Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience [Course Book ed.] 9781400824175

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
A Note on Translations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Becoming Religious by Becoming American
1. From Beautiful Island (Ilha Formosa) to Beautiful Country (America: Bi-kuo/Mei-guo)
2. Becoming Christian
3. Becoming Buddhist
4. Becoming American Men and Women
5. Cultivating American Saints
Conclusion: Becoming Americans
Appendix: Interview Schedule
References
Index

Citation preview

Getting Saved in America

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GETTING SAVED IN AMERICA

Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience

Carolyn Chen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRE SS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright ” 2008 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chen, Carolyn, 1971Getting saved in America : Taiwanese immigration and religious experience / Carolyn Chen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-11962-5 1. Taiwanese Americans—Religion. 2. Conversion. 3. Christianity. 4. Buddhism. I. Title. BR563.C45C44 2008 200.89c51073—dc22 2007018418 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. f press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents Chen Ching-yih and Hsieh Pi-lien

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CONTENTS

A Note on Translations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Becoming Religious by Becoming American 1

1. From Beautiful Island (Ilha Formosa) to Beautiful Country (America: Bi-kuo/Mei-guo) TAIWANESE IMMIGRATION AND RELIGION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 16 2. Becoming Christian BREAKING TRADITIONS AND MAKING TRADITIONS 38 3. Becoming Buddhist FROM EMBEDDED RELIGION TO EXPLICIT RELIGION 77 4. Becoming American Men and Women OTHERWORLDLY NARRATIVES AND THIS-WORLDLY SELVES 111 5. Cultivating American Saints RELIGIOUS DISCIPLINES OF THE SELF 146 Conclusion: Becoming Americans FROM MIGRANTS TO PILGRIMS 186 Appendix Interview Schedule 203 References 207 Index 227

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A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

I INCLUDE SOME Taiwanese and Mandarin words in the text. The Mandarin word follows the Taiwanese word (Taiwanese/Mandarin). Mandarin words have been transliterated according to pinyin romanization.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EVER SINCE I WAS YOUNG, my parents would always tell me that I have ho mia or good fortune. As a girl, I did not understand this. But now, as an adult, I realize how much of my achievements are due to forces beyond my own merit—to the kindness, generosity, and commitment that others have extended to me. I know I am lucky. For the privilege to pursue the life of the mind and to write this book, I am indebted to so many. I am grateful to the members of Dharma Light Temple and Grace Evangelical Church for opening their communities, their homes, and their lives to me. I will never forget the afternoons I spent in Southern California, sipping numerous cups of tea, and losing myself in their stories. These encounters were personally moving, inspiring and challenging. I can only hope that my work conveys the richness and complexity of their experiences. This book began as a dissertation in the Sociology Department at the University of California Berkeley. My dissertation committee—Ann Swidler, Mike Hout, and Ling-Chi Wang—provided wise guidance and helpful encouragement through the research and writing process. I want to especially thank the chair of my dissertation committee, Ann Swidler, for intellectually mentoring me throughout the graduate program. The ideas in this book are the product of many afternoon conversations with Ann in Barrows Hall. I hold her as a model of the scholarly mentor I hope to be. I want to thank Troy Duster for generously supporting my work as a graduate student even though he was a specialist of neither religion nor immigration. Without the generous funding of several organizations I could not have completed this book. I am grateful to the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, the University Research Grants Committee at Northwestern, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, the Louisville Institute, the Social Science Research Council, the Office of the Dean at U.C. Berkeley, and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale University. In addition, I am indebted to the American Bar Foundation for providing me with a with a quiet space and lakefront view to complete the revisions to this manuscript. Many people were instrumental in the intellectual development of this project. Members of my writing groups at U.C. Berkeley—Tally KatzGerro, Karolyn Tyson, Will Rountree, Scott North, Mary Charlotte Chan-

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dler, Jason McNichol, and Joseph Palacios—helped me formulate and finish the book as a dissertation. I am grateful to my fellow Berkeley-ites— Teresa Gowan, Rachel Sherman, Harold Toro, and Tony Chen—for their friendship and willingness to listen to my endless thoughts on this project. Sheba George, Russell Jeung, and Joe Palacios deserve special mention here. They were my intellectual and spiritual partners through graduate school. I have no doubt that without the fortuitous coincidence of our being in graduate school together, I would not have written this book. This work is the result of their inspiration and intellectual partnership. I am also grateful to members of APARRI, the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative, for their encouragement and comraderie. In particular, I am grateful to Jane Naomi Iwamura, Paul Spickard, David Kyuman Kim, Christopher Chua, and Frank Yamada for their friendship and support. Several scholars have been kind enough to offer critical feedback on all or portions of this book: Robert Wuthnow, Fenggang Yang, Winnifred Sullivan, Wendy Cadge, Nicola Beisel, Wendy Griswold, Dylan Penningroth, Paul Spickard, Jane Naomi Iwamura, and Russell Jeung. Fred Appel, my editor at Princeton University Press, was generous in his guidance of this project. I am grateful to Yuxiao Wu for his research assistance and Hwa Jen Liu for Mandarin translations. A number of friends supported this project by nurturing me with food, laughter, shelter, and love. Always interested and graciously engaging with me about my work, they also happily disengaged me from my work. Thank you—Shana Bernstein, Devah Pager, Leslie McCall, Jeannine Bell, Yvonne Lau, Marta Elvira, Victor Espinosa, Jens Meierhenrich, Hwa Jen Liu, Jaykumar Menon, Dana Hernandez, Edith Li Ross, and Melody Ko—for being true friends. I am particularly grateful to Dylan Penningroth for his unconditional generosity and support. His scholarly commitment, integrity, and humility inspire me. My family was a constant source of support throughout the writing of this work. I will always fondly remember the gracious hospitality of Aunty Bi-le/Lin Mei-li and Aunty Yoshiko/Lin Yoshiko during research visits to Taiwan. My brother, Timmy, happily distracted me from my work. I am grateful to my sister, Jennifer, for always patiently listening to my “latest” thoughts. She now knows more about the religious lives of Taiwanese immigrants than she could ever care to. I am thankful for her nurturing kindness to me. My parents were instrumental in planting and fostering the seeds of my intellectual curiosity in religion. I am fortunate to have a father, James Ching-Yih Chen, who is sociologically minded and found my project every bit as interesting as I did. The encouragement of my mother, Patricia Pi-Lien Hsieh, sustained me through the research and writing. I dedicate this book to my parents.

Getting Saved in America

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Introduction Becoming Religious by Becoming American What is it about going to the United States that makes people religious? —Question posed to me by Mrs. Chou, a woman in Taiwan

THIS BOOK TELLS A STORY of how people become religious by becoming American. The idea for this study developed several years ago during a conversation that I had in Taipei, Taiwan with a lively middle-aged woman named Mrs. Chou.1 Seeing that I was from the United States, she asked me a question about her neighbor, Mr. Ting, who had immigrated with his family to the United States five years ago, but returned to Taiwan for prolonged visits. After immigrating to the United States, Mr. Ting converted to evangelical Christianity, much to the chagrin of his extended family. With much animation, Mrs. Chou recounted to me how after returning to Taiwan, Mr. Ting promptly went through his entire house and cleared it of any remnants of what he called “idolatry.” The first thing he did was to dismantle the family altar, remove the ancestral tablet, and replace it with a plaque that reads, “Christ is the Lord of this house.” He also removed popular Taiwanese religious icons from his home, such as statues of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva, Ma-tsu, and Maitreya Buddha, as well as books on Chinese astrology and martial arts. He then had a Christian pastor come and exorcise the house of evil spirits. Whenever Mr. Ting returns from the United States, Mrs. Chou hears people who are gathered in his home singing hymns. Mr. Ting frequently talks to Mrs. Chou about Christianity and invites her to attend church. Mrs. Chou knows a few Christians in Taiwan but according to her they are not like Mr. Ting. They keep their religion to themselves. “Mr. Ting has become a totally different man,” Mrs. Chou told me and then asked, “What is it about going to the United States that makes people become religious?” A look at the number of Taiwanese Christians in the United States clearly shows that Mr. Ting is not an isolated case. In Taiwan, Christians 1 I have given pseudonyms to protect the identity of the institutions and individuals that participated in my research.

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are a mere 3.9 percent of the population,2 where the majority practices a religion that is a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, and folk religion. In comparison, Christians are approximately 20–25 percent of the Taiwanese population in the United States.3 Most Taiwanese convert to Christianity in the United States. Pastors of Taiwanese churches in the United States estimate that over 60 percent of their congregations are converts to Christianity. Other studies of Chinese churches also report a high number of converts (Guest 2003; Ng 2002; Yang 1999a; Yang and Tamney 2006). In Chinese-concentrated areas of Southern California, Chinese churches are common fixtures in the suburban landscape. The overwhelming majority of these Chinese Christian churches are denominationally independent, evangelical, and theologically conservative (Yang 2002a). But Taiwanese immigrants converting to evangelical Christianity only tells part of the story of Taiwanese immigrant religious experience. No less fervent than Christians are Buddhists, who also experience religious transformation after migrating to the United States. An example of this is Mrs. Lee, a woman who converted to Buddhism after migrating to the United States in 1991.4 In Taiwan Mrs. Lee grew up thinking that Buddhism was old-fashioned and backward, “the religion of my grandparents” as she put it. She associated Buddhism with images of elderly women in the back of temples chanting “meaningless mantras.” It was only after migrating to the United States that she encountered what she calls “true Buddhism.” It is a “pure Buddhism” that she claims is untainted by the superstitions of Chinese traditions—a religion that she finds compatible and resonant with her reality as an educated and scientific person. At one time a self-claimed “society lady,” she now lives a simple life where she devotes several hours a day to Buddhist practice, and keeps her social engagements to a minimum. Like Mr. Ting’s conversion to Christianity, Mrs. Lee’s conversion to Buddhism has caused concern among her family and friends. They wonder whether she has abandoned them for her religious practice that now occupies so much of her time and energy. Like Mrs. Lee, the majority of Taiwanese Buddhists distinguish their current practice of Buddhism from their religion in Taiwan, claiming that 2 “Christians” include Protestants and Catholics. Protestants are 2.6 percent and Catholics are 1.3 percent, of the Taiwanese population. These are the official statistics published as of 2005 by Taiwan’s Government Information Office (see Taiwan Yearbook 2005). 3 There are no precise data on the religious affiliation of Taiwanese immigrants. A more thorough discussion of how I arrive at this number is in chapter 1. 4 I use the word “convert” here because Mrs. Lee and other Taiwanese Buddhists like her claim that they were not Buddhist in Taiwan but became Buddhists only after immigrating to the United States.

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they have become practicing Buddhists after coming to the United States (Chandler 2004; Denton Jones 2003). For example, at Dharma Light Temple, a Taiwanese Buddhist temple where I conducted my fieldwork, an estimated 70 percent of the devotees participated in the practice of “taking refuge” (guiyi san bao), the Buddhist counterpart of Christian baptism, only after migrating to the United States. What is most remarkable is that Taiwanese immigrants are becoming practicing Buddhists in the United States, despite a popular revival of Buddhism in Taiwan for the past thirty years.5 The religious conversions of Taiwanese immigrants like Mr. Ting and Mrs. Lee are part of a broader immigrant experience of revitalized religiosity in the United States. Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have observed the increasing salience of religion to largely European immigrants to the United States (e.g., Bodnar 1985; Dolan 1975, 1985; Smith 1971, 1978). Historian Marcus Lee Hansen (1940) labeled this tendency toward devout piety in earlier immigrants as “immigrant Puritanism.” Immigrants, for example, were among the most avid supporters of nineteenth-century abstinence movements (Dolan 1975, Brady 1976). Studies by sociologists show how religion plays a more vital role in some of the lives of more recent non-European immigrant groups, for example, Dominicans (Levitt 2001), Indians (Williams 1988; Fenton 1988), Koreans (Hurh and Kim 1990; Min 1992), Chinese (Yang 1999a), Thais (Cadge 2005; Numrich 1996), and Cubans (Tweed 1997). And like the Taiwanese, several groups are converting to evangelical Christianity in significant numbers, such as Koreans (Min 2005), Chinese (Abel 2006; Hall 2006; Yang 1999a), Haitians (Richman 2005), Cambodians (Douglas 2005), and Latinos (Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda 2003). Religion is so significant to American life that Will Herberg (1960) claimed that while later generations would eventually shed their ethnic and cultural identities, they would continue to maintain their religions. Religion has been, and continues to be, integral to the immigrant experience in the United States. On one level this study asks the specific question of why and how do middle-class immigrants like the Taiwanese become religious in the United States. On a more general level, this study asks, how do immigrants become Americans? From the outset, I was interested in what dif5 Taiwanese Christians mark their conversion as the moment that they commit their lives to Jesus Christ. Because conversion for evangelical Christians is designated by the prayer to Jesus Christ to be one’s personal lord and savior, they can often identify the time and place that they became Christian. To Buddhists, on the other hand, this is less clear. Rather than a precise moment in which they started to believe, Buddhists describe the beginning of their Buddhist faith as a time that they started to “study” or “practice” Buddhism.

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ferent religions offer to people who have been uprooted and are recreating their lives anew in the United States. In particular, when Taiwanese immigrant evangelical Christians spoke of being saved, or Taiwanese immigrant Buddhists spoke of awakening the Buddha-self, I was interested in how these profound existential experiences manifested themselves sociologically in the reconstruction of themselves as individuals and as communities in the United States. My sense was that if a significant number of Taiwanese immigrants were converting to Buddhism and Christianity in the United States, then certainly these profound experiences of religious transformation—accepting Jesus Christ or awakening the Buddha-self— were as much about otherworldly concerns as they were about making sense of their new lives in the world they inhabited in the here and now— the United States. Two main themes emerged in my research: How do immigrants reconstruct new communities in the United States? And how do immigrants reconstruct new selves in the United States? For immigrants, migration to the United States disrupts existing networks of community and challenges the moral traditions that once sustained them. In particular, for Taiwanese, migration to the United States severs critical structures of community, kinship, and ritual upon which Confucian moral traditions are based. In this book I explore how immigrants establish new sources of community and moral traditions in the United States in the face of these challenges. Communities and traditions from Taiwan not only sustained social relations, but created a particular kind of self. The individual-oriented culture of the United States frequently clashes with more collective traditions of selfhood from non-European societies. Furthermore, Taiwanese who enjoyed a particular level of status in Taiwan must now adjust to being foreigners and racial minorities in the United States. Faced with these new American social realities, immigrants must reconstruct coherent selves. When structures and traditions that sustained a particular sense of self are now challenged by competing traditions and different structural realities, immigrants must find the resources to build new narratives, identities, and practices of selfhood. This book argues that for Taiwanese immigrants these are the challenges of becoming American and that religion—especially religious conversion—plays a pivotal role in the way they understand, define, and address those challenges. Scholars have examined the ways that immigrants become incorporated into American society through key social institutions, such as the economy (Waldinger 1986, 1990), education (Rumbaut and Cornelius 1995; Portes and Rumbaut 2006), and the political system (Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001; Jones-Correa 2001; Portes and Rumbaut 2006). Scholars are able to measure this process by looking at rates of political participation, test scores, income levels, and employment

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records. What is often overlooked is how immigrants become Americans in ways that are not so quantifiable or easily observed on the outside— the conversions that occur on the level of habit and the unconscious. For example: the changes in the taken-for-granted and unconscious rules that regulate social relations; the transformations in the moral sensibilities that tell us who we are and who we ought to be; the shifts in daily habits and practices that sustain new ways of being in the United States. An examination of religion and particularly religious conversion gets at these processes of deep transformation. Here I use William James’ poetic definition of conversion (1961, 165) as a transformation in one’s habitual center of energy. To James, conversion is not merely a change in consciousness—beliefs, practices, or identity—but also a change in habit, the grounded unconsciousness of a person. This book argues that religion remakes Taiwanese immigrants into Americans. Religious conversion to Buddhism and evangelical Christianity offers new moral vocabularies, institutional structures, and ethical traditions that reconstruct community, identity, and self in the United States. Men and women encounter different challenges to their selfhood in the United States and use religion to reconstruct different gendered selves more consonant with their lived realities in the United States. Religious practices oriented toward transforming the self instill techniques of moral self-discipline that, I argue, ground individuals during migration’s “unsettling” times. Christianity and Buddhism provide Taiwanese immigrants with new narratives, practices, and habits for remaking themselves as Americans in the United States.6 In important, but often overlooked ways, Taiwanese immigrants become American by becoming religious.

