I needed the money and they paid $17 an hour, which was more than I was making at my other job. The CEO was very patient with me, but I got bored there because ultimately, I wasn’t passionate about numbers and graphs. 

In addition to my jobs at Refugee Transitions and the hedge fund, I also tutored high school kids and professionals in Indonesian, and for a short while, I worked at a retail store in the Mission called Currents, selling soap and candles. Currents was a special place. I was making minimum wage and I didn’t feel confident about my retail skills, but the atmosphere was laid-back. Time was slow. They offered gift wrapping. You can go crazy with that stuff. I would silently judge my coworkers: “How could you do those color combinations? They don’t go together!” The owner was Japanese American. He was very moody but we shared some memorable moments. One evening as we were closing up the shop, he and his wife invited me to stay and served me unfiltered, smoky sake and a Japanese tofu dish they whipped up in the tiny kitchenette. It was one of those spontaneous moments of connection and beauty. 

But my main passion at that time was film. One day, while I was volunteering at the Asian American International Film Festival, I was in the bathroom of the Kabuki Theater in Japantown and I started talking with someone who worked at the Center for Asian American Media, the organization that presented the festival. She was Malaysian and we started chatting about our Southeast Asian cultures and similar, Malay-root language. One thing led to another and I ended up working at CAAM as their office manager, quitting all my other jobs, except tutoring Indonesian.

Hosting a high school friend.

Hosting a high school friend.

With friends in San Francisco.

With friends in San Francisco.

CAAM staff photo.

CAAM staff photo.

At CAAM Film Festival with another staffer and filmmaker Leo Chiang.

At CAAM Film Festival with another staffer and filmmaker Leo Chiang.

The tutoring job is actually how I ended up at LinkedIn. After two years at CAAM, I didn’t feel I was being challenged enough, and I was getting frustrated by the slowness of the organization, just like I’d felt at the Learning Assistance Center and Refugee Transitions. I had idea for how to streamline operations and I sensed that there wasn't an interest or the resources to implement such changes.

I made a list of things I needed to do in order to get a new job, which included updating my LinkedIn profile. I went onto the site to fill in more information on my profile, and I listed all my current positions, including “Indonesian Tutor and Teacher.” The next day I received an email from LinkedIn, with a list of jobs I might be interested in, and a linguist position at LinkedIn was one of them. I realized later that the LinkedIn algorithm recognized that my newly updated profile partially matched the qualifications of one of their own open positions. I applied and got an interview.

Next: Do We Want to Be Right in the Dictionary Sense?

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 6: Human Remains and Cultural Artifacts

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 6 Nani explains how poetry led her to anthropology.

Nani: Through Kyger’s influence I started reading Snyder, who’s a big advocate for anthropology. His work taught me the importance of knowing where people came from, how they live, and why different groups of people live in such different ways. It felt like foundational knowledge to me. That summer at Naropa I also took a class with Joanne’s friend Peter Warshall. His class also had an anthropological perspective. He took us to a sewage treatment plant to understand how we use water and deal with our waste. He wanted us to think about how our society has evolved to the point it’s at now.

Sarah: Were those experiences what gave you the idea of formally studying anthropology?

Nani: Yes. After a year and a half working full-time at the Learning Assistance Center, I spent a semester at San Diego State, taking prerequisites with the intention of applying to their master’s program in anthropology. But I quickly realized San Diego was not San Francisco. In retrospect I realized I went to San Diego to get away from a relationship that I was trying to end. After six months I returned to San Francisco and started my master’s at SF State.

Grad school was intense. For my thesis work I was drawn to one of the most controversial subjects in anthropology (at least at the time): the repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural artifacts. That exposed me to the ugly side of academic life. I was so surprised that individuals with PhDs could be so wedded to their own view that they would get downright hostile toward each other. The fight was primarily between archaeologists and physical anthropologists on the one side, and cultural anthropologists on the other. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists study the past by examining human remains and cultural artifacts, while cultural anthropologists study the present by working closely with present-living peoples, such as Native Americans. Because of their beliefs, many (though not all) Native Americans oppose the study of their ancestors’ human remains and cultural artifacts. One of the primary issues in the battle was that the two groups adopted polarized stances even though actually, even within each group, there was a range of perspectives and opinions.

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Sarah: How did you cope with the situation?

Nani: I tried to be diplomatic. Even now I still see both perspectives—although I lean toward cultural anthropology, because if you look at the history of physical anthropology, it’s pretty ugly. The physical anthropologists at U.C. Berkeley, including the renowned Alfred Kroeber, took some deeply problematic stances, from saying that the brains of Anglo Saxons were more powerful than those of other ethnicities, to removing Native American artifacts without permission. They excavated something like 2,000 remains of individuals—that’s still in contention to this day.

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I learned so much about the history of various Native American cultures. I hadn’t even known that Native Americans were the original inhabitants of North America. I’m embarrassed to say that, but it’s the truth. That narrative was never presented in Indonesia, given the suppression of critical thinking I described earlier. The Indonesian government didn’t want indigenous Indonesians to be aware of struggles by indigenous populations in other parts of the world.

