Ong - Buddha is hiding : refugees, citizenship, the new America

Buddha Is Hiding

CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologists role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropologys commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debatetransforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings.

Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University)

Contributing Editors: Philippe Bourgois (UC San Francisco),
Paul Farmer (Partners in Health), Rayna Rapp (New York University),
and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (UC Berkeley)

University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider

1. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death,
by Margaret Lock

2. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel,
by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh

3. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide,
edited by Alexander Laban Hinton

4. Pathologies of Power: Structural Violence and the Assault
on Health and Human Rights, by Paul Farmer

5. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America,
by Aihwa Ong

Refugees, Citizenship, the New America

Aihwa Ong

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ong, Aihwa.

Buddha is hiding : refugees, citizenship, the new America / Aihwa Ong.

p. cm.(California series in public anthropology ; 5)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-22998-3(cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 0-520-23824-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Cambodian AmericansCaliforniaOaklandSocial conditions. 2. Cambodian AmericansCaliforniaOaklandEthnic identity. 3. Cambodian AmericansCivil rightsCaliforniaOakland. 4. RefugeesCaliforniaOaklandSocial conditions. 5. RefugeesCivil rightsCaliforniaOakland. 6. CitizenshipSocial aspectsUnited StatesCase studies. 7. Oakland (Calif.)Social conditions. 8. Oakland (Calif.)Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Series.

F869.02B83 2003

305.89593079466dc21 2003001857

Manufactured in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally

chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of

ANSI/NISO z39.481992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Bob

Two small grants from the University of Californiaa research fellowship from the office of the president of the University of California, and a Gender Institute fundhelped launch this study on Southeast Asian refugees.

A Rockefeller Foundation Gender Roles Program grant made possible more sustained fieldwork in the early 1990s. In the course of writing this book on and off over the past ten years, I have benefited from the support and advice of many individuals. I am indebted to Brackette F. Williams, friend and interlocutor, who read many drafts of the book. Her advice and references on the history of race in America were especially penetrating and useful. From a different direction, discussions with Pheng Cheah helped orient my own argument on the changing meaning and basis of citizenship. I am grateful to Judy Ledgerwood for her comments on Cambodian history and culture, and to Kathryn Poethig and Lindsay French for sharing their insights on the experiences of Cambodian refugees. Earlier versions of some chapters were read by Lawrence Cohen, Donna Goldstein, and Anna Tsing. Finally, I must mention the enthusiastic support of Robert Borofsky, the series editor of Public Anthropology, and Naomi Schneider of the University of California Press. I of course bear full responsibility for errors of judgment and interpretation.

As always, my husband, Robert R. Ng, fourth-generation American, has been a wonderful supportera technical wizard, giver of music and humor, and partner in lifes adventures. Our children, Pamela and Benjamin, have made possible our living life in full.

A.O.
Berkeley, May 2002

In the fall of 1970, I left Malaysia and arrived as a college freshman in New York City. I was immediately swept up in the antiwar movement. President Nixon had just begun his secret bombing of Cambodia. Joining crowds of angry students marching down Broadway, I participated in the takeover of the East Asian Institute building on the Columbia University campus. As I stood there confronting policemen in riot gear, I thought about what Southeast Asia meant to the United States. Were Southeast Asians simply an anonymous mass of people in black pajamas? Southeast Asia was a far-off place where America was conducting a savage war, supposedly against communism. American lives were being lost, and so were those of countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others.

This rite of passage into American society was to shape my attitude about U.S. citizenship. As a foreign student, I was at a disadvantage, ineligible for most loans, fellowships, and jobs. My sister, a naturalized American, could have sponsored me for a green card, but the bombing of Cambodia, symptomatic of a wider disregard for my part of the world, made American citizenship a difficult moral issue for me.

More than a decade later, when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I encountered refugees fresh from Indochina. As a new mother, I was grappling again with the meanings of citizenship. My sons birth engendered a new struggle with the moral implications of becoming a naturalized citizen. Becoming American is bigger than merely acquiring a new legal status, or the right to vote in the United States. We are told that Citizenship is one of the greatest privileges the United States confers upon alien-born residents, but becoming naturalized entails an inexplicable loss in exchange for a kind of dubious freedom, and an even more complicated sense of self for someone already multicultural and transnational in practice. Out of curiosity about what becoming American might mean for others, I dropped in on citizenship classes in Oaklands Chinatown. Old women, more gamely than the old men they outnumbered, struggled with English along with memorizing the various branches of the government, the names of past presidents and important officials in California, and absorbing a grandiose view of freedom and its limitless possibilities. The would-be citizens were preparing for what was probably the most important test in their lives, because acquiring American citizenship meant the right to send for sons, daughters, grandchildren, and siblings still in the home country. Sitting in the class, I wondered whether becoming citizens as a consequence of an American war might be a rather different experience for refugees from Southeast Asia.

In the past few decades, perhaps since the end of the Vietnam (or Indochina) War, the patriotic language used to analyze citizenship has given way to more specific concerns about the government of an ever-changing population. How can citizenship be explored when it is lived in an age not of heroic sacrifices, but of pragmatic considerations about productivity and profits? How have the inroads of American neoliberalism transformed this practical notion of citizenship? In