RELIGION AND IMMIGRATION Scholars have long observed the significance of religion to immigrants and explained it by focusing on two functions of immigrant religion in the United States—facilitating adaptation and preserving ethnicity. Religions often play a seminal organizational role in immigrant communities (e.g., Chen and Jeung 2000; Levitt 2001). Whereas religious institutions may be solely centers of worship in the home country, religious institutions serve a multifunctional purpose for immigrants in the United States (Yang and Ebaugh 2001a; Warner 2000). Religious institutions are centers of 6 This is not to say that Christianity or Buddhism by nature are American. Indeed the point of comparing the two religions is to show that these are two very different religions and yet they produce similar results. What Christianity and Buddhism do share is that as religions they hold the potential for profound transformations in infinite contexts. What is

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religious worship and educational, cultural, social, political, and social service activities. Immigrant religious congregations offer a wide array of formal and informal social services that facilitate the material, social and psychological adjustment of their members to American society (e.g., Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Hurh and Kim 1990; Warner and Wittner 1998; Yang 1999a). For example, immigrant religious institutions may offer English classes and information on citizenship, taxes, employment, and the like. Informal networks link immigrants to social and health services and job opportunities. More established immigrants in the congregation inform newer immigrants about local practical knowledge, such as where to buy a phone card, how to enroll children in school or how to register a car. Second, sociologists explain the attraction of religion to immigrants by pointing to the ethnic function that religion plays in American society. Because religion is voluntarily organized (as opposed to state-organized) in the United States, it is a structurally conducive way for Americans to form groups and build communities. In a multicultural American society, religion has always been a natural way for immigrants to mediate their differences and stake out their identities. R. Stephen Warner (1993, 1060) argues that “religion is a refuge for cultural particularity” in the United States because the constitution has always protected the freedom and autonomy of religious association. In this pluralistic religious landscape, groups use religion to build solidarities and identities (Greeley 1972; Smith 1978; Smith 1998; Warner 1993; Williams 1988). Immigrants use religious institutions to collectively reproduce their traditions and customs among those within and signify their difference to those without. This ethnic concern is all the more heightened for immigrants who wish to preserve their inherited traditions in the new land. Immigrants are attracted to the ethnic fellowship and belonging that their religions provide. Immigrant religious congregations are spaces where people of shared ethnicity gather to speak their own language, eat their native foods, celebrate their customs, and holidays (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000). The buildings of immigrant congregations often resemble the architecture from their homeland and are a physical reminder of their ethnicity. Furthermore, immigrants use religion to pass on their language, traditions, and values to the second-generation (Chen 2006; Joshi 2006; Kurien 1998; Yang 1999a). A growing literature on transnational religion also points out how religions connect immigrants to their countries of origin (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002; Guest 2005; Levitt 2001, 2003; Menjivar 1999). interesting in this particular case is how immigrants capitalize upon these potentialities in the unique social location of the United States.

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Religion as Transformation These studies are very important in explaining why immigrants are drawn to religion in the United States, but they still did not fully answer Mrs. Chou’s question “What is it about going to the United States that makes people religious?” Immigrants were attracted to religion in the United States for instrumental reasons to build networks, make friends, find support, and preserve traditions. But religion (even inherited religions) did something else in the process—it transformed immigrants. Immigrants used religion to recreate themselves and their communities anew in the United States. Quite literally, the Buddhists and Christians that I studied were “born again” and “awakened” to new selves and new communities through their religious experiences. Immigrants may gravitate toward immigrant religions because of the ethnic fellowship, but from what I observed, being religious was also not easy, and required sacrifice and commitment. As Mrs. Chou printed out, “awakening” to a new self and new community could mean casting off old ones. Becoming Christian or Buddhist was not the same as joining another ethnic organization. For several Buddhists and Christians, their religion created tension between them and their spouses, parents, and in-laws. Because Protestant Christianity prohibits ancestral veneration, Taiwanese converts to evangelical Christianity risked severing family relationships through conversion. And indeed, many suffered these consequences in the act of conversion. Buddhists, who were rediscovering an inherited tradition, similarly expressed feelings of social ostracism from family and friends who considered Buddhism backward and superstitious. Religions may help immigrants maintain some ethnic traditions, but they also radically transform others. As a result of their religious commitments, Christians and Buddhists changed their daily habits—what they did, what they read, what they ate, who they interacted with, who and what they obeyed. Religion made demands on these immigrants, and often quite rigorous ones. Half of the Buddhists I interviewed gave up meat and became vegetarian. Some respondents spent less time developing their careers to cultivate their religious practice. Buddhists now spent free time volunteering at the temple. Others engaged in rigorous and time-consuming daily practices of sutra study, chanting, bowing, and meditation. Several had taken the Bodhisattva vow, where they were scarred on the head or forearm with three incense burns. Christianity also made demands on its faithful. Protestant Christians could not longer participate in “sinful” rituals of ancestral veneration that are so fundamental in Taiwanese tradition. Church members now spent their free time

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serving the church. Not only demanding of their time, the church encouraged members to tithe—give 10 percent of their income to the church. When Taiwanese immigrants talked about “renouncing the self” or “submitting the self,” they described a force that moved them to do things beyond their ordinary habits, inherited traditions, and self-interests. When Christians sang hymns and Buddhists chanted in unison they ritually embodied this force. In their presence, I, too, felt its palpable tangibility. As practicing Christians and Buddhists, they became different persons—new persons. They acted out the directives of something much larger than themselves, an experience with what Emile Durkheim calls the sacred, those things that are “set apart and forbidden.” The Sacred as a Sociological Concept For both Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, it is the quality of the sacred that makes religion particularly “religious.” For example, magic may also involve supernatural powers or concern the afterlife. The relationship between magician and client, however, is strictly business, based upon the exchange of a service or product between the two. Religion is different because it involves a moral community. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim writes that religion “binds men who believe in them (religion) to one another and unites them into the same group” (42). Similarly for Max Weber, religion creates a “cosmos of obligation” among individuals that magic does not. From a sociological perspective, it is easier to apprehend the sacred when we turn around the functional question that sociologists of religion ask—“what does religion do for individuals?”—to ask instead, “what do individuals do for religion?” Religious institutions do many things that secular institutions can do, for example, serve as voluntary associations that facilitate communal life, strengthen cultural bonds, assimilate newcomers, and demarcate ethnic boundaries. However, few secular organizations possess the moral authority to command the level of commitment and sacrifice that religion does from individuals. Religion, because of its sacred power, makes ethical demands that other organizations cannot. For example, the Rotary Club cannot ask people to sell their possessions and live in poverty. Most secular institutions lack the legitimate authority to make the demands that religions do. Taiwanese immigrants will not risk severing their relationships with their families to join an ethnic association like the Taiwanese American Citizens League. But, they will do it to become Christian. It is the sacred that makes people sacrifice their personal interests and utterly reorganize their lives for something outside of themselves. It is this power of the sacred that makes religion particularly “religious.”

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Migration and Religious Experience There are certain moments when people experience the sacred more intensely, or put differently, when religion becomes more powerful. For example, religion was taken for granted in Taiwan as the Taiwanese immigrants themselves pointed out. They practiced their religion as habit, without consciousness or deliberation. But in the United States, the Taiwanese I studied took great pains to be “practicing” Buddhists and Christians. They consciously reorganized their lives around religion. The sacred, I argue, becomes more powerful during periods of transition, or what Ann Swidler (2001) calls “unsettled” times. During such times, the sacred gains the power to transform individuals and societies. As Swidler puts it, “When people are learning new ways of organizing individual and collective life, practicing unfamiliar habits until they become familiar, then doctrine, symbol, and ritual directly shape their action” (99). Migration, no doubt, is one of these moments. It is no coincidence that the experience of migration is critical to the spiritual practice of several religious traditions. The Buddha’s first step to enlightenment was the renunciation of domesticity and the embracement of a permanent state of homelessness. In the Hebrew scriptures, God calls Abraham (then Abram) to leave the land of his kin, and to build a great nation in a new and strange land. In all of the great world religions, the spiritual practice of pilgrimage invokes the sacred by deliberately inducing the experience of migration. Migration, or leaving what is familiar, draws religious questions to the forefront and elicits an openness for change that may not exist in the normal course of life. By disrupting the ordinary patterns of life, migration challenges people’s assumptions about who they are and how they fit into their social worlds. Migration calls into question the very core of one’s being, questions about belonging and identity, self and community. During these times of flux, taken-for-granted traditions and vague definitions will not suffice. Conversion is one human response to disruption and transition. All pilgrims may be “migrants,” but not all migrants are pilgrims. Migration, however, makes some people pilgrims. This book is about this group of people—migrants who become pilgrims. These are, so to speak, the lost that are found. They are people, who, through their migration experiences, encountered the power of the sacred and, in the parlance of evangelical Christians, become “saved.” Salvation If migration is on the one hand an experience of losing a given reality, it is also an experience of finding a new reality. If migration is the experience

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of destroying one mode of existence, it is also the experience of building a new one. Salvation offers something particularly compelling to the immigrant, who, either by choice or by force, now faces a new world. If the experience of migration brings immigrants to question their former ways of being, then the experience of religious salvation offers a transformative program to become new beings. Max Weber categorized Buddhism and Christianity, along with Islam and Judaism among others, as “salvation religions.” These are salvation religions because they pose an alternative transcendent and perfect reality to save humans from the fallen and imperfect world that they inhabit. Unlike magic, salvation religions approach salvation in a systematic and organized fashion. Not only do salvation religions envision a radically different world order, but they also possess the level of systematic coherence to rationally reorganize individuals and institutions around a single ethical principle. Weber saw that salvation religions have a potential for conversion, the transformation of habits, which other ideological and symbolic systems may not. In the words of historian Timothy Smith, “systems of religious thought . . . can help break the chains of custom by making new and revolutionary demands, dissolving myths, and declaring a transcendent ethic not identifiable with any existing society or social institution” (1978, 1157). Migration and salvation alike embody the dialectical forces of dying and birthing, destructing and reconstructing. Only after rejecting his worldly family, wealth, and identity, did the Buddha awaken to a new form of community, the Sangha, and a new form of selfhood, the Buddha, based on an otherworldly reality. In a similar spirit, Christ commanded the faithful to discard their old selves and bonds of kinship when he declared, “For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be those of his own household’” (Matthew 10:35– 39). In place of the old, Christ offered a new “born-again” self, and a new kinship of the church based on an ethic of love. Both Buddha and Christ rejected this world for another, yet the new terms of salvation would have monumental consequences for how the faithful live their lives in this world.

THE STUDY In this book I ask how religious salvation transforms Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. Most often, the quest for otherworldly salvation begins as a search for solutions to the problems that individuals en-

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counter in this world. As Weber writes, “the idea of ‘salvation,’ pregnant with consequences, still has the elementary rational meaning of liberation from concrete ills” (1978, 437). The Buddha’s search for enlightenment was a response to the problems of human suffering that he observed once he left the sheltered walls of his privileged life. Christ attracted the masses through his ministry of physical healing. No doubt his promise of establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth also addressed the concerns of his fellow Jews as peoples dominated by the Roman Empire. Similarly for Taiwanese immigrants, the religious world of signs and symbols are grounded in the mundane world of surviving and thriving in America. The particular shape that salvation takes depends upon the social contexts of the saved. Methods and Sample To understand the social context of Taiwanese immigrant religious transformation, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California from January 1999 to March 2001. Due to the high influx of Taiwanese immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, Southern California, and in particular the San Gabriel Valley, has become the largest and most vibrant Taiwanese community in the United States. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that 22 percent of all Taiwanese immigrants arrive intending to reside in Los Angeles County alone, not to mention the surrounding areas such as Orange County where a fair number of Taiwanese settle. I conducted participant-observation in two Taiwanese immigrant religious institutions.7 What I call “Grace Evangelical Church,” is a Taiwanese church that is evangelical and denominationally independent, like most Chinese churches (Yang 2002a). “Dharma Light Temple,” is a Mahayana Buddhist temple that incorporates both Pure Land and Chan traditions, similar to most Chinese Buddhist organizations. I also observed the services of other local Taiwanese and Chinese immigrant churches and temples. I discuss Dharma Light Temple, Grace Evangelical Church, and the larger context of Southern California’s Taiwanese immigrant community in more detail in chapter 1. I also conducted in-depth interviews among fifty Taiwanese immigrants—twenty-five Christian converts and twenty-five Buddhists (see 7 At Dharma Light Temple and Grace Evangelical Church, I participated in a variety of capacities. I attended religious services, religious education classes, and retreats. I was a volunteer at the temple and helped in the kitchen, the office, and in various other places where they needed me. At the church, I participated in weekly visitations to members’ homes. Because I speak English fluently, both the temple and church recruited me in their religious education programs for the youth, where I served as a youth camp counselor.

