Buddha Is Hiding
Refugees, Citizenship, the New AmericaBy Aihwa Ong
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2003 the Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-23824-4
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.......................................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................xiPROLOGUE....................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Government and Citizenship....................................11. Land of No More Hope.....................................................252. A Hilton in the Border Zone..............................................483. The Refugee as an Ethical Figure.........................................694. Refugee Medicine: Attracting and Deflecting the Gaze.....................915. Keeping the House from Burning Down......................................1226. Refugee Love as Feminist Compassion......................................1427. Rescuing the Children....................................................1688. The Ambivalence of Salvation.............................................1959. Guns, Gangs, and Doughnut Kings..........................................22910. Asian Immigrants as the New Westerners?.................................253Afterword: Assemblages of Human Needs.......................................275NOTES.......................................................................287INDEX.......................................................................323
Chapter One
Land of No More Hope
When the Vietnamese invaded, she was alone, wandering around looking for her family. It wasn't until in the camps that she met up with them. Her father and an older sibling had died. Only her mother and a sister were left. But then, once they had found each other, they didn't get along, so she went and stayed with a Vietnamese man in another part of the camp. She's what we call "a person with no pillar of support," a person with no direction, like a lotus leaf just drifting aimlessly, floating like a weed, in the middle of the river. Wherever she ended up, she just stayed there, and if she did not end up anywhere, she just floated on.
In Khmer Buddhism, the pillar or column of support (preah kamlaong) refers to the parents, who should be revered as near-deities. The speaker above—I'll call him Yann—is a Cambodian teacher who met this woman who had lost everything in a Thai refugee camp; he married her and they later moved to Oakland with their two daughters. They lived in a housing complex that held a lively community of Cambodian refugees. The one-bedroom apartment was dark, the curtains drawn against the California sunshine and the kids playing in the yard outside. When I visited, his wife, an invalid, was lying on a cot, intermittently moaning in her nightmares. She required around-the-clock care. Yann was kept very busy, but his daughters, barely out of their childhood, helped with the household chores and the care of their mother.
In Yann's story, his wife came to stand for all women who were swept up in the vortex of war "in Pol Pot time," a term Cambodians used to refer to the years of Khmer Rouge revolution (1975–1979). Cambodians speak of Pol Pot time as a period of social reversals: the rural ruled the urban, the uneducated ruled the educated, and (sometimes) children ruled their parents. Often separated from their fathers, brothers, and husbands, women were at the mercy of warfare, starvation, and constant fear, while struggling to protect children and aged relatives. Some had been through so many traumas that they were set adrift like lotus leaves floating in the stream. Many more survived with their bodies and minds undamaged but scarred and found unexpected resilience, rooted in their desire to live and to protect their children. Families were fragmented by war, mass relocation, labor camps, torture, death, and exile. Conventional Khmer-Buddhist notions of family obligation, gender roles, and personal propriety were scattered to the winds as displaced urban dwellers struggled to survive in the harsh labor camps of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), and later found refuge in the world of Thai border camps.
During those times, Cambodians experienced multiple displacements, encounters with authorities who wielded absolute power over their lives and death, and the kind of terror and hardship that transformed their identity as men and women, their sense of who they were as human beings. These refugees were to experience even more transformations in their lives in the United States.
When I began my research in the mid 1980s, there were approximately fifteen thousand Cambodian refugees living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the majority were crowded into rundown sections of Oakland and San Francisco. Families were packed into shabby public-housing apartment buildings, radically different from the verdant village homes many were forced to abandon years before. In one Oakland complex, people avoided the long, dark hallways reeking of urine after dark; in the evenings, people swore, they heard gunshots. The jangling and clanging caused by people going in and out of the iron apartment doors contributed to the prisonlike atmosphere that pervaded the entire complex. Loud sounds tended to set the older refugees shaking, as they flashed back to some war trauma. The old, infirm, and shell-shocked seldom ventured beyond their doors for fear of becoming disoriented or of being mugged. Their fears were not entirely imaginary: just before my research began, a small child playing in the courtyard had been accidentally run over by a truck, and street predators quickly identified these newcomers as easy marks. In many households, surviving family members and their friends had managed to patch together a family of sorts, clinging to one another and counting on welfare checks to help them navigate the storm-tossed world of inner-city America.
REFUGEE STUDIES AND THE CONCEPT OF THE HUMAN
In recent years, there has been a flood of reporting about refugees from wars, natural disasters, and economic crises—the upheavals they endured, the statistics, the humanitarian efforts, the threats to the nation-state and to peace, and the personal stories. We've been told that tens of millions of the world's population are now classifiable as refugees. There has also been a proliferation of other kinds of materials about refugees from around the world—exhibitions, brochures of relief organizations, movies, and the like—detailing wrenching stories of terror and anguish suffered in war. These stories are used by organizations to seek funds for their programs addressing poverty, starvation, and human-rights violations. And the academic community has linked refugee issues to the nation-state, considering how the displacements of large populations have affected the ways nation-states imagine themselves as discrete geopolitical entities and how modern statecraft regulates refugees in order to exclude them from territorial citizenship. An ethnographic analysis of the actual experiences of refugees will show, however, that not all refugees are defined as being outside the norms of the (intended) host countries; the question becomes how, in each political situation, refugees are differentially categorized and assessed as being more or less assimilable into national norms of moral belonging and citizenship.
Giorgio Agamben notes that "by...
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