Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New AmericaUniversity of California Press, 2003 M09 4 - 333 pages Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions—of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry—affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization. |
Contents
Government and Citizenship | 1 |
Land of No More Hope | 25 |
A Hilton in the Border Zone | 48 |
The Refugee as an Ethical Figure | 69 |
Refugee Medicine Attracting and Deflecting the Gaze | 91 |
Keeping the House from Burning Down | 122 |
Refugee Love as Feminist Compassion | 142 |
Rescuing the Children | 168 |
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abuse AFDC African Americans Ameri American citizenship Angkar Asia Asian American Asian immigrants become biopolitical bodian body Buddhist California Cambo Cambodian Americans Cambodian culture Cambodian refugees Cambodian women Chinese citizen-subjects citizens claims clinic discipline doughnut economic ethnic ethno-racial female Foucault gangs gender girls global groups health workers Hispanic Hmong husband individual Khao-I-Dang Khmer Rouge kids kind labor learned living male marriage medicine Michel Foucault middle-class migrants minority moral Mormon Mormon Church mother nation neoliberal networks newcomers Ngor norms Oakland parents patients Phnom Penh Pol Pot policies political practices programs race racial refugee camps regime resettlement role San Francisco sexual shaped Silicon Valley social workers society Southeast Asian refugees status strategies struggles subjects teenage Thai tion underclass United University Press urban Vietnamese Vietnamese Americans welfare wife woman York young Cambodian