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appendix for interview questions). Each interview was two to three hours in length. I collected my sample through snowball sampling. The interview respondents were members of different Chinese churches and temples in Southern California, however, many attended Grace Evangelical Church and Dharma Light Temple. Although some came as early as 1965 and others as late as 1997, the majority of immigrants in my sample came in the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were in their twenties and thirties. This is representative of the larger Taiwanese immigration pattern to the United States. Respondents ranged in age from thirty-five to fifty-five. All but two were married. One woman was single, the other divorced. Over 50 percent of the women were college educated and 27 percent had advanced degrees. Over 80 percent of the men were college educated and 55 percent had advanced degrees. My sample is slightly more educated than the general Taiwanese immigrant population. All men in my sample were employed. Half were skilled professionals who work outside of the mainstream economy, and the other half work in small businesses within the ethnic economy. Half of the women in my sample worked outside of the home. Among these, half were professionals working in the mainstream economy and the other half within the ethnic economy. In addition to the fifty in-depth interviews, I interviewed monastics, pastors, and religious lay leaders from Dharma Light Temple, Grace Church, and other Chinese religious congregations in the Southern California area. I also interviewed Taiwanese immigrants with no religious affiliation whatsoever. In the fall of 1999, I made a brief visit to Taiwan, where I observed religious practice and interviewed religious clergy and laypeople. The Taiwanese “Taiwanese” refers to all persons from Taiwan, and includes “Mainlanders” (waishengren) who immigrated to Taiwan from China after 1949 as well as “ethnic Taiwanese” (benshengren), the Han Chinese who came to Taiwan before 1949. Many studies lump Taiwanese with Chinese. I distinguish the two, however, because Taiwan’s unique history over the last century has formed a Taiwanese population whose economic, political, and cultural experiences are distinct from other Chinese immigrants. As I discuss in chapter 1, Taiwanese immigrants in the United States tend to be more educated, affluent, and suburban than other Chinese. Furthermore, Taiwanese can be more traditionally Confucian than Chinese from China for a multitude of reasons, including the distinct political and economic systems of Taiwan and China (Whyte 2004). At times I include

INTRODUCTION

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Taiwanese among “Chinese.” Unless I specify their country of origin, this refers to all Han Chinese, including persons from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and so on. Taiwanese immigrants, while having their own institutions and ethnic economy, also participate in organizations, institutions, economies, and cultural practices that are based on a shared ethnicity with other Chinese. In these instances, I use the term Chinese rather than Taiwanese. Studying the Religion of New Immigrants through the Taiwanese The case of Taiwanese immigrant religious conversion is a lens to understand the experiences of contemporary immigrants that have entered the United States since the Immigration Act of 1965.8 As an immigrant group from Asia that is largely middle-class, educated, and non-Christian, Taiwanese immigrants represent a new and increasing type of immigration that differs in region, class, and religion from earlier immigration to the United States (Chang 2006; Chee 2005; Chen 1992; Ng 1998). Whereas earlier free immigrant groups came from Europe, contemporary immigration draws largely from countries in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa. Past European immigrants were largely working-class and built their ethnic enclaves in urban areas. Today’s immigrants represent a far more heterogeneous class population that includes low-skilled workers, but also educated professionals (e.g., Espiritu 2003; George 2005; Kanjanapan 1995; Liu and Cheng 1994) who tend to reside in suburban settings (Fong 1994; Yang 1999a). Unlike nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants, who came from Christian backgrounds, contemporary post-1965 immigrants are religiously diverse and come introducing their Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam to the American religious landscape (Eck 2001; Wuthnow 2005). In sum, contemporary immigration is a different experience than immigration in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. The immigrant population itself is different, and so is the United States they enter. If religion is a way that humans work out the problems that they face in daily life, as I claim it is, then the shape of religion varies significantly according to context. While all immigrants may face similar challenges of uprooting, migration, and settlement, how they experience these is necessarily shaped by their particular social locations and the resources they can bring to bear. 8 The 1965 amendments to American immigration policy abolished the national origins quota system. In place of nationality and ethnic considerations, immigration policies substituted a system based primarily on reunification of families and needed skills.

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INTRODUCTION

More recently scholars have devoted attention to the topic of religion among contemporary immigrant groups (e.g., Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Haddad, Smith, and Esposito 2003; Leonard et al. 2005; Warner and Wittner 1998). With rare exceptions (Kwon 2003), book-length studies do not compare different religious traditions within the same immigrant group. Using Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese immigrants as a case study, this book systematically compares how migration shapes religious experiences and how different religions shape migration experiences within the same group. A study of Taiwanese immigrants’ religious lives is well-situated to compare how contemporary immigrants use Christianity, the American majority religion, and Buddhism, a minority Asian religion, to work out the challenges of adjusting to middle-class life in the United States. This book also demonstrates how immigrants of Western and Asian religious traditions face different issues in the processes of becoming American and staying Taiwanese. And finally, a study of Christians and Buddhists in the same Taiwanese community reveals the religious diversity within ethnic groups and shows how intragroup dynamics influence immigrant religious experience.

ORGANIZATION OF BOOK The book begins in chapter 1 by examining the social, political, economic, and religious contexts that shape Taiwanese immigration and religious experience in Southern California. I describe my fieldsites, Grace Evangelical Church and Dharma Light Temple, in more detail and situate them within these larger contexts. Chapter 2 illustrates how conversion to Christianity provides a moral and institutional basis for the formation of communities in the United States. A confluence of factors, including immigrant needs and church marketing strategies, make Christianity a compelling choice for Taiwanese immigrants. The practical need for community leads to a transformation in the symbols that Taiwanese immigrants use to make sense of their new realities. Chapter 3 examines how religious meanings, identities, and practices of inherited religious traditions are transformed in the United States. I claim that Buddhism shifts from embedded religion to explicit religion in the United States. This chapter show the growing presence of Christianity in the ethnic community challenges Buddhist identity and practice. Buddhist religious experience transforms from practice to belief and from tradition to choice as Buddhists interact with Christians within the immigrant community. The Buddhist case shows how religious pluralism

INTRODUCTION

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within the ethnic community drives the revitalization and redefinition of an inherited religious tradition. Chapter 4 addresses how men and women use religious models of authentic selfhood to reconstruct new selves in the United States. Gendered immigration experiences profoundly shape how men and women experience and articulate their new, true selves. Conversion narratives are ways, I argue, for men and women to work out the contradictions between traditional gender expectations and the realities of their lives in the United States. Distinct understandings of salvation and religious community among Buddhists and Christians shape how Taiwanese immigrants situate their “true selves” in the world. Chapter 5 shows how Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity offer “salvation ethics” that reorganize the lives of religious converts. Religious practices are techniques of moral self-discipline that replace the governing structures of Confucian tradition, community, and family that have been weakened in the “morally disordering” experience of immigration. The conclusion discusses how Taiwanese immigrants become American by becoming religious. I show how distinct religious traditions, immigration experiences, and class interact to shape immigrant religion. Furthermore, I illustrate how the religious experiences of Taiwanese immigrants in Southern California reflect more general patterns in American religion.

1 From Beautiful Island (Ilha Formosa) to Beautiful Country (America: Bi-kuo/Mei-guo) TAIWANESE IMMIGRATION AND RELIGION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

During the recent 20-year immigration period, Taiwanese Americans have become one of the “model minorities.” —From a Taiwanese American Heritage Committee brochure

ON APRIL 24, 1999, over two thousand eager Taiwanese Americans gathered at Pasadena City College in Southern California to support one of Taiwan’s presidential candidates, Chen Shui-Ben.1 Recognizing the importance of overseas Taiwanese financial and electoral support to his campaign,2 Chen visited Southern California—home of the largest Taiwanese community in the United States. After the performance of several church choirs singing traditional Taiwanese folk songs, and speeches by several local leaders extolling his virtues, an excited and hoarse Chen arrived on stage. The crowd went wild, chanting “Ah-biah,” his nickname in Taiwanese, for ten minutes before he could begin his speech. In a characteristically Taiwanese manner, he assured the supporters of his humility; his campaign for presidency was not motivated by an egoistic desire for power. Rather, he told the audience, the presidency was the “cross” he had to bear, an awesome and heavy burden that he was willing to carry. This, of course, is not the first time that politicians have used the image of the cross to describe their mission. But surely most of those leaders represent Christian populations or are Christian themselves. Why would Chen Shui-Ben refer to the cross when Christians are only 3.9 percent of the Taiwanese population? 1 I use this chapter title because Taiwan is commonly called “Formosa,” in reference to the Portuguese name for the island, “Ilha Formosa,” meaning beautiful island. “America” translates to “beautiful country” in Chinese. 2 Taiwan recognizes dual citizenship and extends voting rights to overseas Taiwanese, however, they must return to Taiwan to vote.

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This example illustrates both the continuity and transformation in Taiwanese Americans. Their support of Chen Shui-ben’s presidential campaign shows that Taiwanese immigrants maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity and political involvement even in diaspora. But Chen Shui-Ben’s rhetorical reference to the Christian cross in a secular political rally in Southern California suggests that these overseas Taiwanese are different from those in the homeland. Taiwanese Americans have adopted new icons, in particular, religious icons. To reach out to some of them, he has to speak their language. In this case, it was Christian language. This chapter discusses the social, political, economic, and religious contexts that shape Taiwanese immigration and religious experience in Southern California. Taiwanese immigration is a product of shifting geopolitical and economic forces in the post–World War II era. American labor needs and foreign policies have created a distinctly educated, highly skilled population of Taiwanese Americans. Capitalizing on mass Chinese emigration from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Chinese developers have drawn Chinese to Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, transforming it into a mecca for Chinese economic, cultural, and religious activity. My fieldsites, Grace Evangelical Church and Dharma Light Temple, illustrate how immigration patterns and trends in American and Taiwanese religion have shaped the religious experience of Taiwanese in Southern California.

FORMOSA Taiwan was named Ilha Formosa, or “beautiful island,” by Portuguese sailors in the late sixteenth century. Formosa is a mountainous island ninety-six miles east of the South China coast. The island is a mere 36,000 square kilometers, approximately the size of the Netherlands. With a population of twenty-three million people, it is second only to Bangladesh as the most densely populated place on earth. Today Taiwan is best known to Americans for two things. The first is its “miracle economy” that has transformed Taiwan from an agrarian society to a postindustrial society in a mere fifty years—what took the United States and Great Britain two hundred years to achieve. The second is its ambiguous political status as either a sovereign nation or a renegade province of China that has generated endless tension between China and the United States. Its strategic location less than one hundred miles from China has made it indispensable to American foreign interests in Asia. Taiwan’s former claim to be the legitimate government of China, and now, independent from China, make it a perpetual thorn in China’s side. The legacy of Taiwan’s political history forms the backdrop for contemporary Taiwanese emigration. The people of Taiwan were ruled briefly by

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the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch from the late sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Beginning in 1662, Taiwan came under Chinese rule, first under the warlord Chen Ch’eng-kung (or Koxinga) for twenty years, and then under Manchu China for more than 250 years. After China’s loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese war, China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. Taiwan was ruled by Japan for nearly fifty years. After World War II, the Allies placed Taiwan under Chinese control. At the time, China was embroiled in a civil war between the Nationalists or the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai Shek, and the Communists under Mao Zhedong. In defeat, Chiang Kai Shek and roughly two million mainland Chinese, also known as “Mainlanders,” retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949. Chiang and his troops intended to temporarily recuperate in Taiwan before reclaiming Mainland China from the Communists. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States poured military and economic aid into neighboring Taiwan to prevent communist domination in the region. During this time, the United States, along with the United Nations, recognized the Kuomingtang in Taipei, and not the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing, as the legitimate government of China. All of this changed in the 1970s, when the United Nations switched and recognized the PRC and not the Kuomingtang as the state of China, and the United States began normalizing relations with communist China. This sudden drop in diplomatic status created a sense of political uncertainty that has motivated large-scale emigration from the island since then.3 For over forty years, the Kuomingtang controlled Taiwan under an authoritarian military state. The Kuomintang did little to warm the hearts of the ethnic Taiwanese, or the pre-1949 Han Chinese, who comprise over 70 percent of the population. The Kuomingtang repressed the usage of Taiwanese, or the local Minnan dialect, barred ethnic Taiwanese from important political positions, and killed people expressing political dissent. These repressive practices heightened tension between the ethnic Taiwanese and Mainlanders. The Kuomingtang finally loosened its iron grip on Taiwan in the 1980s. With the ending of martial law, the legalization of oppositional parties, and the lifting of media control in the late 1980s, Taiwan peacefully transitioned from an authoritarian state to a democratic society (Clough 1998; Gold 1998). Despite or perhaps because of its suppression of civil society, the Kuomingtang helped to grow Taiwan’s “miracle economy” (Aspalter 2001; Gold 1986). With the backing of tremendous American foreign aid, the Kuomingtang built an impressive economic infrastructure. In the 1950s 3 For additional reading on Taiwan’s history, see Tse-Han Lai, Ramon H. Meyers, and Wou Wei’s (2001) A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947; George H. Kerr’s (1965) Formosa Betrayed; and Murray A. Rubinstein’s (2001) A New History.

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the Kuomingtung instituted major land reform, leading to increased agricultural productivity (Rubinstein 1994). Agricultural profits generated the capital to finance labor intensive manufacturing industries beginning in the 1960s and throughout. As Western industrialized nations were beginning to outsource manufacturing, Taiwan was perfectly poised to meet their demands. By the 1970s, Taiwan had transformed into an export economy specializing in labor-intensive industries. Today Taiwan’s economy is concentrated in technology-intensive and service-oriented industries, like most Western industrialized countries. As I will discuss, Taiwan’s economic growth spurt, coupled with its political uncertainty, has produced an educated and skilled class of potential e´migre´s who meet the labor needs of the postwar American economy.

TAIWANESE IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the possibility for large-scale Taiwanese immigration by removing previous policies restricting Asians. It increased the annual quota of Chinese immigrants (this includes Taiwanese) to twenty thousand, included a provision for the reunification of immediate family members, and established a system of preferences for individuals possessing scientific and technical skills. The American attempt to curb communist proliferation around the globe heavily influenced this seismic shift in immigration policy (Ong and Liu 1994). Under international pressure to live up to its image as the champion of the free world, especially with the racist contradictions of the Civil Rights movement mounting internally, the United States had to reconsider its former immigration policies barring those of nonwhite descent. Cold War anxieties motivated the United States to establish a preference system for immigrants with scientific and technical skills to bolster the nation’s scientific armor against the Soviets (ibid.). American political and economic concerns coincided neatly with Taiwanese desires for political security and economic advancement in the postwar era. Before the 1970s, the majority of immigrants from Taiwan were elite graduate students from middle class backgrounds.4 After taking control of Taiwan, the Kuomingtang implemented a widespread campaign to modernize and expand the educational system. This program invested heavily in basic education and vocational schooling, however, leaving those seeking advanced degrees to study abroad. Because of better eco4 Although most early graduate students came from well-off families, the majority funded their education through fellowships and assistantships, according to a survey of students from 1960–79 (Yao 1981).

