Chenxing Han is a young Asian American Buddhist who never intended to write a book on young Asian American Buddhists. Han, who describes herself as a “1.75-generation Chinese American immigrant,” grew up in a nonreligious household and with few Asian American peers. As a young adult, she adopted Buddhist practice and even pursued a master’s in Buddhist studies from the Graduate Theological Union but was hesitant to talk openly about her racial and religious identity, for fears of being stereotyped as either an “inauthentic” practitioner as a convert or a “superstitious immigrant” as an Asian American.
In 2012, while beginning research for her M.A. thesis, Han decided to let go of her ambivalence about the terms “young,” “Asian American,” and “Buddhist,” in order to get to the bottom of the “two Buddhisms” dichotomy that seemed to thwart nuanced conversations about representation and race in American Buddhism. She set out to ask her fellow Asian American Buddhists directly about their experiences. Casting “as wide a net as possible,” she spoke to any “young adult” of full or partial Asian heritage who responded to a call for interviews, regardless of immigration status or English ability. As Han suspected, these interviews disturbed the perceived divide between “heritage” and “convert” Buddhists, but they also gave many young Buddhists an opportunity to reflect on their racial and religious identities on their own terms for the first time.
Drawing from her academic research, Han’s first book, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic; January 26 , 2021) continues to complicate “two Buddhisms” through its use of memoir, ethnography, and critique. Presenting the voices of her interviewees, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and Buddhisms, the book paints a complicated picture of Asian American Buddhists, who make up two thirds of Buddhists in the United States. Ann Gleig, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Central Florida and the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, spoke to Han about the making of the book, and the importance of letting Asian American Buddhists speak for themselves.
Be the Refuge is partially a memoir, but it’s not just about your journey. Can you say more about how you came to write this book? Back in 2012, I needed a topic for my master’s thesis in Buddhist chaplaincy. Part of my attraction to this topic was born out of a sense of loneliness and confusion. I’d read that among American Buddhists, who are only about 1 percent of the nation’s population, more than two thirds are of Asian heritage. So it confused me why I rarely saw Asian American voices or faces represented in a lot of scholarship that I read or in more mainstream depictions in Western media.
There was that piece, and I was also lonely as a young Asian American Buddhist, because I didn’t grow up in a Buddhist tradition. A lot of the people I met through this project grew up in predominantly Asian Buddhist temple communities or families. That wasn’t a privilege that I had growing up. That got me started on interviewing people, and I thought, “Maybe a few people will talk to me, and then it’ll be enough for an M.A. thesis.” I wasn’t even thinking about writing a book at that point. By the time I talked to 26 people in person, and 63 more people wanted to do email interviews, I realized my motivation had shifted. I felt inspired by respect for these voices. Although I didn’t agree with everyone I talked to, it felt important to put them together on the page and allow other people to hear their voices too.