num_pages: 352
description: 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 institutionsof health welfare law police church and industryaffect 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.
language: English
title: Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Volume 5)
publisher: University of California Press