Ultimately three factors led me to decide to not pursue a doctorate degree. First of all, I didn’t like the politics of the academic world—though I later learned that every field has politics—I just needed to learn the skills to cope with it. Also, as someone who is not Native American, I felt a little out of place speaking about Native American rights and traditions. And finally, I saw the pressure to be a good academic, strive for tenure—for example by writing papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Next: You Just Need to Find a Good Husband

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 5: Poetry Has No Rules

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 5 she describes her discovery of poetry.

Sarah: I think you started studying poetry writing with me right after you began working full-time at the Language Acquisition Center.

Nani: That’s right, we met in the fall of 2002.

Sarah: What drew you to poetry?

Nani: I’d read Charles Bukowski in one of my undergrad classes. Back home in Indonesia, poetry had all kinds of rules. When I read Bukowski, I was surprised and impressed that poetry could look and sound like that. “Wow, you can include cuss words and write in free verse about daily stuff!” I saw a flyer in the campus library about your poetry workshops and consultations. I was curious. When I first started working with you, if you remember, I didn’t join a workshop—I was too shy. You had put on your flyer that you also worked with people one-on-one, and that appealed to me. Then after you told me more about your workshops, I realized it would feel safe—I didn’t have to be somebody already in order to join.

Looking back, I can see that being in the workshop was such good practice in terms of learning how to express myself in a more public forum. I also paid attention to how you taught the class. All the students were working in different styles, writing different kinds of work. The course readers you put together introduced me to a lot of different kinds of poetry as well. I remember you had us read a poem about Frida Kahlo and you pulled a biography of her off your shelf; it had lots of reproductions of her work. You introduced me to Joanne Kyger’s work too. I was attracted to it for the same reasons I was drawn to Bukowski—the frankness, the dailiness, no rules. I wanted to write like that.

My undergraduate studies in English literature and Language Studies were more externally oriented. That’s where I first realized that people can express their individual visions and others might read that work. Coming from my culture, that was such new, exciting idea. Then in your workshops I was looking internally at what I had to say. The two approaches went hand in hand.

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Sarah: Tell me about becoming friends with Joanne Kyger.

Nani: After you introduced me to her work, I decided to attend Naropa’s summer writing program, which she taught in. A lot of students wanted to hang out with her but it seemed like they were mostly curious about her personal life and her marriage early on to Gary Snyder. I didn’t feel the need to ask about those things. She told me that she really appreciated that I just wanted to talk about her work. For a while after Naropa we wrote postcards to each other. Then she gave me her email address, and then she invited me to her home in Bolinas. From then on, I visited her about once a year.

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I felt our deepest connection came mostly in relation to poetry—I appreciated her work, and she appreciated mine. In person, we were very fond of each other, but I now wish we had a deeper in-person connection.  At one point she invited me to stay overnight at her place and I didn’t do it. I feel a little regretful knowing that I could have formed a deeper friendship and mentorship. She was very encouraging about my work. She published one of my poems in a local Bolinas newsletter.

Next: Human Remains and Cultural Artifacts

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 4: Dessert Goes to a Different Stomach

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. Part 3 of our conversation concluded with Nani attending San Francisco State University and feeling connected to her academic studies for the first time.

Sarah: You were also holding down a job, right? 

Nani: Yes. I became friends with other Indonesian students and they helped me look for jobs. My first job was working as a barista at the university’s Café 101. I was really into it. I loved making the perfect coffee drinks. And I liked the public-facing aspect. I felt cool working there. 

Then I got a waitressing job at a burger joint called The BullsHead, near my brother’s house in West Portal. It’s owned by Korean-American family. I had no experience in waitressing but they accepted me. It’s a very popular restaurant. Suddenly I wanted to be the best server. I even told my dad that my goal was to be a classy waitress at a fancy restaurant. 

A colleague at the restaurant told me that a great server is when the patrons don’t even notice you’re there. I learned so much about that. For example, if patrons are having an intense conversation, there are ways to interject without intruding. 

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I wanted to move up in the restaurant world, so I left Bullshead and went to Olive Garden, next to SF State. I learned how to pair food and wine, which was fun. But it was a very corporate environment, not at all like the mom-and-pop world of Bullshead. You had to show up when they opened at 11am. They could dismiss you any time between 2–4:30pm—but you had to be back at 5:30pm for the dinner shift. 

And the waitstaff were expected to compete with one another. I remember there was a prize for whoever sold the most desserts. I learned to cajole customers using witty comments—“Oh it’s OK, you have room because dessert goes to a different stomach.” I did get into trouble once. I was serving an older white American couple and I kept saying “you guys.” The gentleman gestured to his partner and said, Look at her—do you think she’s a guy? I apologized but then I repeated the term—it was just automatic for me. The second time he was pretty unhappy! 

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Even with the competition to sell, I was making less money than at The BullsHead. My performance started to slip—I didn’t want to be the best server in the world anymore. The store manager said, Nani, when you started you were getting 5+ stars but now you are only earning 4 stars. I didn’t last long. No regrets, though, because I learned a lot about workplace politics. 

