OPINION
August 3, 2015
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
You can try walling out
Mother Mexico’s ambitious
children or walling in proud
Palestinians. But crushing
parental optimism produces
ferocious commerce in
frightened families, in
vulnerable kids and women,
in drugs and guns, and the two
most violent businesses of all:
war and poverty.
n Polo
Families move
Forget legal abstractions and awful bigots
aily, our evening news startles
then totally paralyzes me. Donald
Trump says Mexican “rapists” are
lurking in our neighborhoods; the Public
Broadcasting Service reports the moody
Mediterranean is swallowing another
hundred Arab and African “displaced
migrants”; the British Broadcasting
Corporation runs footage of my own
homeland, Indonesia, shoving a packed
boatload of Rohingya “asylum seekers”
back out to sea. Out into our hungry
Andaman Sea. Skinny moms and babies
and grandpas. In his very best English, a
single schoolboy shouts out, “Please-
please, sirs. We are thirsty.”
That boy’s words play and replay inside
me. So full of meaning they are. The words
asylum seeker and displaced migrant and
rapist rattle around inside too — words
which are in fact, fundamentally contrary
to what my eyes just saw, and what my
heart already knows. They’re wonky words
and ugly words that short circuit my
human reflex to jump in after a family
drowning, after a kid thirsting.
Legal abstractions and polarizing
clichés daily distort conversation about the
brutality of where new Americans have
always come from. Wordy distractions are
D
drowning out that poor kid’s truer words.
Please-please, sirs.
Words can distance you and me. Words
can lock us into institutional cruelty. Say:
Immigration. Say it at work or at a dinner
party, say it in a Starbucks morning coffee
line. It’s a conversation killer. We dash to
adversarial policy positions, punctuated
with awful stereotypes. And our humanity
— the real fears of folks anxious about
America taking on another vexing global
urgency, and the real sorrow of those
abandoned by the kind and creative nation
we’ve always looked up to — is shoved out
to sea.
A simpler, kinder narrative
I’ve been looking around for another
narrative, one less likely to mute my
impulse to yank that skinny boy from his
miserable boat. I’ve been thinking of
simply saying “families move,” because we
do. Because human communities have
migrated determinedly all over our achy
earth’s lovely face since memory began.
Here on River Columbia’s generous shore,
we’ve done about 140 centuries of this.
That’s a lot of families moving.
We migrate like Pacific gray whale
families and Columbia River’s sockeye
salmon do. Every autumn hundreds of
Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization
(IRCO) board director Tatiana Youseff welcomes
attendees at an IRCO event.
hushed Portlanders on spread picnic
blankets awe the chimney migration of
Chapman Elementary’s Vaux Swifts.
Thousands and thousands spew out of that
school’s tall stack, nervously chattering in
a mix of English and Spanish before
jetting down to sunnier Mexico. Bigger
bugs too.
We can try to stop folks from moving.
Governments do. Tall walls get erected.
Borders get electrified. But just like when
we dam living rivers, natural and
necessary consequences follow. When
Chinook salmon suffer, so do native and
newer nations, so do cities and industries,
so do ranchers, farmers, and fishers. You
can try walling out Mother Mexico’s
ambitious children or walling in proud
Palestinians. But crushing parental
optimism produces ferocious commerce in
frightened families, in vulnerable kids and
women, in drugs and guns, and the two
most violent businesses of all: war and
poverty.
Seeing movements of irrepressible
parents, their energetic kids and elegant
elders, as natural and necessary, is the
same as acknowledging how we’re all
participants in our shared green planet’s
pattern of moving her grazers and hunters
and shoppers from place to place to place.
From there, we can orchestrate our
international relations and our domestic
policies to the truth of it. Families move.
One hundred twenty centuries ahead of
Lewis and Clark paddling in, families mi-
grated around generous River Columbia’s
shores. For our last two centuries, those
families moved to Indian reservations,
then again from terminated tribal lands to
our cities; families moved from Jim Crow’s
south to north Portland’s shipyards; since
the fall of Saigon, the fall of Berlin’s wall,
and City Hall’s failed promises to Albina,
African-American
families,
Asian,
African, Arab, Spanish- and Russian-
speaking families, Caribbean and Pacific
island families — have all moved to River
City’s stubbornly optimistic far-far
eastside. And that’s the truth.
We have always, we will always, move.
The only unknown in this narrative is our
national and state policymakers’ readi-
ness to work with us.
Yoga philosopher brings lessons to Ketchikan
By Megan Petersen
Ketchikan Daily News
ETCHIKAN, Alaska (AP) — Yoga philosopher
Ram Vakkalanka is blunt when talking about
common perceptions about yoga, the ancient
Indian practice of meditation and physical movement.
“Many people when they hear the word ‘yoga,’ they
think that it’s about making sure that they look good in
tight, stretchy pants, which it is, but yoga goes deeper
than that,” he said.
Vakkalanka said he hopes he presented Ketchikan
residents with “a comprehensive look at yogic discipline,
yoga as a lifestyle, yoga as a mantra of philosophy to live
by” with a series of workshops and performances
organized through Ketchikan’s Advaita Yoga Center,
according to the Ketchikan Daily News.