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nomic opportunities in the United States, most students remained after completing their degrees—contributing to the “brain drain” of Taiwan. Students who had entered the country on an F-1 (student) visa adjusted their status to permanent residency based on the category of occupational preferences. Since the 1950s, nearly 80,000 Taiwanese have pursued graduate education in the United States, and only 20 percent have returned to Taiwan (Chang 1998; O’Neil 2003). The number of Taiwanese who immigrate through occupation preference categories is quite high compared to other groups. Along with the Phillipines, India, China, and Iran, Taiwan is one of the top countries sending professionals to the United States (Kanjanapan 1995). For example, in 1989 42 percent of Taiwanese immigrated to the United States under occupational categories reserved for highly skilled individuals and their families. By 2004, this proportion decreased to approximately 30 percent, but is still significant. The brain drain has slowed and partially reversed since the mid-1980s. Two things have attracted highly skilled overseas Taiwanese back to Taiwan—its booming economy, particularly in the high-tech sector, and new state policies that encourage the return of professionals (Chen 1989). Since the mid-1970s, they majority of Taiwanese immigrants have established permanent residency through the preference category of family reunification. Highly educated Taiwanese who had immigrated during the 1960s and early 1970s sponsored their family members—usually siblings—leading to a pattern of chain migration. These immigrants come from more diverse class and educational backgrounds than the earlier immigrants. Undocumented immigration is not typically associated with Taiwanese, but it also occurs among Taiwanese immigrants. Unlike the popular stereotype of undocumented immigrants who are smuggled across the border, undocumented Taiwanese immigrants have become “illegal” by overstaying their student or visitor visas. Many are middle-class and educated. Some undocumented Taiwanese, particularly before the mid-1980s, were able to establish permanent residency as political asylees from the Kuomingtang.5 Other undocumented Taiwanese immigrants have been able to adjust their status to legal permanent residency by meeting the criteria set forth by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the current “Registry” Provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.6 5 Hundreds of Taiwanese immigrants were blacklisted by the KMT because of their involvement in the Taiwanese independence movement and barred from returning to Taiwan (Shu 2002). 6 The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted blanket amnesty to those arriving before January 1, 1982. The “Registry” Provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act grants blanket amnesty to those arriving before 1972.

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Taiwan’s political uncertainty has spurred much of Taiwanese immigration since the 1970s. The absence of recognition as an official state, plus the constant threat of invasion by the People’s Republic of China, elicits an ever present state of insecurity in Taiwanese people. Emigration, or at least possession of another country’s passport, is a strategy for security among those who can afford it. Having at least one member of the family outside of Taiwan ensures the future immigration of other members should tensions between Taiwan and China escalate. The United States has always been the first choice for Taiwanese emigrants, but it is also the most difficult country to establish residency. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are second-choice options, with countries like Brazil in South America as well as South Africa as alternatives. Some Taiwanese will first immigrate to these countries to gain easier access into the United States. Besides political security and economic opportunity, the most commonly cited reasons for emigration are deteriorating living conditions in Taiwan, and access to higher education for children (Chee 2005; Ng 1998; Tseng 2001). The rapid economic development of Taiwan has come at a high environmental cost. Several respondents claim that pollution, congestion, and urbanization have made living in Taiwan highly unpleasant and undesirable. More recently fewer immigrants complain about this as a highly successful environmental movement in the last decade has improved the lives of Taiwanese urbanites. Taiwanese frequently claim that they move to the United States for their children’s education. Because there are relatively few universities, getting into a Taiwanese university is notoriously competitive. Taiwanese claim that children’s lives in Taiwan are miserable. After school, children regularly attend “cram schools” until ten or eleven o’clock to prepare for exams that track them into particular schools. Their fates hinge on their performance in the university entrance exam. In the United States, on the other hand, higher education is accessible to virtually anyone who can afford it. Children can have access to higher education without the miserable lifestyle. As one Taiwanese immigrant explains, “Now my children don’t live with the constant pressure of having to be the best in their class” (Arax 1987). But Taiwanese American parents still hold very high educational expectations from their children. For example, the Southern California Chinese Yellow Pages includes a list of the top ten American universities as pertinent information to all Chinese immigrants, demonstrating how central educational achievement is to Taiwanese. The desire to offer educational opportunities for their children has led some Taiwanese to engage in creative immigration arrangements. Some Taiwanese immigrants resolve conflicting interests through split family migration, where the wife and children remain in the host country while

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the husband-bread winner shuttles like an “astronaut” (taikongren)7 between Taiwan and the United States (Chang 2006; Chee 2005). One of my respondents who grew up in a split-family migrant household admitted that the reason his mother brought him to the United States was because he could not get into a university in Taiwan with his poor grades. His father, on the other, a surgeon in Taiwan, stayed behind to fund two households. Certainly this is a strategy of class reproduction that only the affluent can afford. Other Taiwanese send their children to live in the United States alone, without adult supervision. These young immigrants, known as “parachute children” or “little students abroad” (shaio liu shuesheng), have developed a reputation for being affluent, spoiled, and delinquent (Pih and Mao 2005). Southern California Chinese leaders have even requested the Taiwanese government to tighten visa requirements to reduce their numbers (Hamilton 1993). Since the 1980s, a growing number of Taiwanese have immigrated to the United States for business investment. Countries such as Australia (Ip, Wu, and Inglis 1998), Canada (Wong 1997), and the United States (Tseng 2001, 1997) have implemented immigration policies attracting affluent business migrants, mostly from newly industrialized countries like Taiwan and Hong Kong, as links to foreign investment. In 1990, the U.S. Congress expanded occupational preference categories to include a fifth category (EB-5) to compete with Australia’s and Canada’s lure for affluent investors. This category admitted persons who could invest one million dollars and create ten new jobs in the American economy. With higher wages and stricter environmental and labor standards in Taiwan, Taiwanese businesspersons have sought to plant their businesses elsewhere, such as China, and Latin America, but also the United States (Kwong and Misˇcˇevic´ 2005). Furthermore, an American passport offers Taiwanese capitalists pursuing international investment opportunities the diplomatic protection and internationally mobility that a Taiwanese passport does not. Taiwanese immigration to the United States has shifted in the last forty years, vacillating between 6,745–16,698 immigrants a year. Taiwanese immigration peaked between the years 1977–96, drawing over 10,000 nearly ever year. My own sample of fifty respondents reflects this immigration pattern, with ten immigrating in the 1970s or earlier, twenty-seven in the 1980s, and thirteen in the 1990s. Immigration from Taiwan has slowed down since the late 1990s. Incredible growth in Taiwan’s economy, particularly the high tech industry, 7

Taikongren means “empty-wife person” in Chinese.

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improved living conditions, and expanded educational opportunities have encouraged Taiwanese to stay put. More Taiwanese, especially high tech engineers, are returning home because of better job opportunities (Chang 2006). The glass ceiling, racism, and the relative stagnancy of the American economy in comparison to Asia are factors pushing Taiwanese Americans back to Taiwan (Chee 2005). But Taiwan’s political status has not changed and Taiwanese parents still want their children to have the opportunities of an American education. For these reasons, some affluent Taiwanese opt for split-family transnational arrangements between the United States and Taiwan. These Taiwanese transnational families practice what Shenglin Chang (2006) calls “bi-gration,” the shuttling between homes in the United States and Taiwan. In contrast to migration, permanent settlement in one place is not the objective of bi-gration. Rather the maintenance of two homes affords some Taiwanese opportunities to both attain political security through American citizenship (Ong 1999), and assure the reproduction of class status through American education. TAIWANESE IMMIGRATION TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S SAN GABRIEL VALLEY Just south of the San Gabriel Mountain range sits Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, home of the largest Taiwanese community in the United States. Go twenty to thirty miles east from the swaying palm trees that line Santa Monica Beach, into the neighborhoods of Los Angeles’ infamous suburban sprawl: Monterey Park, Arcadia, Alhambra, San Marino, and Rowland Heights. In the 1970s the majority of these cities were white, but by 2000 Chinese Americans comprised between one-quarter to onehalf of their residents (Horton 1992; Kwong and Misˇcˇevic´ 2005). Taiwanese immigrants are part of this Chinese concentration and are over 30 percent of the Chinese American population in this area (Li 1998). According to the 2000 Census, 67,485 Taiwanese immigrants live in Los Angeles County. This number, however, represents an undercount, for it is based on persons who were born in Taiwan and does not account for immigrants from Taiwan who were born in China. Local Taiwanese leaders estimate that over 100,000 Taiwanese Americans (immigrants and their children) reside in Southern California, with most concentrated in the San Gabriel Valley. The San Gabriel Valley is not like Chinatowns that Americans know. There are no crowds of Chinese picking through bins of fruit and vegetables lining the sidewalks like the Chinatowns in New York City or San Francisco. In fact, few people are walking on the sidewalks. This is Southern California, afterall. This is the American suburbs. The San Gabriel

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Valley is like any other suburb in a metropolitan area—with wide streets, minivans, minimalls, Walmart, Borders, and the Gap—except that so many people are Chinese. As an article in the Atlantic Monthly put it, “Its charm is how it juxtaposes this superficial homogeneity—what some might even call sterility—with the vibrant and the strange” (Schwarz and Schwarz 1999). To the authors, who are obviously not Chinese, what is “strange” is the overt presence of Taiwaneseness in typical suburban trappings. Stop at one of the minimalls and instead of finding donuts and coffee, your options are Taiwanese equivalents—boba, tea with tapioca pearls, and taro toast. The local grocery store, 99 Ranch Market, whose clientele is white, Latino, black, and Asian, is a Taiwanese chain. Its motto betrays its immigrant work ethic—“for 100 we try harder.” Instead of keeping of with the Joneses, here you keep up with the Chens—upgrade the tract home to a custom-built home in San Marino, trade in the Honda for a Mercedes, replace the Seiko with a Rolex (even if it’s fake). But most importantly, do absolutely everything possible to get your child into Harvard. The San Gabriel Valley is one of the new “ethnoburbs” (Li 1998) that are beginning to highlight the American suburban landscape. Ethnoburbs, the geographer Wei Li suggests, are different from the typical suburbs because they are “ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts” (470). And unlike ethnic enclaves such as traditional Chinatowns, they are “multi-ethnic communities in which one ethnic group has a significant concentration, but does not necessarily comprise a majority” (ibid.). Ethnoburbs like the San Gabriel Valley are the result of “leapfrog” migration. Traditionally immigrants moved into low-income urban ethnic enclaves and after gaining sufficient upward mobility (which could take several generations), moved into middle-class suburbs. Now, middleclass immigrants like Taiwanese can bypass urban ethnic enclaves altogether and head straight for the suburbs (Chang 2006). Developers from Hong Kong and Taiwan were highly influential in creating the Chinese mecca that the San Gabriel Valley has become (Light 2002). The earliest of these was Frederic Hsieh, who capitalized on the threat that communist China presented to both Hong Kong and Taiwan’s political futures by promoting Monterey Park (a city in the San Gabriel Valley) to potential affluent e´migre´s as a “Chinese Beverly Hills” in the 1970s (Arax 1987). Immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong quickly flocked to the area, snatched up real estate, and drove housing prices through the roof. What ensued was a reverse case of “white flight,” where whites were bought out by wealthy Taiwanese and Hong Kongnese offering unbelievable prices for their homes. The Taiwanese presence has left an indelible mark on Southern California’s economic, political, and social institutions. Sociologist Yen-Fen

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Tseng (1995) suggests that unlike traditional ethnic economies, Taiwanese immigrant businesses have had a far reaching impact outside of the ethnic community and into the mainstream economy. She claims that a Taiwanese American economy, largely concentrated in finance, high-tech, computer wholesalers, real estate, and international trade, is responsible for the economic growth in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s and 1990s despite the larger recession in Southern California. With their substantial ethnic backing in the area, Chinese immigrants have won important political races in Southern California. Chinese immigrant political success represents a departure from traditional patterns of immigrant political socialization where the second generation, and not the first, breaks into politics (Horton 1992; Saito 1999; Watanabe 2003). And culturally, cities in the San Gabriel Valley are accommodating to their new Chinese residents through, for example, bilingual signage and annual Lunar New Year parades (Li 1998). But Taiwanese integration into the San Gabriel Valley has also faced resistance and resentment among existing white, Latino, and Asian residents. Despite the purported contribution of Taiwanese businesses to the local economy, they have been criticized for not employing nonethnics and underreporting profits (Tseng 1995). Long time residents resent the mass encroachment of Chinese and their foreign culture on their territory, leading one white resident to declare, “I feel like an outsider” (Arax 1987). In a backlash against the Chinese, the city council of Monterey Park passed a short-lived ordinance declaring English as the official language in 1986. Racial tensions rose as Chinese and Latinos allied successfully to defeat the council’s xenophobic ordinance (Horton 1992; Saito 1999). In more subtle ways, locals exhibit racist sentiments toward Asian newcomers. For example, at the same time that locals praise Taiwanese American students for raising the national profile of schools in the San Gabriel Valley (Mathews 1988), they criticize Asian American parents for using harsh discipline to “force children to be successful” (Hamilton 1994). Due to the rise in affluent Taiwanese business immigrants to the United States in the mid-1980s, Taiwanese immigrants in Southern California have been stereotyped as rich newcomers who buy ostentatious homes in cash, drive around in Mercedes Benzes, and use local resources without a sense of due accountability (Arax 1987; Cho 1993; Frantz 1987; Kotkin 1991; Schoenberger 1993). Some of these characterizations are no doubt true, but they hardly represent the reality of most Taiwanese immigrants and mask the internal diversity of Taiwanese American experiences. Indeed, earlier waves of Taiwanese who emigrated from a less affluent Taiwan criticize the “new rich Taiwanese” for their materialistic and hedonistic values.

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Despite being characterized as affluent and educated, Taiwanese immigrants in Los Angeles rank lower than non-Hispanic whites in major economic indicators (Asian Pacific American Legal Center 2004). According to the 2000 Census, 71 percent of Taiwanese adults have a college degree or higher compared to 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites in Los Angeles County. Yet, the median household income for Taiwanese is $50,116 compared to $53,978 for non-Hispanic whites. Because the average Taiwanese household in Los Angeles is larger (3.2 persons) compared to nonHispanic whites households (2.3 persons), Taiwanese per capita income is $21,939 compared to $35,785 for whites. Fifteen percent of Taiwanese are below the poverty line compared to 9 percent of whites. These figures show that even higher levels of human capital such as education do not completely counteract the negative effects of one’s immigrant and racial minority status on income. Despite considerable human capital, Taiwanese are still subject to the vulnerabilities of being foreigners, newcomers, and immigrants. MIGRATING FAITHS: TAIWANESE BUDDHISM AND PROTESTANT CHRISTIANITY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Chinese immigrants have transformed the Southern California landscape not only racially or economically, but also religiously. In cities with large immigrant populations like Los Angeles, churches once occupied by white Americans now share their buildings with even more populous and vibrant Chinese and Korean congregations. As the numbers of mainline Protestants have rapidly declined in the United States, immigrants are buying and converting mainline churches into their own houses of faith. In Southern California, countless numbers of Chinese churches now occupy the churches that once belonged to white Americans. Some are no longer churches but have been converted into Buddhist temples, like the Fa Kwang Temple in Downey or Dharma Seal Temple in Rosemead. A former Protestant seminary in Rosemead is now the University of the West (formerly Hsi Lai University) established by the Taiwanese Buddhist organization Fo Guang Shan. Taiwanese religiosity pops up in the least expected places. Where real estate is tight, Chinese churches set up of their equivalents of store-front churches in Chinese mini malls. Don’t be surprised to find Buddhist monks from the nearby Hsi Lai Temple in the cereal aisle at Ralph’s Supermarket in Hacienda Heights. A local dumpling house posts an announcement for a Chinese Christian revival and the cafe´ beside it does the same for a Chinese Buddhist retreat. The local Fourth of July Parade features the typical marching bands and calvarymen, but also Buddhist monks in

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convertibles waving to the crowds. The stranger at the mall handing out tracts and asking whether you are going to heaven is no Jesus freak, but a clean-cut Taiwanese American youth who graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. In Southern California there are 195 Chinese Protestant Christian churches and 45 Buddhist and Taoist temples/organizations (only a handful are Taoist)—that is approximately four Christian churches to each Buddhist temple/organization. Although churches far outnumber temples, Buddhist temples may attract thousands of Taiwanese during its celebrations. There are no conclusive numbers regarding the religious affiliation of Taiwanese Americans. In a 1997 survey of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, 32 percent claimed to be Protestant Christian, 20 percent Buddhist, and the remainder no religious affiliation (Dart 1997). Taiwanese, however, are only a portion of the Chinese American population, and tend to have fewer Christians and more Buddhists than other Chinese. In a 2001 survey of Taiwanese in Southern California 18 percent identified as Protestant Christian and 24 percent as Buddhist (Lien 2001). However, with a sample size of only sixty-eight, these findings are inconclusive.8 Based on my conversations with local Taiwanese leaders, I estimate that Christians are between 20–25 percent of the Taiwanese American population. Those who identify as Buddhists are probably between 20–25 percent of the population as well. Because only a subset of those who identify as Buddhists are actually practicing, I estimate that there are more practicing Christians than practicing Buddhists. The vast majority of Christians are Protestant, and mostly evangelical, while a small minority is Mormon and Catholic. Taiwanese Buddhists practice Mahayana Buddhism, with particular emphasis on the Pure Land and Chan practices.9 Although Americans tend to see this as two different forms of practice, East Asian Buddhists regard Pure Land and Chan as complementary. Pure Land Buddhism emphasizes faith in Amitahba Buddha and rebirth in the Pure Land, or Western Paradise, a realm conducive to attaining enlightenment. Pure Land Buddhist practices include hearing and reciting Amitahba Buddha’s name, which in Chinese translates to “Omitopho.” Chan, or what most Americans know as “Zen,” teaches enlightenment through the direct perception of one’s own mind and emphasizes meditation. 8 Of the sixty-eight respondents, 26 percent claimed no religious affiliation and 25 percent were not sure or did not answer. 9 Chan is generally perceived as too rigorous and demanding for the ordinary lay Buddhist. Pure Land practice is regarded as the easier method to attain enlightenment and tends to be more popular among the masses. Some differentiate the two by Chan’s cultivation of “self-power” and Pure Land dependence on “other power” for enlightenment.

