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160 Chapter 10 The Gender of Practice Some Findings among Thai Buddhist Women in Northern California  Todd LeRoy Perreira Buddhism must be front and center in [any study] about Thai gender because Buddhism . . . is a key component of Thai identity. . . . [It] provides many Thai with a way of viewing the world, a sense of reality, moral standards, and a shared language and metaphors for analyzing their existing life situation. —Penny Van Esterik, Materializing Thailand Thai women who immigrate to America are situated at the crossroads of some of the most significant concerns in global studies of transnational communities and feminist anthropology, including female labor migration across international borders, sex tourism, wealth redistribution, the commodification of women, identity formation, and non-Western models of gender and sexual categories. This chapter considers how Thai women in America renegotiate traditional gender roles to fulfill personal aspirations while advancing the financial and spiritual welfare of their families in Thailand and the United States. I analyze how migrant Thai women engage and finesse models of gender by legitimizing a conception of Buddhist practice that allows them to meet the needs of families on both sides of the Pacific. This study does not speak for all migrant Thai women. Here, the focus is on a broadly construed lower-to-middleclass stratum of migrant women, the majority of whom are married to non-Thais.1 Most of the women who participated in this research are self-employed or work for Thai-owned businesses, typically in the food and hospitality industry. They have not gained the notoriety of the parvenu, but they have achieved a remarkable degree of socioeconomic mobility, personal autonomy, and cultural authority otherwise unavailable to nonmigrant Thai women. In spite of the attention given to the experience of other Southeast Asian migrants, the Thai community has been overlooked by social scientists and historians working in the field of Asian American studies, although recently one anthropologist has managed to conduct research on the role of marriage in identity formation among the Chinese Thai diaspora.2 This oversight means that little is The Gender of Practice 161 known about the actual sociology and experience of Thais in general and Thai women in particular. The data collected here should therefore be considered only a step—indeed a preliminary step—toward rectifying this situation. Given this lacuna, I devote the first part of this chapter to providing a broad demographic pro- file of the Thai community in the United States, with special attention given to the sex-ratio imbalance and high rates of out-marriage in the accompanying figures. The data presented gives us a tentative foothold from which pertinent theoretical questions can begin to be explored regarding the influence of gender and religion on migration. The remainder of the chapter is based largely on fieldwork data and oral interviews that attempt to uncover how attention to the practice of Buddhism by ordinary Thai women, which is centered on an ideology of merit making, can elucidate the contours of their choices—and limitations—and how they negotiate their situation to achieve some fulfillment in the milieu of migration. Thai Immigration to the United States An Overview In 1970, there were fewer than 5,000 people of Thai ancestry living in the United States. Thirty years later, the official count increased thirty-fold: the 2000 federal census reported a figure of 150,283. By the end of 2006, that number increased by another 42,218 individuals, bringing the total number of Thais residing in the United States to 192,501.3 But these official numbers reflect only what we know about legal migrants, not illegal migrants who, if counted, many insiders believe, would more than double the numbers reported by the federal government.4 Mainland (as distinct from peninsular) Southeast Asians are, in general, newcomers to America. Practically all have come as refugees, asylees, and their relatives, including Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese populations. Thais, by contrast, came as immigrants and have a much longer history in the United States. The first Thais arrived in 1829 and settled in North Carolina. Officially naturalized in 1839, they were the first Asians in American history to become U.S. citizens, the first to vote in U.S. elections, and the first to marry white Americans .5 The immigration of Thais can be easily divided into two broad categories: low nonimmigrant inflow (pre-1965) and moderate immigrant inflow (post-1965). The...

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