Panda Express(ions): Commodifying and Constructing Pan-Asian-ness

August 25, 2012 By 2 Comments

With the start of the new semester comes the renewed search for interesting examples to provoke good conversation in the classroom on race, class, and gender. One of the persistent themes in contemporary sociology of race research is the manifold meanings of the term “Asian.” What is “Asian” anyway? And by extension what is “Asian American?” I published a paper a few years ago where I explored this very question with undergraduates I met at several universities. They explained to me that “Asian American” has a multitude of meanings but they seem to hinge on whether one plays up the internal diversity in that word, or the externalized same-ness imposed through that word. As I have shared in other posts, Asian Americans are highly diverse ethnically and religiously, and yet there remains in our society an insistence that they share something in common that gets summarized in the term “Asian.”

In a racialized society, all minority groups (and the majority as well) get this kind of treatment. Historian David Hollinger argued that in the contemporary US we effectively have a “racial pentagon” which includes “white” “black” “Asian” “Hispanic” “Native American.” So racial same-ness is a key component in our culture, and minorities often struggle with maintaining ethnic particularity (“I am Korean, not Asian”) or giving in to racial generalizations. One of the common examples of this is to dine at a pan-Asian restaurant like “Panda Express” or “Pei Wei.” The menu is usually focused on “Chinese” cuisine – the quotes are intentional because, if you’ve been to a locally-owned Chinese restaurant with a full menu, very little resembles what is served in these mainstream establishments. They have to make the dishes more appealing to largely white customers. But in addition, there are often notable course options that signal a pan-Asian palette by use of phrases that are somewhat recognizable to more cosmopolitan Americans: “Thai,” “Bangkok,” “Korean,” “teriyaki,” “udon.” These too don’t often resemble dishes prepared in restaurants with single-ethnic cuisines. So “Asian” in this example is a combination of both reducing ethnicity to something more palatable to American (read: white) appetites, and to symbolic displays of internal diversity.

Just because a society has a tendency to create a controlling concept like race doesn’t mean that individuals and groups are without a certain degree of freedom. Notably, a lot of Asian Americans proudly call themselves by this term. Most of the people I interviewed said so, but less than a quarter of Asian Americans surveyed by Pew and less than half of those surveyed by political scientists like Janelle Wong, Karthick Ramakrishnan, Taeku Lee, and Jane Junn also identified with the label. If you’ve been on a college campus there is often an “Asian Student Association” or an “Asian American Christian Fellowship.” Sociologist Russell Jeung explored over 30 different pan-Asian Protestant congregations in the US across the west coast and detailed the ways in which these Christian communities understood what this term means. For many, describing oneself as “Asian American” is quite intentional – they believe that Asian Americans, regardless of ethnicity, experience some of the same trappings and dynamics that are particularly unique.

Perhaps not surprisingly, adoption of this term is not limited to the US, and its expression appears most readily in popular culture. A recent evident example I came across recently was a documentary called “Project Lotus: The Search for Blush.” This series chronicled the development of the first pan-Asian girl group called “Blush.” It was on one of those cable channels that you don’t normally run across, and as it turns out, this talent search began way back in 2010 but the story is only now reaching American markets. The series detailed the drama behind the production of the first ever pan-Asian celebrity group. Contestants came from five major nations: China, India, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Apart from the absence of Vietnam in this group, these nationalities represent 5 of the 6 largest ethnic groups in the US among Asian Americans. The final group would consist of one performer from each of these nations. This struck me as oddly uncontroversial, but it led me to ask: are there pan-Euro girl groups? What about pan-Latino? Pan-African? I don’t have an answer for that, but I leave it to readers to send me your reflections. This was the first element that got me thinking about the pervasiveness of “Asian-ness” in my own thinking which draws from participating in a popular culture that also commodifies this term.

Like most talent search contests, the judges met with contestants based on location. But unlike most American contests, each location entailed individuals of one specific and visible nationality; and that’s where things start getting tricky. Some contestants for example were ethnically one group but their nationality was of another group. Is a contestant of Korean heritage who grew up in Japan a representative of Japanese or Korean culture? The judges, almost all of whom were white (except the choreographer), struggled a lot over these issues of identity.

As I watched the series I kept looking for ways that internal diversity came out, but instead the focus was largely a conventional talent search: lots of arduous training, physical and emotional strain, performative excellence. Since the aim of this band was to appeal to American and Asian audiences they had to select a language that was universally acceptable across multiple nations: of course that would be English. Dance moves were not reflective of Bollywood or K-Pop or any Asian culture. Instead it seemed like conventional contemporary pop dance from Lady Gaga and the like. Perhaps intentionally, the only characteristic that stood out as particularly ethnic was the difference in their physical appearances.