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Although Taoism is quite popular in Taiwan, its presence is minimal among Taiwanese immigrants.10 One partial explanation for this is that Taoism is locally organized, usually under a priest and his familial lineage, and is not suitable for transnational organization.11 Taoist masters often work from home and include healing arts, such as chi-gong, gong-fu, and breathing meditation. Although Yiguan Dao, one of the most popular religions in Taiwan, which includes Taoist practices with the veneration of Maitreya Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, is an exception because it is centrally organized and has established a temple in Rosemead, California. Another possible explanation for the scarcity of Taiwanese Taoist and popular religious temples in the United States is that the educated and professional Taiwanese who immigrate here are less receptive to these practices that are more popular among the working-class (Guest 2005; Yang 2002a). Most immigrants from Taiwan do not come with a strong sense of religious identity or commitment, but become religious in the United States. The religions of Taiwanese immigrants are partly the product of enterprising Taiwanese religious leaders in Taiwan and the United States who prodigiously foresaw that religious institutions could be a more potent force in the diaspora than in the homeland. With wealth from Taiwan and the local Taiwanese immigrant population to back them, Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese religious entrepreneurs transplanted their religions to Southern California’s fertile grounds. I turn now to discuss my fieldsites, “Grace Evangelical Church” and “Dharma Light Temple” as examples of Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese immigrant religions in the United States. Taiwanese Christianity in Southern California: Grace Evangelical Church Grace Evangelical Church is located at a busy intersection two blocks away from a minimall with Blockbuster Video and a row of Chinese delis. The juxtaposition of its white stucco walls and Spanish red-tiled roof with the Chinese sign “Grace Evangelical Church” is perfectly ordinary in this Southern California suburb. On a Sunday morning, four hundred Taiwanese immigrants and their children congregate here to worship the Lord. In the lobby, several men and women dressed in Sunday finery greet mem10 In contrast, Chinese from Hong Kong, China, and Southeast Asia have established their own Taoist and popular religion temples in the United States (Guest 2005; Yang 2002a). Some Taiwanese, however, may worship at these temples. For example, some Taiwanese immigrants worship the popular goddess Matsu at the Tien Hau Temple, which was established in San Francisco in 1852 (Lee 2003). 11 I am indebted to Elijah Siegler for this idea.

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bers with “Peng-an,” “Peace, brother or sister so-and-so,” and hand them a hymnal. The sanctuary is modern and sparse. The altar is dominated by a large wooden cross and behind it a stained glass window. Secondgeneration youth and young adults hold their English-language service in the sanctuary before the Taiwanese-language service. The Taiwanese-language service begins with several choir members leading the congregation in traditional hymns and contemporary praise music that is common in evangelical churches. The lyrics, which are projected onto a large screen at the front of the church, are emotional and some members raise their hands and close their eyes when singing. The pastor, dressed in a blue three-piece suit, delivers a forty-five-minute sermon. The main points are projected in powerpoint onto the large screen while church members busily take notes from the pews. The choir sings. Offering is collected. Newcomers are introduced. After the service, church members pour out of the sanctuary into the fellowship hall for a lunch that lasts at least as long as the service. Church members socialize animatedly in a trilingual mixture of Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English. The teenagers like to eat in a separate room, where they listen to the latest Christian rock and flirt away from the watchful eyes of their parents. After lunch, people stay around for meetings, intramural sports, and choir practice. The church finally closes its doors at five o’clock. Grace Evangelical Church is a branch church that was “planted” in the late 1980s by the larger Grace Evangelical Church organization—a Taiwanese denominationally independent church. The first Grace Evangelical Church was established in the early 1970s in Southern California by young Taiwanese professionals and graduate students. The church emerged out of a Taiwanese Christian Fellowship group that began in 1966. Christians were disproportionately represented among this early wave of Taiwanese immigration because they tended to be more educated and urban than the general Taiwanese population, (Swanson 1981).12 Taiwanese Christians, whose ancestors had been converted by Canadian and American Protestant missionaries as early as the 1860s (Rubinstein 2003), brought their own Christian faith traditions with them to the United States. Because of linguistic, regional, and class differences from earlier immigrant waves of Chinese who were predominantly Cantonese, immigrants from Taiwan formed their own churches where they could speak Mandarin or Taiwanese (Chan 1996; Chao 1995). Some ethnic 12 For example, in 1971, 32 percent of Christians had a college education compared to 9 percent of the general Taiwanese population (Swanson 1981, 99). Christians were by no means a majority of the immigrants, but merely a more sizable minority among immigrants than in Taiwan. Christians, afterall, have only comprised between 2 to 5 percent of the Taiwanese population.

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Taiwanese and post-1949 Mainlander Christians have separate churches because of ethnic and political differences.13 The early founders of Grace Evangelical Church were predominantly ethnic Taiwanese and wanted a church where they could speak Taiwanese. Although these early members were mostly Presbyterian, they wanted to establish their church as independent and nondenominational. They were young professionals who could afford to support a church that was not only financially independent, but free from the supervision of American denominations. According to Fenggang Yang (2002a), most churches established by contemporary Chinese immigrants are denominationally independent. In contrast, early Chinese American churches were established in the nineteenth century by white missionaries belonging to Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist denominations (ibid.). But still, there are many post-1965 Chinese churches in Southern California that are denominationally affiliated with American denominations, for example the Taiwanese Presbyterian Churches, the First Chinese Baptist Church, and Christian and Missionary Alliance Churches.14 The fastest growing churches, however, are the ones that regard themselves as denominationally independent, like the Evangelical Formosan Church, Ling Liang Tang Worldwide Evangelistic Association, and the Vineyard. Christian churches like Grace Evangelical Church quickly became the central social institutions within the Southern California Taiwanese immigrant community in the early days of Taiwanese immigration (Chao 1995). Most immigrants had no family members in the United States. Alone and in a foreign land, they wanted the fellowship and support of other coethnics. While there were a few ethnic organizations, such as the Taiwanese Association of America, they did not meet on a weekly basis and did not cultivate the same kinds of communal ties that churches did. Instead of competing with churches, ethnic associations often relied on the help of churches to organize and publicize their events. Taiwanese professional, political, and voluntary organizations particularly grew in the 1980s (ibid.). And Buddhist organizations did not develop in Southern California until the mid-1970s. By then, Christian churches had already 13 The Taiwanese Presbyterian Church has played an active role in the Taiwanese independence movement and was a vocal critique of the Kuomintang prior to Taiwan’s democratization. In the United States, the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church has maintained a strong political and ethnic identity, with prominent Taiwanese American ministers like C. S. Song calling for Taiwanese self-determination (Rubinstein 2003). Other Taiwanese churches, like the Evangelical Formosan Church, take an explicitly apolitical stance so as not to alienate potential converts. 14 In Taiwan and in the United States, those who attend Baptist and Assembly Hall churches tend to be post-1949 Mainlanders, while ethnic Taiwanese tend to be Presbyterian (Rubinstein 1991).

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established themselves as one of the most significant institutions in the Taiwanese community, a legacy which continues today. Grace Church is like other Chinese American churches, which tend to be denominationally independent, theologically conservative, and evangelical (Yang 1999a).15 Grace Church services include traditional hymns but also the contemporary praise music that is popular among American evangelicals. The Bible is considered the inspired and infallible word of God, and is often quoted in church services, Bible studies, and fellowship meetings. Like other Chinese churches, Grace Church emphasizes the importance of being “born again” and encourages personal evangelism (Yang 1999a; Wang and Yang 2006). It holds altar calls at the end of most Sunday services. Like most Chinese immigrant pastors, Grace Church’s pastors studied at American evangelical seminaries like Fuller, Gordon Conwell, and Trinity.16 For example, its current senior pastor, Pastor Chang, is a former engineer who earned a M.A. from the University of California Los Angeles before entering Fuller Seminary. With pastors trained in the evangelical strategies of “church growth,” some Chinese churches have grown tremendously by planting sister churches. For example, Grace Evangelical Church has planted over fifty churches around the world wherever there are Taiwanese. Chinese Christians at Grace Church are strongly influenced by trends and ideas in the larger American evangelical subculture. Chinese Christians read popular evangelical books like bestseller The Purpose Driven Life and other books that have been translated into Chinese. They attend mainstream evangelical meetings like the Billy Graham Crusade. Many church members share in the larger evangelical concern about the dissolution of the family and are familiar with Dr. Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family (Chen 2006). Grace Church members also belong to a larger Chinese evangelical Christian network of radio shows, television shows, bookstores, publishing houses, revival meetings, and para-church organizations that is both local and transnational (Yang 2002b; Zhang 2006). For example, members of Grace Church and other Chinese churches read the literature of Chinese evangelical para-church organizations like Focus on the Chinese 15 According to historian George Marsden “Evangelical Christians tend to emphasize (1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of Scripture, (2) the real, historical character of God’s saving work recorded in Scripture; (3) eternal salvation only through personal trust in Christ; (4) the importance of evangelism and missions; and (5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life” (1954, ix–x). 16 An increasing number of Chinese American pastors are being educated in evangelical Chinese American seminaries like Logos, Truth Baptist, International Bible, and Chinese for Christ, all located in Southern California.

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Family. They attend retreats and meetings sponsored by Chinese Family for Christ retreats, or the Christopher Sun Evangelistic Association. Grace Church differs from other Chinese churches because the majority of its members are ethnic Taiwanese immigrants and their children. A small minority of its members are Taiwanese who are post-1949 Mainlanders, Hokkien and Minnan-speaking Chinese from Southeast Asia. Since the late 1990s, it also includes a growing contingent from China. In comparison, other Chinese churches may have a more mixed composition of Chinese from Hong Kong, China, and Mainlander Taiwanese (Yang 1999a). To accommodate to the different linguistic needs of its members, Grace Church holds three different services in English, Mandarin, and Taiwanese. The English congregation is composed of second-generation Taiwanese Americans, while the first generation attend the Mandarin and Taiwanese services. Each of the congregations has its own pastor, Sunday Schools, cell group meetings, and prayer meetings. Although Grace Church has three separate congregations, there is a great deal of interaction among them. After each Sunday service all members have lunch together. And several times a year the church will hold joint worship services with everyone. In addition to the religious programs, Grace Church offers a multitude of social events, such as camping, hiking, skiing, and attending concerts and movies that are typical of other churches. Members come together to celebrate ethnic holidays such as the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. The church hosts talks on practical issues such as purchasing real estate and filing income tax. In contrast to the churches of other immigrants groups, Grace Church and other suburban Chinese churches do not offer formal social services largely because its middleclass populations do not need them (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Yang 1999a). Unlike some Chinese churches, however, Grace Church does not offer Mandarin or Taiwanese language classes to the second generation. There are several language instruction schools in the area already. In short, church events are plentiful and fill up the social calenders of most of its members. Between religious services and social events, active members can be involved in church activities four to five days of the week. Taiwanese Buddhism in Southern California—Dharma Light Temple Dharma Light Temple is located on the edge of a quiet residential neighborhood only five minutes away from Grace Evangelical Church. In contrast to the local Mediterranean architecture of Grace Church, Dharma Light Temple is built in classical Chinese architecture. The temple is un-

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mistakably Chinese, and looks out of place among the row of tract homes. On the weekends, the temple is especially crowded with cars spilling from the overfilled parking lot and lining the neat suburban streets. Devotees enter the temple through the Bodhisattva Hall. Here devotees pay homage by bowing and lighting incense to Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva, Maitreya Bodhisattva, Avolokitesvara (Kuan Yin) Bodhisattva, and Manjusri Bodhisattva. To the corner, some monastics and lay volunteers sell various offerings one can make to the Bodhisattvas—flowers, fruit, and incense. Devotees greet one another by saying “Omitopho,” (Amithaba Buddha’s name in Chinese) pressing their palms together and bowing their heads. Publications in English and in Mandarin with titles like “What is Buddhism?” are distributed on a table in the hall. Past the Bodhisattva Hall is a large courtyard framed by a garden and meeting rooms. Large stone lions placed at the four corners of the courtyard ward off evil. People mill around the courtyard, taking photographs, talking on their cell phones, enjoying the beautiful surroundings. At the back of the temple is the Main Shrine with immense golden figures of Amitahba Buddha, Medicine Buddha (Bahaisajyagura), and Sakyamuni Buddha. On a typical weekend over seven hundred people will visit the temple. People come to the temple for different reasons. Most do not come to engage in orthodox Buddhist practices, but to pray for good luck or protection like they do at Taoist and popular religion temples in Taiwan. Although these temples may offer divination or fortune telling services, Dharma Light, like other orthodox Chinese Buddhist temples, does not. After praying with incense, some will walk around the temple, enjoy its beautiful garden, and have lunch at the vegetarian cafeteria. Visiting beautiful temples is a refreshing form of recreation in Taiwan. Those who are more serious practitioners will don a hai-ching, a devotee’s robe, and enter the main Buddha Hall for the chanting ceremonies on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. Others come for one of the many classes the temple offers—the dharma classes, the language classes, or the meditation classes. The Master Venerable Ling Chi of Dharma Light Organization in Taiwan established Dharma Light in Southern California in the late 1970s. Master Ling Chi had a popular following in Taiwan and had already established numerous temples there. With the growing Taiwanese population in Southern California, Master Ling Chi saw an opportunity to spread the dharma in the West and expand his organization transnationally. At the time there were only a few Taiwanese Buddhist temples Southern California. The organization purchased a church and converted it into a small temple until the construction of Dharma Light Temple was completed in the late 1980s. The temple was funded by serious devotees in the United States and Taiwan. The temple has an

