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Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
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Introduction “What does your community need to keep its culture vital and meaningful ?”1 In 1994, I posed the question to a group of elders from Watt Samaki, a Cambodian Buddhist temple in Portland, Maine. We were seated on hundred -pound sacks of rice in the back room of an Asian grocery, sipping soy drinks and passing a paper plate of shrimp crackers. The group was agitated by what they viewed as the rapid deterioration of their community and troubled by a sense of isolation from the local mainstream. They were also a little mystified as to why a white bureaucrat was concerned about their problems, and dubious about the prospects for any action. But I had suggested that there might be some money involved, so they’d agreed to the meeting. In the decade following the U.S. defeat in Indochina, thousands of Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in cities throughout the United States. Portland was a typical destination: a small city with a dominant European American culture, but a relatively liberal attitude regarding Master musician Ngek Chum instructs Pirun Sen on the roneat. Photo by Jim Daniels. 2 / Introduction diversity. Portland viewed itself as a welcoming new home, a place where refugees could settle into the community and build new lives for themselves . Within a few years, thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese newcomers had established the largest Asian enclave in the state. They were followed by new waves of refugees from Afghanistan, Russia, several African nations, and Bosnia. But by the early 1990s, even as the pace of refugee resettlement accelerated, Portland’s Asian communities had entered a state of crisis. Things hadn’t turned out quite as expected: white anti-immigrant backlash had created a series of ugly incidents; parents were alarmed at the directions their children seemed to be headed; and families were choosing to move away. Asian culture in Portland, fragile to begin with, was breaking down. The Vietnamese and Cambodians were striving to make a place for their families . Many of them worked two or even three jobs to get out of the subsidized housing projects and into American-style prosperity—exactly as generations of immigrants had done before them. Finding prosperity wasn’t the problem. Existing social services offered basic English instruction and job training, and in-school English as a Second Language (ESL) education for their children. But access to the welfare state wasn’t their problem. They had lost their roots. The loss of their culture, and the subsequent disintegration of their communities’ sense of cohesion, was the problem. The question “What does your community need to keep its culture vital and meaningful?” elicited blank stares from the assembled elders. Most of us are not accustomed to contemplating such questions. Few people devote much time to ruminating on what our culture even is, much less prescribing what it might need to keep itself healthy. I tried a different tack. “Name the things that you and your grandparents know and care about— that twenty-five years from now nobody will remember any more.” This was more successful. “Our language” was the quick response. “Our children all speak Khmer around the house, but they can’t read or write. If our language disappears, our culture will surely follow.” A chorus of assent. “The soul of Cambodia is etched onto the walls of Angkor,” said another elder. “The celestial dances shown there are the most perfect embodiment of Cambodian heritage. But none of our children knows these dances. They have never seen them performed; they don’t know what they look like. They’re cut off from what it means to be Cambodian.” The meeting erupted into several intense discussions, all in Khmer and unintelligible to me. Occasionally, someone would offer a summary trans- [54.224.124.217] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:24 GMT) Introduction / 3 lation, usually reducing a long speech to something like, “He disagrees!” It was clear that, after fifteen years in Maine, this was the first time any public agency had posed the question of cultural assessment to the community ’s assembled leadership. My inquiry was the beginning of an explicit attempt to bring Cambodian culture into the public realm. To answer it, the elders had to focus their attention first on what it really means to be a Cambodian. What were the traits or practices that most profoundly shaped their identity? Only then could they begin to imagine how that vision could be supported. I came to...