The effort to create a pan-Asian ethnic girl group that is accessible to American and various Asian audiences seems to follow the same pattern as I mentioned earlier regarding food: there’s symbolic gesturing of diversity with Asia, but its core is aimed at appealing to American sensibilities. Much like mainstream pan-Asian dining in the US, Blush is an example of displaying diversity while essentially conforming to the dominant market. It helps a lot that the nations represented in this band all think highly of America, but the concern here is that conformity for the sake of profit winds up saying “culture doesn’t matter” to audiences that don’t realize how much it actually does.

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Ideals and Realities of Religious Tolerance

August 20, 2012 By 1 Comment

The recent event involving the killing of Sikh Americans in their house of worship (gurdwara) struck a deep chord for many. Shortly after, some news outlets reported on the burning of a mosque in Joplin, MO. And about a week later the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) released this brief detailing that these events were only 2 of 9 between the beginning of August and the 15th. I include a snapshot of these events for readers who don’t have time to read the full brief (it’s only 2 pages if you click on these links).

APALC news brief screenshot. http://www.apalc.org/

What has happened to our ideals of religious freedom and assembly?

As a second generation Korean American Christian, understanding American ideals was (and remains) an important part of my identity and continues to inform much of my research interests and teaching. One of these ideals is the freedom of religious assembly. It was clear that religious freedom and tolerance were a high priority for many who helped construct the legal and political foundations of this country. While scholars argue over whether this foundation imagined only Christian pluralism or all manner of religious pluralism, it is clear at the grassroots level for many immigrants today that they believe it means the latter.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit a Sikh temple for the first time. I was with the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative’s annual conference which included a visit to a Sikh temple in the Chicago area where the meeting was held. It was an amazing experience to be sure. Friendly leaders of the community helped us understand some of the basic beliefs and practices of the faith and the expectations of how to conduct oneself in the building as well as the communal religious service (this is the closest Christian equivalent term for the experience of being in the sacred space of the gurdwara). I noticed that the social experience of Skihism in America is not unlike the experience of many American Protestants, and in some instances I noticed even more similarities with Asian American immigrant Protestantism.

Some of the similarities included having communal religious practice such as music, ritual practice-all analogous (from my vantage point) to Protestant and Catholic worship. Moreover, the gurdwara was clearly a place for the communication of social services as well as community activities much like one would see outside the sanctuary of a typical Christian place of worship. Local events for the Sikh community, access to healthcare and legal services-none of this surprised me as someone who grew up seeing the same social practices at work in immigrant Korean American Protestant churches. For these newer Americans adapting to a new society, the comfort of co-ethnics is invaluable in gaining access to the basic institutions we all rely on. Since churches are regular meeting spaces, this is a primary location for informing community members how to gain help where needed. Many minority religious groups including Sikhs, Muslims and Buddhists all adapt to this pattern even if their religion did not traditionally include regular communal activity. This is sometimes described as religious adaptation or de facto congregationalism (sociologists are wordsmiths).

Where the Sikh religious community differed was in the content of their religious practices. This appeared not only in worship differences, but also in the ceremonial garb (bana), and the headpiece or turban worn by the men.

That was essentially it. In basic sociological functions, the Sikh American religious community is similar to mainstream Christianity (and since much of the religious practice is not in English, it is more analogous to immigrant Christian community). They are set apart by the content of practices, language and appearance from the rest of American society which today remains largely Christian. Our Sikh teachers often tried to draw analogies between their faith and practice to make it relatable to our largely Christian sensibilities-this struck me as a powerful example of extending a community’s culture with outsiders in an instructive and non-threatening manner. There was no mention of the superiority of their faith and the inferiority of others. If anything, the Sikh Americans I met want nothing more than to participate in the American experience while retaining their faith tradition as best they can with their available resources.

The violence that occurred in recent weeks shatters the trust bond between local communities of faith and the larger nation-state that supposedly protects the right to assemble and worship freely without fear of persecution. Moreover the violence was not only directed against the Sikh community out of xenophobia but also out of anti-Muslim sentiment, thus revealing more of our collective ignorance and tendency toward stereotyping. As the news brief shows, most of the violence was anti-Muslim. Some of this I discussed previously.

It occurred to me that it makes sense that organizations that advocate for Asian American issues would be most aware of these events. For one, Sikhism originates in south Asia, and the overwhelming majority of Sikhs in America are therefore Asian American. Scholars like those in APARRI have unique access to this faith community as we are all keenly aware of our shared racial status in American society. Similarly, it makes sense that APALC posted these recent anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim events as they help raise awareness of all injustices against Asian Americans regardless of faith. But what is troubling is that more Americans, particularly those who convey news media, do not pick up on these events and raise awareness.

