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