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active sangha of thirty monks, most of whom are nuns from Taiwan and speak limited English. Master Ling Chi remains based in Taiwan, but travels and lectures extensively to the many Dharma Light Temples he has established around the world. Dharma Light is one among several Taiwanese Buddhist organizations to establish transnational branches among the Taiwanese and Chinese diaspora (Chandler 2004; Lin 1996; McLellan 1999). For example, in Southern California, Pao Fa Temple, Fo Guang Shan’s Hsi Lai Temple, Tzu Chi Compassionate Relief Society, Dharma Drum Mountain, and the Amida Society originate from Buddhist organizations in Taiwan. Although a few organizations, such as Venerable Master Hsuan Hua’s Dharma Realm17 and Grand Master Sheng-yen Lu’s True Buddha School, originated in the United States and have expanded globally. Some smaller temples, like Dharma Seal, which was established in 1975, are institutionally independent and formed by Taiwanese immigrants inviting monks from Taiwan to lead. Chinese Buddhist organizations like Fo Guang Shan and Dharma Realm that have a sangha (monastic community) tend to establish temples. Others, like the Amida Society or Tzu Chi are lay organizations devoted to Buddhist cultivation based on a particular master’s teachings. For example, the founder of Tzu Chi, Venerable Cheng Yen, encourages Tzu Chi members to cultivate Buddhist practice through charitable actions. While each Buddhist organization may emphasize certain practices—such as meditation, sutra study, and chanting—they commonly practice Chan and Pure Land Buddhist traditions. These Taiwanese organizations propagate a “humanistic Buddhism” that emerged as a response to modernist critics of Chinese Buddhism in the first half of the twentieth century (Ch’en 1973; Jones 1999; Welch 1968). Leading reformers such as Taixu (1890–1947), Zhengfeng (1903– 34) and Yinshun (1906–) were Mainland Chinese monks who sought to change Buddhism’s focus from the afterlife to this world (ones 2003, 1999). Reformers transformed Chinese Buddhism in two ways: (1) they shifted the emphasis of Buddhist practice from devotions and rituals to gain rebirth in a Pure Land or idealized world, to transforming this world into a Pure Land and (2) they reoriented Buddhist practice from the worship of buddhas and bodhisattvas as godlike saviors, to moral self-cultivation. These reforms have created a this-worldly Buddhism that emphasizes lay religious education and involvement. Chinese Buddhists today regard these reforms as a “return to orthodox Buddhism” distinctive from the syncretic popular Buddhism of the past (Chandler 2004). 17 Although Venerable Master Hsuan Hua is from Hong Kong via China, and not Taiwan, he has a large Taiwanese following.

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Buddhism has experienced a popular revival in Taiwan since influential monks like Fo Guang Shan’s Hsing Yun and Tzu Chi’s Cheng Yen established their organizations in the late 1960s. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Interior, 24 percent of Taiwan identify as Buddhist in 2003, compared to 11 percent in 1982, although scholars estimate that less than half of the Buddhists are practicing (Laliberte´ 2003). The popularity of humanistic Buddhism spread as Taiwan became increasingly urbanized, modern, and economically affluent in the 1970s onward. The new mediasavvy, this-worldly Buddhism helped meet the spiritual needs of an urban Taiwanese middle-class experiencing massive social transformation (Hoh 2002; Huang and Weller 1998; Weller 2000). Taiwanese affluence has also funded the enormous global growth in Buddhist temples, seminaries, universities, and mass media enterprises in the last thirty years. Some Buddhist organizations have amassed such wealth that critics suspiciously label them “religious business enterprises” (Hoh 2002). As Taiwanese emigrated, Taiwanese Buddhist organizations followed suit, establishing their organizations in heavily Taiwanese concentrated areas beginning as early as the late 1970s, but more steadily in the 1980s and 1990s. Dharma Light Temple regards itself as a Chinese Buddhist temple whose mission is to both propagate the dharma and transmit Chinese culture. Most of its devotees are Taiwanese (both ethnic Taiwanese and Mainlanders), although there are also a fair number of Chinese from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and a few Vietnamese that visit the temple. In contrast to the Chinese churches, the temple attracts very few from China (Yang 2002a). The temple also has a small, but very visible, number of white American devotees. Dharma Light, like some other immigrant Buddhist temples, actively encourages the participation of white Americans and sees non-Chinese as highly desirable members of the community to spread the dharma (Lin 1996; Numrich 1996; Yang and Ebaugh 2001b). This characteristic, however, is not typical of smaller Chinese temples and lay Buddhist organizations. To accommodate to the various linguistic needs of its devotees, Dharma Light Temple offers chanting, dharma, and meditation classes in Mandarin and English. It also offers a Cantonese dharma class. The English services take place on Sunday morning, perhaps to accommodate to the religious habits of the non-Chinese. Like other Taiwanese temples in Southern California, Chinese language chanting, dharma, and meditation classes are scheduled on Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes throughout the week. Some temples do not meet on a weekly basis, but on a bimonthly or monthly basis. Unlike Christians, Taiwanese Buddhists are not expected to attend the temple every Sunday morning. Like most immigrant Hindus and Buddhists in the United States, most do not attend the temple regularly (Cadge and Ecklund 2006; Min 2005). Similar to Indian

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American Hindus (Min 2005), Buddhists do not regard temple participation as an indication of piety. One respondent quoted a Buddhist leader comparing the temple to a gas station—you visit when you need more spiritual fuel. For example, a devotee may attend the meditation class, but not the chanting ceremonies. Furthermore Buddhists often attend the classes and ceremonies of multiple temples. Membership is not exclusive. As one Buddhist told me, “Chinese think that going to the temple brings good luck, so they go to as many as they can.” The Dharma Light Lay Organization organizes small group dharma studies that meet once or twice a month in members’ homes. These meetings consist of a presentation by a monastic or temple-trained lay dharma lecturer followed by discussion. The Dharma Light Lay Organization will also organize charity activities such as food drives and social events like picnics and karaoke. For the second generation, the temple has a children’s Chinese language school and after-school program that is quite popular. It also has a youth orchestra and summer camp. But the temple has struggled to develop a religious education program that attracts youth. Chinese Buddhism does not have a tradition of children’s religious education like Protestant Christianity. Most immigrant Buddhist temples struggle to offer even modest children’s religious education programs because they lack English-language materials (Kwon 2003; Suh 2005). The absence of a known tradition of children’s religious education also influences Buddhist parents’ expectations of the temple. A nun told me that parents regard the children’s Sunday School as “daycare,” suggesting that parents do not expect the temple to engage in serious religious teaching. Consequently there are far fewer active youth in temples compared to churches. While the temple attempts to develop children’s programs in Chinese Buddhism, they still lag behind the vast resources that Christians have. This affects the ability of immigrants to pass Buddhism onto their children. For example, according to a survey of college freshman in 1997, 33 percent claim they no longer identify with their mother’s Buddhism (Lien and Carnes 2004). Dharma Light Temple wants to propagate the dharma to both the Chinese and non-Chinese in the West. Both its evangelical mission and vast resources to realize this goal distinguish it from smaller Chinese American temples. But it is also characteristic of a number of powerful transnational Buddhist organizations originating from affluent East Asian countries like Taiwan. In the attempt to “localize” itself to American society, it actively engages in mainstream society through charity projects like disaster relief and funding local schools. It takes care to invite non-Chinese to its ceremonies and prominently displays the temple’s “diversity” in its publications (Chen 2002). The temple participates in interreligious events with

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Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in Southern California. The temple presents one model for how immigrant Buddhist temples might perpetuate itself beyond the first generation of immigrants.

CONCLUSION The examples of Grace Evangelical Church and Dharma Light Temple illustrate how Taiwanese immigrants are transplanting their faith traditions in the Southern California landscape. The formation of a Taiwanese middle-class population in Southern California is a distinct product of postwar global economic and political shifts. In light of Taiwan’s political uncertainty, Taiwanese who can afford to, immigrate to the United States for political security, but also for economic and educational advancement. High levels of Taiwanese capital from both Taiwan and the United States have created a distinct Chinese ethnoburban economy, culture, and religion in Southern California. Taiwanese religious institutions like Grace Evangelical Church and Dharma Light Temple can afford to be organizationally independent from American organizations. They also have the resources to propagate their religious messages and institutions around the world. As one of the few social outlets in the early immigrant community, churches played a central role and attracted the conversion of the largely non-Christian Taiwanese population. These churches continue to be important institutions despite the growth of competing social and religious outlets. Buddhist temples came later, in the late 1970s and 1980s, offering a space for Taiwanese immigrants to continue some of their religious practices in Taiwan. But these Buddhist temples and organizations also introduced a new form of humanistic Buddhism, emphasizing lay education, involvement, and enlightenment. How these religions have transformed the formation of Taiwanese American communities, identities, selfhood, and moral discipline is the subject of the following chapters.

2 Becoming Christian BREAKING TRADITIONS AND MAKING TRADITIONS

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. —Matthew 10:34–36. And Peter said, “Behold, we have left our own homes, and followed you.” —Luke 18:28 MR. HOU, CHRISTIAN CONVERT: You want to know why I didn’t become Christian in Taiwan? There people will say that you’ve rejected your family and your ancestors. CAROLYN CHEN: Do you have any relatives in the United States? MR. HOU: No. Our relatives are the church.

WHEN MR. HOU told his mother in Taiwan that he was getting baptized as a Christian she cried for six months. Understandably his mother would be upset. By becoming Christian, her son was not only breaking with family tradition, he was also disrespecting his parents and family ancestors. As a Protestant Christian, he would not bai bai (worship), or participate in rituals of ancestral veneration after his parents died.1 As the son, it is Mr. Hou’s filial duty to ensure that the spirits of the ancestors are well cared for through the offerings of food and incense, and the burning of paper money. By converting to Christianity, Mr. Hou was in effect rejecting his family responsibility. No one would mourn the dead. No one 1 In comparison to the Protestant Christian missionaries, Catholic missionaries permitted ancestral veneration among the Chinese who converted to Catholicism.

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would care for their spirits. But in the United States Mr. Hou did what would have been unimaginable in Taiwan. In 1993 he and his wife got baptized as Christians at Grace Church. Mr. Hou and his wife are not alone in converting to Christianity. Like most Taiwanese immigrants, they were nominally religious when they came to the United States, participating in traditional religious practices only on special holidays or when called for by the family in Taiwan. Only about 3.9 percent and declining of Taiwan’s population identifies as Christian, but approximately 25 percent of Taiwanese Americans do (Dart 1997; Chen 1992; Yang 1999a). Pastors and religious leaders in the Taiwanese community claim that 50–70 percent of their congregants converted to Christianity after immigrating to the United States. As Mr. Hou’s story suggests, converting to Christianity is not an easy decision for Taiwanese. By becoming Christian, Mr. Hou not only rejected his inherited religious traditions, he also rejected an accompanying set of social obligations to his family in Taiwan. Given these familial tensions, why would Mr. Hou and other Taiwanese immigrants like him convert to Christianity in the United States? After all, as immigrants shouldn’t they be concerned about preserving their ethnic traditions rather than breaking these traditions (Herberg 1960)? In this chapter I illustrate how Taiwanese immigrants reconstruct community and form new bonds of kinship through the process of Christian conversion in the United States. Religious conversion, I argue, involves a shift in the locus of their communities of tradition from the family to the church. Taiwanese immigrants are drawn to Grace Evangelical Church because it offers solutions to the practical struggles that they encounter as middle-class immigrants in the United States. Those challenges require more than the discrete services of social agencies; they require sustained communities of solidarity. But turning to religion to address these immigrant challenges is not an intuitive step for most Taiwanese, who, after all, have experienced religion in their home country as ritual devotion rather than as community. The draw to Christianity is partly explained by institutional strategies of evangelism that attract new members and invest them with a sense of accountability to the community. Within the context of these newly formed social relationships of obligation and commitment, Taiwanese immigrants are able to break with old traditions of Taiwanese religion and embrace new Christian traditions. For those who make that break, the experience is both painful and liberating. Finally I consider how evangelical Christian rituals and rhetoric structure religious experience as individual choices in the United States rather than inherited traditions, as was the case in Taiwan.

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RELIGIOUS CONVERSION: BELONGING TO A COMMUNITY OF TRADITION Sociological theories suggest various explanations to explain increased religiosity among immigrants, and more specifically Christian conversion among Taiwanese immigrants. Three models are most relevant to the case of Taiwanese immigrants: (1) adaptation theories, which emphasize the adaptive functions of immigrant religions (2) religious marketplace theories, which focus on the “marketing” strategies of religious institutions and (3) symbolic-meaning theories, which emphasize the explanatory power of the religions. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of each, I suggest an approach to conversion that recognizes the importance of the communal, institutional and symbolic aspects of religion. Adaptation theories posit that conversion is a response to the stresses that converts encounter in the social environment (Lofland and Stark 1965; Glock 1961). Immigrants become religious to deal with the challenges of adapting to a new country. Far from their former networks of community, immigrants are drawn to religion because it provides a space for belonging and community (e.g., Smith 1978; Warner and Wittner 1998; Kim 1981; Yang 1999a). Within the religious congregation, they find a community of coethnics where they can celebrate ethnic traditions (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000), reproduce cultural traditions and values to the second generation (Warner 2000; Yang 1999b), and negotiate new ethnic identities in the United States (Kurien 1998; Park 2001; Warner 2000; Yang 1999a). The religious community also provides a wide array of formal and informal social services that help members materially, socially, and psychologically adjust to the United States (Kwon, Ebaugh, and Hagan 1997; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Guest 2003). Immigrants turn to religion rather than other service or fraternal organizations to address their needs because of the distinctive role that religion plays in American society. Religions, in the United States, are voluntary organizations that rely largely on their lay membership for support (Yang and Ebaugh 2001a; Warner 1993). R. Stephen Warner (1998) has suggested that religions, regardless of how they are organized in the home country, adopt congregational forms in the United States, a process he terms “de facto congregationalism.” Unlike many parts of Asia where individuals may pay homage at multiple temples and regard them solely as centers of ritual service, religions in the United States function as intentional communities, where members meet regularly and develop personal relationships. Hence, religion in the United States serves an ethnic function that congregates people of similar persuasions—whether they be ethnic and cultural traditions (Greeley 1972), or lifestyle choices (Bellah et

