What is it like to be Asian American and practice in convert Buddhist sanghas? It is to be have the direct experience of a particular kind of racialization over one’s lifetime and simultaneously to now be with the following contradictory flows—reckon with your life and reckon with the particular ways Buddhism is helpful and not helpful. In service of studying this one. What do you know about Asian American history?
In liberalism’s myopic gaze on black and white, Asians are sticky. Stereotyped from crafty and sneaky to mysterious, exotic, etc. And then there is the iconic figure of the monk or all knowing sage. Its a thing now.
The role/position of Asian Americans, in general, is to find oneself a) excluded from a politics that if often focused on white/black race relations, b) be defined not simply by the national political conversations about race but also the present and past currents of international relations (for example, China/U.S. relationships), and c) and, to be over-determined by colonial conceptions… in particular, a fetish toward orientalism.*
I came to zen to look beyond my habitual mind. My own need to take the backward step has been, for the most part a powerful warrant to sit quietly in community. There are days I long for the feeling of my early days. Simple, no frills, expectant. A world of becoming.
There was that night when Katherine was talking about how much Shogaku Shunryu’s students loved him, how they wanted to be like him, how they sometimes tried to talk like him. From my own private Idaho of a zabuton that night, furrowed brow. Eww. Talking like him. I could just imagine. Broken English will surely guarantee enlightenment. Everybody wants the fast track. People would talk fake Japanese to me as a kid, do the buck teeth thing or squinty eye move.
What KT was talking about wasn’t that kind of racism. Still. Fake fortune cookie talk is bullshit. I am Japanese American and I don’t fall for that crap. Actually, the truth is, I can’t fall for that. I did not fault her for it…. there was a lament as she talked suggesting she knew that imitation did not make one a zen teacher. In my mind, I conjured groups of white hippies and the Japanese zen master in 1967. I can’t fall for that fake Asian stuff because I was still being called Jap in 1969. My father was on strike for a Third World College at UC Berkeley in 1969. My parents took me to see MLK in Sproul Plaza. Oh. Is that Hop Sing, squinting at me, dancing on the corner of my zabuton?
As I went from lay to priest, the furrowed brow moments came more frequently, more pauses, more glitches in the backward step. Studying zen, as in reading and understanding sutras, texts, history…. is complex to say the least. Have we done justice to this? In my graduate school days, a group of us would swim—rain or shine—at Strawberry Canyon. The OL student (yes that would be for Oriental Languages) had been at it for years, writing a thesis on one kanji. Really? Yes, really. I was astonished. She explained it wasn’t a matter of translation… it was language studies, history, poetry, literature, philosophy, and gosh knows what else. So naturally, sometimes, I pause on hearing, “Master Dogen says……...”. Did he say that? Did he really mean that? Is that the right translation? What part is our cultural interpretation (or appropriation) and what part is history?
Being Asian American in zen means I reckon with my life in and sometimes against dharma.
More about the fetish thing… in another post.
*Edward Said’s (1978) coined this term to describe views/stereotypes of Arab and Asian societies that enabled the reproduction of empire and domination.
About the pic: you’ve seen this or something like this hundreds of times.