If non-Asian Americans have difficulty relating to these faith communities, consider this from a religious lens. Historical evidence of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism abound, and in the case of the latter we see continued annual reports by the FBI numbering in triple digits. Mormon history for that matter has similarly witnessed collective antipathy. What does our history tell us about the mismatch between our ideals and our behavior? What message does this convey to those who adhere to faiths that are not in the Christian mainstream?

As a speculative illustration, I think of Governor Nikki Haley. Her biography says that she was raised in a Sikh household, I think in South Carolina. I wonder what her experience and that of her family has been like as Sikhs in the Christian South? Did she witness xenophobia, and how did she respond to it? Is her conversion to Christianity in some way tied to her experiences growing up (as opposed to a complete abstract comparative analysis of these two faiths)?

What are the roots of these acts of intolerance? What should minority faith communities do in view of these actions? What ideals does this nation-state want to convey to the world?

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Most Mainline or Most Evangelical? Miscounts and Religious County Membership

August 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In the race to produce relevant researched stories it’s important to know that error sometimes occurs that can radically alter what we know. A few months ago when I saw an announcement that the Association of Religion Data Archives had county-level information on religion, I of course wanted to know the spread for the area I live: McLennan County, TX. What I wanted to figure out was how evangelical was this city, as it seems that most everyone I run into seems to have faith of some sort.  Is this place the most evangelical in the US?

So when I saw this chart, I was really floored. The largest religious tradition in McLennan County was mainline Protestantism- really?

Screenshot from 07/17/12 at ARDA

So since my sociologist’s intuition signaled something might be amiss, I called the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies and had a good conversation with Rich Houseal of the Religious Congregations and Membership Study, the folks who have given us the 2010 US Religion Census. These are the folks that help us to see the general spread of religious adherence through maps and extensive tables. They work very hard at getting the most accurate count of religious groups around the country. In order to do this they essentially reach out to actual religious leaders and ask them for help by volunteering any records they may have of the number of attenders on a typical week or service. Many leaders and organizations share their figures, and some don’t.

As it turns out I was mostly right that there was indeed a weird miscount of the mainline denominations in McLennan County. In the edited changes that are reported in this document nine counties had the wrong figures, and two were in Texas. McLennan County seems to have the largest range of denominations that fit the 236 religious bodies that reported numbers to ASARB. But the miscount affected one religious tradition, and sure enough, it was Mainline Protestantism, specifically the United Methodist Church. If the original report was 109,901 in the Mainline and the figure drops to 22,333, and the only figure that changes is the United Methodists, there was a miscount of 87,568 of Mainliners or United Methodists in this county. So all of a sudden it becomes clear that the Mainline is way smaller than their Evangelical counterparts, as you can see in this screenshot below.

Screenshot taken 8/3/12 from ARDA

However, the Evangelical Protestant number doesn’t change. Where did these 87,000 adherents go? They fall into a category called “unclaimed.” Unclaimed refers to adherents that did not belong to the 236 religious bodies that are recorded by ASARB in a given county.  This could mean for example that there are a lot of independent churches in Waco that have no major denomination and are reasonably small that they don’t bother keeping count nor are all that helpful to those that want to know. In the specific case of the largest historically African-American denominations, they have also not divulged their numbers. So “unclaimed’ could refer to this combination of groups that didn’t respond to ASARB.

So does this mean McLennan County is the most evangelical county? Can’t quite tell, but it’s certainly not the most Mainline.

 

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New Questions About Asian American Buddhists

July 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

Since 1965, the Buddhist population has grown considerably as a result of increased immigration from Asia. Buddhism is not new to the US since many of the early immigrants, largely Japanese and Chinese immigrants brought their Buddhist faith with them. But as a result of racist policies that tinged with some Christian nationalism (e.g “America is Christian not religiously pluralist”) the number of Buddhist Americans never grew at the normal rate like other groups. Since most Asian Americans today are immigrants, and since a large proportion of them are not proficient in English (especially in answering a phone survey) most surveys since 1965 have no accurate recording of the Buddhist population. The new Pew Report on Asian American religions helps bring some of our current understanding of Buddhist religion in perspective. As the report points out, 14% of Asian Americans in the survey currently identify as Buddhist. If the Asian American population is roughly 17 million, that’s nearly 2.4 million Asian Americans. If we add the white Buddhist population (using the Religious Landscape Survey from 2007), that’s an additional 1 million or so (there are smaller numbers of non-white and non-Asian American Buddhists, but even when we combine their figures it would not add up to even half of the white Buddhist constituency). So Asian Americans form the largest fraction of American Buddhists today (about 60% if there are nearly 4 million Buddhists). Note how this differs from the original figures presented in the 2007 Landscape survey which was only administered in English. White Buddhists now make up about 25 to 30% of the American Buddhist population, not 53%.