Sarah: When I met you, you were working in a tutoring center run by the university. How did that come about?

Nani: When I first arrived and was taking basic English, one of my teachers was a French-American woman. I liked her vibe and felt comfortable with her because English was also a second language for her. A few years later I ran into her on campus and she said she was working at the Learning Assistance Center, which provides free tutoring to students. She encouraged me to apply.

I had my doubts. How could an ESL student tutor native and non-native English speakers? I didn’t think I did well in interview. But I was accepted for the position.

Then I wanted to be the best tutor.

Sarah: Tell me about wanting to be the best at everything you do.

Nani: I remember you once said, Nani, when you want something, you want it now. I tended to move fast and I wanted to be the best, but then if I wasn’t stimulated enough, I lost interest.

I learned a ton working as an English tutor. I felt my managers were more confident in me than I was in myself. Sometimes the director would pair me up with students who had learning disabilities. After a session I would have no idea if the student I’d worked with had gotten anything out of it. But we received training and the managers did sometimes observe.

I worked part-time there, tutoring students in reading, writing, and study skills. When I graduated they offered me a full-time position as an office manager with time built into my week to do some tutoring.

The director of the Center was one of the best managers I ever had. She expressed a lot of confidence in me, and she was compassionate and empathetic. For instance, she noticed that I liked to swim. She said, if you go swimming at lunch and you take a little more than an hour, don’t worry about it. I learned so much from her about how to be a good manager.

That position was a great match for me for a while, but over time I got frustrated by the manual system they used for scheduling appointments. I had learned that you could schedule using computers, which made it much more efficient. I offered my recommendations and was told my thinking was sound, but they were not ready to make the shift. I didn’t realize (and wasn’t patient enough to figure out) that in public institutions, things don’t happen swiftly. It’s not like once you identify a problem and a solution you can solve it overnight.

 Next: Poetry Has No Rules

Managing to Build Bridges - Part 3: I Felt Pretty Stupid

Nani has a gift for entering others’ cultures in a respectful and sensitive way. That gift, combined with her strong curiosity and sense of adventure, has led to a unique trajectory from her childhood in Indonesia to her current job as a project manager at LinkedIn. In Part 3 of our conversation, Nani describes her initial encounter with U.S. culture and her nascent passion for exercising her analytical skills.

Sarah: What were your first impressions of US culture?

Nani: I was reading an old diary recently and I found observations about exactly that. For instance, I noted that people say “How are you” a lot but, as I learned the hard way, you’re not supposed to pause and really think about how you are—you’re supposed to just say, “Fine.” We don’t say “How are you” in Indonesia so at first I thought people really wanted to know how I was.

I also felt uncomfortable physically. In Southeast Asia, females are supposed to behave in a feminine way, and whiter skin is prized. I’d flunked that test because I wasn’t very feminine and was darker-skinned. Here in the US I had to wrestle with a new projection—I was seen by many as exotic. A lot of people—mostly but not only white men—assumed I’d fit the stereotype they had of Asian women as submissive, weak, nurturing. So I’d gone from feeling unattractive to attractive, but attractive in a way that made me feel objectified, uncomfortable. It took me a long time to develop the vocabulary to understand all that.

On an intellectual level I felt pretty stupid. I remember I went with American friends to see a film and one of them asked me afterward, Well, what do you think? Did you like it? I said, Yes, it was cool. The friend said, Why? I had no idea. My critical thinking skills were still very limited. Under Suharto, critical thinking was suppressed in both the public and private educational systems. You were not allowed to think for yourself. That’s why literature wasn’t offered in schools—literature promotes deeper questioning. Before I moved to the States I had never even heard of the most internationally renowned Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. His books were all banned in my time. After I got to the US I sought out Indonesian literature.

Acclaimed Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Acclaimed Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Sarah: What did you major in at SF State?

Nani: At first I declared marketing as my major. I was still enacting the values of my parents and the world I grew up in. After one or two classes I said, this is so boring, I’m not going to do it. But I didn’t know what to replace it with. I had the same old frustration I’d felt in Indonesia—“I don’t know what my skills are; I don’t know what I’m good at.” I went back and looked at my performance at the American Language Institute. I’d excelled in writing and literature. I thought, maybe that’s what I should go for. I ended up double majoring in English literature and linguistics.

After that, I was able to say why I like or don’t like certain movies! I definitely struggled in the lit classes. But I was dating an American at the time. In terms of our communication as a couple a lot was lost in translation, but being with him propelled the speed of my learning. He would help me even with literature stuff, for example if I didn’t understand something I read or when I had to write papers.

Sarah: Why did you want to study linguistics?

Nani: I knew that breaking down the English language—looking at aspects like phonology, morphology, social linguistics—would significantly speed up the process of gaining mastery, which I very much wanted.

All of a sudden I became a proper student. It just proves that if you’re passionate about whatever it is you’re doing, no one even needs to tell you to be disciplined. You just do whatever it takes, providing you have access to the basics (housing, food, etc.), which I did, thankfully. I often went to my professors’ office hours. I would show up with lists of questions I’d prepared in advance.

Next: Dessert Goes to a Different Stomach