The weekend retreat included a catered concert
featuring Vakkalanka on the sitar — a traditional Indian
stringed instrument — accompanied by local musicians
Chazz Gist and Dave Rubin. Elizabeth Johannsen and
Raffy Tavidagian of the New York Café provided a
traditional Southern Indian meal for the event.
Vakkalanka and Advaita Yoga Center owner Carol
Naranjo also hosted a series of workshops and meditative
yoga classes throughout the weekend.
“The workshops are essentially about energy work,”
Vakkalanka said. “Most of the time, we tend to identify
ourselves with our physical body ... but actually we are a
confluence of various wonderful energies inside of us.
Those energies are trying to express themselves through
the medium of the physical body. The workshops are
focusing about those energies — which are known as ‘the
Chakras’ in the Sanskrit language — and how to balance
those energies, because when the energies are balanced,
we experience a state of wellbeing at many, many levels —
physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We feel
healthy only when the energies are balanced.”
Workshops addressed the origin and evolution of yoga,
Sanskrit language, mantra chanting, the chakras, and the
Bhagavad Gita.
“Bhagavad Gita helps us to understand our life’s
purpose — Why am I here? Why am I born in this time, in
these circumstances, among these people? What’s the
purpose of my life? What’s the reason of my existence?”
Vakkalanka said.
“The idea is once we’ve discovered that, then we have a
true purpose in our life, and unless we know the true
K
purpose of our life, we will not be able to achieve
fulfillment in life. Many people confuse fulfillment of life
with fulfillment of desires. Those two things are very
separate,” he said. “You can have all your desires fulfilled,
but life itself may not be fulfilled. There can be a certain
metaphysical emptiness in life if we do not know the
purpose of it.”
Vakkalanka said he knows the power of the Bhagavad
Gita firsthand. A native of Hyderabad, India, Vakkalanka
was both trained in the yogic tradition and educated in a
“quite regular” education system. As an adult, he became
an accountant and eventually the chief financial officer
of an international company based in Singapore that
had him living and working in Africa and Denver,
Colorado.
“I felt a really strong calling and was drawn to yoga and
yoga philosophy,” Vakkalanka said, adding, “I talked
earlier about fulfillment of life versus fulfillment of
desires, so that was a question that I had to face at one
point in time in my life. In 2008, I decided I was going to
give up the comfort of a regular paycheck and salary and
benefits and stuff and instead seek out the adventures of
teaching yoga philosophy. It has worked out well so far.”
Now Vakkalanka lives in Toronto, Canada, and works
as a full-time Sanskrit expert, sitar artist, keynote speak-
er, yoga philosopher, and meditation instructor. He trav-
els all over the world to lead retreats and workshops.
Vakkalanka said he is now in Shanghai for a similar work-
shop series and begins a European tour in mid-August.
Naranjo said she learned of Vakkalanka through a yoga
e-mail newsletter she subscribed to after visiting India
ANCIENT INDIAN PRACTICE. Yoga philosopher Ram Vakkalan-
ka plays a harmonium in Ketchikan, Alaska. Vakkalanka said he hoped he
presented Ketchikan residents with “a comprehensive look at yogic disci-
pline, yoga as a lifestyle, yoga as a mantra of philosophy to live by” with a
series of workshops and performances organized through Ketchikan’s
Advaita Yoga Center. (Taylor Balkom/Ketchikan Daily News via AP)
and learning yogic philosophy.
Naranjo picked up yoga after her daughter gave her a
yoga video to help with back pain, but she said she really
committed to her practice when she saw an ad in a yoga
magazine for an Indian yoga retreat.
“I had never dreamed of going to India. South America,
yes; Spain, yes, but never thought of going to India,”
Naranjo said.
Yoga “just fits in to my life, as far as the self-discovery
(aspect of the practice). I think something inside me, from
a young child, was always looking for more in life, like
there’s something inside that’s deeper and richer than
just going to work, coming home, watching TV, get up, go
to work, do that same thing.”
She spent some time in India and Nepal practicing yoga
and travelling, and when she returned to Ketchikan, con-
tinued to practice. Naranjo opened the yoga studio in Feb-
ruary of this year, and said she hopes to have Vakkalanka
return or to host other yoga guests in the future.
Naranjo said she especially values how yoga helps yogis
to discover themselves, but Vakkalanka said the individ-
ual is both bigger than, but also just as big as, one person.
“Yoga philosophy teaches us that the universe is as
much part of us as we are part of the universe,”
Vakkalanka said. “We are all micro-universes, basically.
... Yoga philosophy goes very deeply in the macrocosm, as
well as the microcosm, and explores the relationship
between these two and teaches us how to use the tools that
are available to us — such as meditative capability, even
language or music — (and) how to use them to make sure
that we are aligned with the universe, because if we think
about it, this entire universe is like a beautiful orchestra.”
“Everybody is contributing to this universal melody, but
we have so much cacophony inside of us,” he said, “that we
fail to hear (and) listen to this beautiful melody.”
“Now the yoga practice teaches how to use music to calm
down the negative chatter of the mind,” Vakkalanka
added. “You know, the mind is always running like a crazy
monkey here and there, but now yoga helps us to focus,
calm down, concentrate, and listen to the melody inside of
us as well as outside of us, so life feels like a beautiful
journey rather than an uphill task.”