Within Asian America does any one particular nationality or ethnic group dominate the Buddhist population? Appendix 2 of the report shows some of the religious distributions of the major six nationalities that comprise about 83% of Asian Americans today: Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese. Given that migration patterns have changed, I wondered whether the proportions of the Buddhist population were coming from the same places where this faith tradition is more popular. Pulling the numbers from different sections of the report I came up with the following:

Asian American Buddhists Compared to Country of Origin – Pew Asian American Survey 2012
Nationality % Buddhist % Buddhist in US Asian groups Approximate %Difference
People’s Republic of China 15 15 0
India 1 <1 0
Philippines <6* 1 <5
South Korea 20 6 -14
Vietnam 55 43 -12
Japan 41 25 -16

(Note: the * refers to the catch-all “Other religions” for the Filipino figures. Buddhists were not separated out). Interestingly, Chinese, Indian, and Filipino proportions are roughly in the same range in the US as it is in their home countries. However in the three countries where the percentage of Buddhists is 20% or greater (Vietnam, Japan, Korea), we find that those rates are not sustained in the US ranging roughly around 12 to 16% lower. Notably too, only Vietnamese Buddhists come close enough to nearly 50% of the Buddhist American population. Think about it, there are more white American Buddhists than any one nationality of Buddhists among Asian Americans even though they are proportionally much smaller among whites than among Asian Americans.

That said, we might wonder why there is a lower proportion of Buddhists in the US relative to their expected proportions in the Asian countries from which many of them originate. One explanation is that there is a selective Christian migration from Asia to the US. Whether Buddhism dominates the religious landscape (like in the Vietnamese case) or has a large minority presence (like the Chinese, Japanese and Korean cases), a lower proportion of them are migrating relative to Christians. Indeed another Pew report shows that Christianity tends to be the main religion of the majority of today’s migrants around the world. This is one way of explaining too that the selectivity of Asian immigration today reflects the movement of particular kinds of people rather than a random selection. One of these particularities is religion, where more Christians from Asia tend to immigrate relative to their proportions in these countries.

Another explanation is based on stateside experience: there may also be lower retention among Asian American Buddhists or higher exit. As the report shows while 14% of those Asian Americans surveyed identified as Buddhist, 22% were raised Buddhist. No other religious group (save the unaffiliated category which is the topic of a different blog post) shows this much attrition. Put in two different rates, 54% of those raised Buddhist are currently the same religion but of those who are currently Buddhist, 85% were raised Buddhist. So while a lower proportion remain Buddhist compared to their childhood faith, those that are currently Buddhist largely grew up so. Sociologists describe these fluctuations as religious switching.

So what happens to the 45% of former Buddhists? As the religious retention table shows (p. 52), about 27% now describe themselves as unaffiliated, and another 11% report being Protestant. There’s clearly a lot of movement among those Asian Americans raised in this religious tradition. But in a country that espouses religious freedom and tolerance, why is retention among Buddhists so low? And why are the switches occurring with these two groups?

While there are many explanations for this question, one possibility that jumped out to me was religious assimilation. If assimilation can be described as the process of immigrants fitting into mainstream American society, then religious assimilation is the process of immigrants fitting into the religious mainstream of American society. In our current cultural politics it seems as if there are two dominant “religious parties”, evangelical Protestantism and no religious affiliation. Despite our religious ideals, I wonder if some of the attrition is explained by the minimized presence of Buddhism in the public discussion over the influence of religion in American society which espouses religious tolerance. Judging from media analysis research by Jane Iwamura, it’s clear that Buddhism has a problematic place in the popular imagination of the American public, but is it also subtly marginalized for that very same reason? In other words is Buddhism trivialized by the misrepresentations portrayed in the media as well as the near absence of it in our public discourse over religion? As such, for those who grew up Buddhist, whether in the US or abroad, are more of them inclined to leave their faith tradition (or perhaps privatize it) as a result of being exposed to a culture that either does not take religion seriously or asserts the exclusivist claims of only one faith?

Still another explanation might be tied into ethnic diversity and changes in immigration. Without direct access to the data, I wonder if the aforementioned effects might vary based on the immigration wave in question. For example, Japanese migration to the US has slowed considerably. Therefore more of the Japanese Americans in a sample like this were likely US born and perhaps even third generation Americans or more (recall the internment of World War II). I wonder if Buddhist religious retention is lower for multi-generational Asian American Buddhists compared to those who “just arrived” since the 1970s. This might be evidenced by ethnicity (comparing Japanese with Vietnamese respondents), or if we know the particular generational status of each respondent we could directly test whether this might be the case.

These findings require more investigation and this is where more qualitative research can help us understand how American Buddhists think about their faith and what might these retention figures mean. Want to learn more about American Buddhism? Check out these scholarly works by Wendy Cadge,  Sharon Suh and Carolyn Chen as a start.

 

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