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al. 1985; Jeung 2005; Miller 1997)—and mediates difference from those without (Warner 1993). The strength of these interpretations is that they ground religious experience in the practical, everyday needs of immigrants, primarily the need for community. But in privileging the communal and adaptive functions of religion, these interpretive frames may treat religion as just another community organization, while the symbols, beliefs, practices, and meanings that make it a “religious” community are neglected. Studies that focus on the communal needs of immigrants cannot explain why Taiwanese immigrants would choose the often wrenching tensions of converting to evangelical Christianity rather than join other community-oriented groups like an ethnic association or another religious group. Institutional marketplace theories, on the other hand, explain religious change by focusing on the resources and marketing techniques of “religious firms” who seek new converts or “consumers” (Stark and Bainbridge 1987). In America’s pluralistic, “unregulated religious economy,” religions must rely on persuasion rather than coercion for believers. Those religious firms that have superior organizational structures (denominational polities), sales representatives (clergy), products (religious messages), and marketing techniques (evangelization) win new members (Finke and Stark 1988, 1992). By focusing on variations among religious institutions, these theories better explain why Taiwanese immigrants are drawn to one religious organization over another. Religious change is driven by institutional goals of survival and growth. In this model religious conversion is regarded as an outcome of institutional strategies. The weaknesses of religious marketplace models are the strength of adaptation models. Religious traditions are not like other “products” in the free economy. They are systems of shared meanings and symbols. As such, they only gain coherence and relevance in particular contexts and realities. For example, given the familial obligations and pressures that immigrants experience in Taiwan, it is unlikely that Taiwan would experience a boom in Christian conversion even if the Christian churches launched more aggressive outreach campaigns. With more settled lives in Taiwan, people might have less incentive to seek new sources of community and meaning. In the symbolic-meaning model, people change religions because they seek more coherent and powerful explanations of reality (Bellah 1970a, 1976, 1965; Geertz 1973; Horton 1971; Peel 1968; Gellner 1981). Voluntary large-scale conversions occur when peoples’ traditional cosmologies and ways of thinking are challenged by structural transformations such as democratization (McLoughlin 1978), modernization (Horton 1971; Gellner 1981; Martin 1990), or postmodernization (Tipton 1982; Roof 1993; Miller 1997). Religions draw new converts because their cosmolog-

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ies and ethics better resonate with changed realities and provide more powerful and rationalized explanations to life problems. In symbolic-meaning theories, religion is first and foremost a system of meanings and symbols. The draw of one religion over another is its explanatory capacity. These theories tend to assume that individuals evaluate religions as intellectual traditions without regard to prior or future social commitments. But religions are not just intellectual commitments to abstract theories; they are commitments to communities that hold social consequences for practical life. As such, religious choices are rarely made on the basis of intellectual factors alone, but on factors such as social identity, belonging, and status. Religious conversion may be about finding solutions less to the problem of meaning than to the practical problems of everyday life.2 Furthermore, an institutional focus suggests that religious change may not be driven by the human need to find more comprehensive sources of meaning. Rather, religions may be meaningproducing institutions that are in the “business” of producing meaningseeking individuals. Here I would like to suggest an approach toward conversion that recognizes religions as living traditions of meaning grounded in institutionalized communities. Traditions and communities have a symbiotic relationship. The religious world of symbols, beliefs, and rituals becomes concrete only when practiced in a communal context and communities are possible only through the sharing of symbols.3 By living traditions of meaning, I mean that religions are not intellectual abstractions, but grounded in human communities where “word becomes flesh” and powerfully influence human action. As institutionalized communities, religions are concerned with creating structures where traditions of meaning are regular, natural, and sustained. Religious conversion involves a symbolic reinterpretation and a social reorganization of reality. Religious conversion transforms one’s traditions of meaning and one’s sense of community. As I will discuss, the quest for 2 For example, Robert Hefner (1993a) demonstrates that eastern Javanese converted from Hinduism to Christianity in the 1960s because it provided a less stigmatized social identity in an increasingly Muslim territory. Hefner shows that converts may have a very minimal knowledge of the religious doctrines before converting and that the politics of selfidentification play a more prominent role in the decision to convert. Nicole Constable (1994) makes the same suggestion about the Hakka in Hong Kong, who convert to Christianity to mitigate the social stigma associated with the Hakka ethnicity. 3 In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Emile Durkheim makes the argument that religion is the symbolic form that society objectifies itself. He writes, “Religious force is none other than the feeling that the collectivity inspires in its members, but projected outside the minds that experience them, and objectified” ( 1995 [1912], 230). As products of the collective, religious representations cannot exist apart from the collective.

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community has religious consequences just as the quest for religion holds communal consequences for Taiwanese immigrants. Evangelical Christian symbols and meanings become real in the context of the church community, and the church community gains vitality because of the power of its Christian symbols and meanings. As institutions, conversion involves both people seeking religion and religions seeking people. And as their lives become connected with the religious community, immigrants begin to see this world through other-worldly lenses. In the following sections, I discuss how Christian conversion is driven by immigrants’ needs for belonging and security, institutional strategies of evangelism and questions of meaning. None of these processes are exclusive of each other, rather they are mutually reinforcing. “WHEN YOU COME TO AMERICA YOU NO LONGER HAVE A SAFETY NET” When I asked Mr. Hou to describe his experience immigrating to the United States, he told me, “The first thing you have to realize is that when you come to America you no longer have a safety net. You’re all on your own now.” Mr. Hou is a jovial forty-two-year-old motel manager who immigrated from Taipei, Taiwan to the United States nine years ago. In Taiwan, he was a baker. His boss there told him that his friend was opening a Chinese bakery in Southern California and needed a baker. This friend would sponsor his visa and pay him twice what he was earning in Taiwan. Mr. Hou jumped at the opportunity, thinking that he would make enough money to return to Taiwan and open his own bakery. In his own words, Mr. Hou explains: “He [the boss] made is sound like it was really good, but of course we didn’t know the truth. He told me that if I came to America I would be able to earn at least $4,000 a month. And with the exchange rate in Taiwan at the time $4,000 USD was worth four months of work in Taiwan! So at the time I thought that was great. I’d come here and work for two to three years and then go back to Taiwan and open a bakery myself.” Knowing only one acquaintance, Mr. Hou, his wife and two sons settled in one of the suburbs of Southern California. Mr. Hou worked long hours at the bakery. His wife stayed at home and watched the children, but had little to do since most of the time the children were at school. A few doors down from the Hous lived the Wus, a Taiwanese family who attended Grace Evangelical Church. An outgoing and sociable woman, Mrs. Wu took it upon herself to introduce Mrs. Hou to Taiwanese American life and invited her to church Bible studies and social events at Grace Church. With her warm and friendly personality, Mrs. Hou easily found

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a community of friends in the church, and became known to them as “Sister Mei Hwa,” Mei Hwa being her first name. Soon she was hosting Bible studies at her house and joining the church choir. She began to depend on women in the church for things like childcare and transportation, favors that in Taiwan she would have asked her family. It was also through the women at the church that Mrs. Hou learned an endless string of useful tidbits—as where to find an English tutor for her sons, for example, or how to order cable television, and where to buy the cheapest phone card to call Taiwan. Sometimes, Mr. Hou went to church with his wife and sons. He found church members to be pleasant and “exceptionally happy.” He enjoyed the socializing but the Christian religion was not for him. During long sermons he would often steal outside for a smoke, something most Christians frowned upon. After several months, Mrs. Hou told her husband that she wanted to convert and get baptized as a Christian. He was fine with her involvement in the church. After all what was she supposed to do all day? But this business of getting baptized was another matter altogether. No one else in their family was Christian and, short of a miracle, he certainly was not converting. Financially things were not going so well for Mr. Hou. Shaking his head, Mr. Hou told me, “America wasn’t what my boss said it would be like.” Mr. Hou was not earning $4000 a month. “In reality,” he said, “I was earning only $1000 and on top of that my family’s living expenses were even higher in America.” In Taipei he and his family occupied one floor of a three-story home that he shared with his parents and brother. It might have been less spacious than their suburban home now, but it was also much cheaper. There, he and his wife each had a moped and were not burdened by the car payments and insurance that he now had in the United States. To add to his worry, the bakery did not have many customers, and looked as if it might even close. The established Chinese bakery chains such as Diamond Bakery and Marie’s had already cornered the market. Losing his job would jeopardize not only his financial status but also his immigration status in the United States. As a last resort, he could turn to his family in Taiwan for financial help or just return to Taiwan altogether, but his pride stopped him. People back home in Taiwan would consider him a failure. According to his original plan he was supposed to make money to bring back to Taiwan. How could he return empty handed? In desperation, Mr. Hou started praying to the Christian God for a miracle. According to Mr. Hou, his prayers were answered a week later. Mrs. Hou received a phone call from Sister Lan earlier in the day. The Lan’s owned two motels in the area and wanted to know if they would be interested in managing one of them. Unbeknownst to Mr. Hou, his wife had

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shared his story at a prayer meeting a couple of weeks before. The news that Sister Hou’s husband needed a new job spread around the church. Without lifting a single finger, his problem was solved. After that, Mr. Hou started attending church regularly. He did not know whether it was God who answered his prayer, but he was indebted to someone. God, or the Lan’s, attending church was the only way he could show his gratitude. Six months later, he and his wife were baptized as Christians. This was the miracle that Mr. Hou needed. As the story of Mr. Hou illustrates, the turn to religion often arises out of the need to resolve practical problems that immigrants may face in the United States. The safety net that Mr. Hou referred to is that security of having someone or something to turn to in time of need. In Taiwan, that safety net is obvious—the family. But in the United States, things are very different. Like the Hous, some immigrants have no family members in Southern California. Eighteen of the fifty respondents in my sample had no extended family in the area. Half of the Christian converts had no extended family nearby compared to 20 percent of Buddhists. Many Taiwanese who immigrate through skill-based or investment visas do not have local family members compared to those who immigrate through family reunification. Others have family members in Southern California that they rely on initially to adjust. But immigrants frequently claimed that they were reluctant to “bother” their relatives for help. These relatives may have come only a few years earlier and are still struggling themselves. Immigrants also complained that the traffic in Los Angeles prevented them seeing their relatives as often as they liked. In the absence of their usual sources of familial support, respondents repeatedly told me how they were forced to be more self-reliant in the United States. Men brought up the heavier financial burdens of living in the United States. Many had lived in extended households in Taiwan and shared the cost of living expenses with other family members. Others were able to inherit property and homes in Taiwan. Although the number of nuclear households has increased substantially in Taiwan, extended households were still common when the respondents in my sample left Taiwan. According to a survey conducted in 1986, when approximately half of my respondents had already migrated to the United States, 56 percent of Taiwanese lived in extended households (Thornton and Lin 1994). Taiwanese women, like other immigrant women in the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Kibria 1993; Glenn 1986; Pessar 1984), complained that the lack of family networks increased the burden of childrearing. In Taiwan, the responsibility of child-rearing is often shared in

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the extended family household. Grandparents, for example, are more involved in child-rearing in Taiwan than other East Asian industrialized countries (Yu 2001a). Furthermore, domestic help is far more common in Taiwan than it is in the United States. Here immigrant women not only have fewer sources of help for childcare, but they also must learn to be mothers in an unfamiliar territory. Things are even more difficult for women in “astronaut households,” who live in the United States with their children while their husbands shuttle back and forth between the United States and Taiwan (Chee 2005). These women are, in effect, single mothers when it comes to parenting. Even for immigrants who have established stable lives, the lack of a safety net continues to be a problem. Like anyone else, they are vulnerable to life’s unexpected circumstances, such as downward turns in the economy, declining health, and death. Where do they turn in times of trouble? Although they are more Americanized than recent immigrants, they continue to seek sources of support within the ethnic community. Even for those who have resided in America for decades, the primary social dealings continue to be within the ethnic community. Often it is the Christian churches that are most available and willing to help. Despite the growing Taiwanese community in Southern California, finding friends and sources of support is not always easy for suburban immigrants. While they enjoy the privacy and spaciousness of suburban living, they also complain about how quiet and remote the suburbs are compared to the liveliness and congeniality of the open streets and outside market in Taiwan. Most Taiwanese come from cities in Taiwan where living conditions are dense and neighborhoods mix public and commercial spaces. They are used to living in multiresidence buildings and interacting frequently with neighbors. The streets of the city are noisy and brimming with life. In the mornings, working people, the elderly and mothers with their children gather around street peddlers and open-air cafes to buy steamed buns and hot sweet soybean milk. Neighbors stop to chat with each other and exchange gossip on the latest news. A visit to the outdoor night market is a social outing for people of all ages—families sharing an evening meal, young people flirting over shaved ice, women showing off their latest fashionable wear. In contrast to Taiwan’s cities, Southern California suburban neighborhoods are full of private lawns, fenced homes, and gated communities. With the high Latino and Asian immigrant population in Southern California, people can find language another barrier to making friends with the neighbors. More (Taiwanese) social outlets have developed, however, as Taiwanese have moved to Southern California in the past three decades. Taiwanese developers have converted many of Southern California’s strip malls into popular social spots that cater to the greater Chinese community. Whereas

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immigrants used to dream about returning to Taiwan to eat Taiwanese delicacies like “stinky tofu,” shaved ice, and “boba” (tapioca pearl tea), now such pleasures are just a fifteen minute drive away. The San Gabriel Valley now has karaoke clubs and tea houses catering to Chinese immigrants. Taiwanese also have an array of voluntary associations based on shared hobbies, politics, professions, schools and hometowns. Church as Extended Family Despite these competing social outlets, churches are still widely popular and draw new members who seek a community. It is well known among Taiwanese immigrants that the ethnic church is the best place to meet people to make friends and business contacts. Unlike members of other social organizations, members of the church are a community who meet regularly and frequently. Grace and other immigrant churches take pride in being not merely a community but indeed a family. “I feel like Christians are really concerned about you,” one church member told me, “They pray for you. Everyone is like your family and they don’t treat you like an outsider.” The church becomes the new family, replacing the extended kin networks and friendship circles that immigrants had in Taiwan. Grace cultivates this familial culture as members of the congregation refer to each other as “sister” and “brother,” and children refer to adults as “uncle” and “aunty.” With their own extended families geographically dispersed, Grace Church members come to rely upon one another as they would rely upon family in Taiwan for emotional, material, social, and spiritual support. For example, the fact that Mr. Hou was offered a job through the church network is quite commonplace and less extraordinary than he believed. Not only did his social networks expand once he became involved in the Christian community, but his status, or sense of trustworthiness, was also enhanced. He did not have to formally apply for the job and prove himself worthy as motel manager. Just as in Taiwan where one’s status or worthiness can be vouched for by one’s kinship line, so Mr. Hou’s relation to the “Grace family” is adequate proof of his capacity. In another case, when a church member opened a new accounting business he invited the entire church to his new office for a special blessing ceremony performed by Pastor Chang, the pastor of Grace Church. While likely motivated by spiritual reasons, the ceremony also functioned to advertise his new business. And by making the office opening into a church event he simultaneously legitimized his professional credibility.4 4 Observing American Protestant sects in 1904, Max Weber writes that “sect membership meant a certificate of moral qualification and especially of business morals for the individ-

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Like a large and well-connected family, members only need to look within the church to satisfy their needs. The church is a self-sufficient community with professionals and specialists of all sorts. There is the church real estate agent, the church computer programmer, the church dentist, the church car mechanic, the church doctor, the church piano teacher, the church hair dresser, the church gardener, the church handyman, and so on. Church members rely on the patronage and referrals of their “brothers” and “sisters” in their businesses. Elderly or low-skilled can even make a living by working under the table within the church community. For example, one older woman is able to supplement her income in retirement by selling bah-tzung/rou zong, a glutinous rice snack that is wrapped in banana leaves, to the church every Sunday. Another man supplements his income by doing odd jobs, such as giving rides to the airport. Although the church does not have a rotating credit system, as some fraternal organizations do, members informally turn to one another for financial help. Respondents have told me that about borrowing money from other church members. Grace Church also reserves money for the poor and those in need among its members. For example, following communion it may take up a “love offering” reserved for the needy in the congregation. Although there are Taiwanese charities like the Buddhist organization Tzu Chi that operate in the larger Chinese immigrant community, giving and receiving help from one’s own “family” is a qualitatively different experience. Members depend on one another to maintain and build their own nuclear families. When church members need someone to watch their children for a few hours, they will more likely turn to a church sister who lives in the same city, rather than a sister by blood, who lives in a suburb one hour away. One divorced woman told me that when her teenage daughter ran away from home, the first person she contacted was the church pastor, and then her friends within the church. An elderly couple whose children live on the east coast adopted a middle-aged woman in the church as their daughter. She calls them “mother” and “father,” and they call her “daughter.” It is she, and not his blood kin, who have taken up the daily filial responsibilities such as visiting them on the weekend and driving them to doctor appointments. In the absence of their own families, immigrants turned to the church. Furthermore, they depend on the church to reproduce Taiwanese moral values to the second generation. Whereas moral education is normally considered the family’s responsibility in Taiwan, it is now shared with the ual” (1946b, 305). No doubt these same principles continue to operate among the Taiwanese Protestants in America.

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church. Like other immigrants, Taiwanese want their children to benefit from the opportunities that the United States has to offer, but are highly critical of what they perceive as a lack of moral values in American society (Espiritu 2003; Yang 1999a; Zhou and Bankston 1998). Taiwanese parents worry that they are losing influence in their children’s lives. Cultural and generational differences complicate their relationships now that their children are surrounded by a foreign and, in their eyes, immoral culture. Parents and children speak a different moral vocabulary. For parents it is the Confucian tradition, while for children it is quite often a language of American individualism. As one frustrated respondent remarked, “We just can’t use our OBC (Overseas-born Chinese) ways on our ABC (American-born Chinese) children!” Her Taiwanese practices of parenting are based on Confucian notions of filial obligation that no longer work on her Taiwanese American children. The popular advice within the larger ethnic community is that children will not go astray if sent to church. Other scholars note how West Indian (Waters 1999), Chinese (Yang 1999a), and Vietnamese (Zhou and Bankston 1998) immigrants rely upon the church to reinforce parental values. Taiwanese immigrant parents use biblical teachings to legitimize and reproduce traditional Taiwanese values. But rather than appealing to a common Confucian moral code, parents appeal to their children’s sense of Christian discipleship. Here is an example of how Dr. Wu, the father of a fourteen-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl, describes why conservative Christian teachings on premarital sex are useful in navigating children through America’s youth culture: “What can you do if your child gets sexually involved with somebody? Well, in Taiwan we never think about that. That society is so conservative. Even before we got married we didn’t know about sex. Believe me, it’s true. Getting this education is very important for kids these days. But if you are a Christian you have some way to guide them in the right direction. Having sexual relations before marriage is not allowed in this religion. You’ve already crossed the boundaries before God.” Taiwanese immigrants are drawn to the church because it provides a moral and ethnic environment for their children in contrast to an unfamiliar and immoral American public (Chen 2006). They rely upon the church—an institution they first joined in the United States—to reproduce traditional Taiwanese moral values. Cultivating Familial Intimacy through Practices and Rituals Like other Chinese churches, Grace Church cultivates intimacy and kinlike relations among members through faith-sharing practices such as cell

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group meetings and home visits (Abel 2006; Zhang 2006). The cell group, or a small Bible study group, is important for cultivating fraternity and trust among Grace Church members. Cell groups are comprised of anywhere from five to ten families, and include people of similar age or professional interests. Meetings include singing, Bible study, sharing, and prayer. Members feel accountable to one another through these meetings because they take turns hosting and leading meetings in their homes each Friday night. The cell groups are organized around what I call intentional practices of intimacy. For example, during meetings members break into groups of two and three to share with one another the events in the week that they wish to praise God for, or bring to God in concern. Burdens like the health of elderly parents or problems raising teenage child are collectively shared. These meetings create a safe and distinct space for people to share details of their personal life that they might otherwise reserve for their family and close friends. Through this intentional practice of intimacy church goers, who were once strangers, become a community, and indeed a family. It was within one of these cell group meetings that Mrs. Hou had shared the news about her husband’s loss of employment that was soon spread to the motel owner. These regular, intimate interactions among cell group members create a tightly knit system of accountability and support.5 Singing songs in cell group meetings is a powerful embodied ritual that binds these communities together. Sometimes the songs are contemporary Christian praise songs, at other times traditional Christian hymns, and other times, Taiwanese folk melodies with Christian lyrics. In all cases, singing becomes a tangible and immediate practice of individual transcendence and community harmony. Cell group members physically express this experience by raising their hands, or closing their eyes, or bowing their heads. Another example of how Grace Church provides intimate social interactions is home visitations. On Tuesday nights, a group of five church members visits the homes of members. Home visitation encourages church members to voice their concerns and share their burdens, in the intimate setting of their own homes. On one visit a man shared his concern about his daughter getting involved with the wrong crowd at high 5 In comparison, Dharma Light Temple also had its version of lay voluntary communities, which they call sutra study groups. These, however, met once a month. Unlike the very intimate and personal nature of the cell group meetings, sutra study meetings were organized around lay members or monastics presenting lectures on the sutras. Discussions that followed had to do with practical life application but few people shared about their personal lives. In comparison to the cell groups as Grace, the sutra study groups were far more focused on studying the sutras rather than cultivating community.

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school. The church members encouraged him to bring his daughter to church to participate in the youth group and later arranged to have one of the youth group members call his daughter and invite her. On another occasion an elderly woman who had just undergone hip surgery voiced that she could not go to physical therapy because her children were working and there was no one to drive her. Immediately a church member volunteered to drive her.

Church as a Social Event But mostly, Taiwanese immigrants are drawn to the church for reasons of friendship, recreation, and social belonging. Sundays are big social events and members may stay at church from morning to late afternoon. For example, members may come early in the morning on Sunday for the prayer meeting, followed by Sunday school, and then the service. After the service, members eat lunch together and socialize. In the afternoons, many stay to attend meetings, choir practice, or to play basketball and softball. Several of the respondents expressed to me how they look forward to Sundays. For example, Mrs. Chang told me how church eases her boredom and loneliness as an immigrant housewife, “When I first came I had nothing to do. When the children were in school I had even more time. The week was so long but Sundays were great. You got to see other people and meet friends and listen to these great messages. The sermons were very easy to accept. I would wait week after week for Sunday to come again. So I didn’t feel alienated because they were all Christian and I wasn’t at the time.” It is easy to become involved in the church community even for nonChristians, as Mr. Kau, an immigrant of nine years, told me, “We started going to church because we wanted to know more people and we felt that Christians were good for us. I joined a fellowship and they assigned events at my house—like taking care of a group of kids. I was never against it. I always participated even though I was not a Christian.” Participating in a cell group meeting feels more like attending a festive family event rather than a religious meeting as demonstrated by one “young families” cell group meeting that I attended. In entering the home of Mr. Song, I removed my shoes and placed them along the twenty-odd other pairs of shoes outside of the front door. The adults were congregated in the kitchen. Men and women in their forties were casually sitting around, laughing and telling stories in Taiwanese and Mandarin about the happenings of the week. They were engineers, computer scientists, doctors, and dentists. The conversation ranged from the stock market to Taiwanese politics, from children’s fashions to real estate. Some of the women were preparing the food, cutting oranges, and

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heating up the fish ball soup. The children, ranging from five to fourteen, were scattered throughout the house. The younger ones were running around the home playing tag. Some had brought their own video games and books. A few were glued to the television. Parents introduced me to the children as “older sister.” To gather everyone for supper, Mr. Song clapped his hands, calling the children to grace before the meal. We sang a hymn, “Thank you Lord,” some of us in Taiwanese and others in English. Mr. Song prayed in English for the benefit of those children who could not understand Taiwanese. And then we sat down to eat. This was not a potluck for the culinary novice. It was a feast of delicacies. Women had spent hours in the kitchen preparing special Taiwanese dishes like rice stick noodles, sticky rice, and sesame chicken stew. One member had even brought Kentucky Fried Chicken, which the children devoured instantly. People took turns praising the cooks and the conversations about the mundane and the ridiculous resumed. And then after the Bible study, people once again congregated in the kitchen for dessert and for more socializing. This time devoted to socializing took up fully half of the meeting. While religion may be the explicit purpose for the gathering, it would not be far fetched to say that socializing is the highlight of the evening. Many of the gatherings at Grace are like this one, preceded or followed by potluck meals where people come together and share things about their daily lives. When I told the members of a fellowship group that I wanted to observe them for my research they told me jokingly that all I had to write was that they ate a lot. Indeed food is a significant part of church life at Grace and wherever I went there was food, and plenty of it. Food serves a very distinct purpose at Grace. Whereas church events are organized around planned activities such as sermons, Bible studies, or prayers, meals are unstructured times when people can freely socialize. For this reason, meals can last for hours. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that meals are the reason that some people come to church. There are some who always seem to make it to church just on time for lunch. Those who were dozing off during the sermon wake up during lunchtime and are engaged in animated discussions ranging from Taiwan politics to gardening tips to children’s SAT scores. Meals are important times for immigrants to exchange information on practical life issues, such as retirement funds, parenting, tax preparation, and visas. And business mixes freely with pleasure, as the church herbalist consults people about their ailments, and the Amway lady is selling her products, and the car mechanic is passing out his business card. Once involved in the church, few complain about loneliness or social isolation. But the Grace community demands as much as it offers. Some Christians complain that church activities and responsibilities are too demanding and time-consuming. Church activities can occupy nearly every

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night of the week, much to the chagrin of some of the family. For most of the church members, their social lives revolve around these church activities.6 Respondents told me that after getting involved in Grace, they have fewer non-Christian friends and that most of their friends are from the church. Between balancing family, work, and church responsibilities, few have time to join other organizations or make friends outside of the church. Once involved in the church, it is quite difficult to extricate oneself from the web of responsibilities and relationships that one has developed. Members have come to depend on one another for support and stability. This is not to say that there are no tensions within the church community. Many of the respondents said otherwise. But like members of the family, they “stick together through thick and thin,” as one respondent told me. Becoming religious is a way that immigrants address the practical problems they face as new members of American society. But none of these problems are necessarily “religious,” nor do they warrant religious solutions. Taiwanese would certainly not look to a temple in Taiwan for these sources of support. And yet they turn to religion in the United States. One reason immigrants turn to religion to solve these problems is the unique organizational structure of American religion. Religions in the United States, regardless of religious tradition, have adopted the congregational forms of its predominantly Protestant Christian religious heritage (Warner 1994; Yang and Ebaugh 2001a). American religions are voluntary lay organizations and not monastic communities, or state churches. Religion is a way that Americans form communities and has long been the bedrock of American voluntarism (Tocqueville 2000; Bellah et al. 1985). But this does not explain the particular attraction to Christianity, rather than other religions or voluntary associations, given the family conflict that conversion can create. To understand why immigrants are attracted to Christianity, I examine institutional factors that shape Christian conversion among Taiwanese immigrants. Part of the reason immigrants turn to evangelical Christianity lies in the nature of the churches themselves, particularly how theological notions of salvation translate into institutional strategies of growth and community development. GRACE CHURCH: AN INSTITUTIONAL MISSION TO EVANGELIZE Hanging on the church office wall is an expansive map of the world, titled “Status of Global Evangelization,” where different regions of the world are color coded according to the percentage of the population that is Christian. The map is a visible reminder to those at Grace Church that 6 Nancy Ammerman (1987) also makes the observation that church activities consume most of members’ free time in her study of Christian fundamentalists.

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most of the world is yet unsaved and needs to hear the gospel. Like other American evangelical churches, Chinese evangelical churches in the United States make church growth through evangelization a priority (Smith 1998; Roozen, McKinney, and Carroll 1988; Hunter 1983; Miller 1997; Yang 1999a). Pastors at evangelical Chinese American churches like Grace Church have been trained at evangelical seminaries like Fuller Seminary or Talbot Seminary in Southern California, and are influenced by the goals of the larger evangelical culture. Biblically this evangelical mission is rooted in the “Great Commission” found in Acts 1:8, where Jesus Christ commands his disciples to spread the gospel to the end of the earth. In particular, Grace Church sees its special mission to bring the gospel to the Chinese- and Taiwanese-speaking population. To achieve this, Grace Church has set an organizational goal to plant fifty churches around the world by the year 2010. Like other religious groups that successfully recruit new members, Grace Evangelical Church’s evangelization strategy relies on personal networks and friendships (Ammerman 1987; Lofland and Stark 1965; Bainbridge 1978). Grace Church works to reach its organizational goal by instilling the responsibility of evangelization in its members. It does this by creating an institutional culture of personal evangelism. Grace Church uses several strategies to institutionalize evangelism. At baptism, converts publicly promise to share their faith with non-Christians. Pastors and lay leaders are constantly urging church members to bring more friends to church. They create goal-oriented slogans to remind the congregation of the larger Grace Evangelical Church vision. For example, in a Sunday sermon Pastor Chang outlined how church members could participate in church growth through the “1–2-1” plan, which asks each church member to bring at least two new people into the church in the year 2000 through personal “one-to-one” relationships. Another common technique is to have members commit to evangelize to a certain number of people or to a certain group—for example, coworkers or neighbors—within a specified time period. These motivational tactics are especially effective because they translate grandiose and abstract institutional goals into concrete and measurable personal goals. The duty to evangelize differentiates evangelical Christianity from other religions, as evidenced in one respondent’s remarks about sharing the “Good News,” “You also have to understand that the Buddhists don’t evangelize like we Christians. They talk about having a good heart and doing good deeds. That’s it. I feel like they provide good guidelines for living like don’t do things that hurt others, be a good person. That’s it. It’s not like Christianity where we are supposed to be good people already, and on top of that share the Good News.”

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During meetings when members solicit prayer requests, individuals frequently ask others to pray that non-Christian friends and family will come to know God. At Grace Church, inquiring about someone’s state of salvation is a common way of showing concern. Evangelical churches like Grace Church believe that the key to effective evangelizing is not revival meetings or distributing religious tracts, but developing personal relationships with non-Christians and incorporating them into their Christian community (Abel 2006; Zhang 2006). All of the Christian converts were introduced to a church by other Taiwanese. Most of the Christians were introduced through people they interacted with frequently, such as good friends, family members, or neighbors. However, many were also introduced through acquaintances with whom they had professional relationships, such as their doctor, bank teller, or travel agent. Several Grace Church members told me about sharing their faith in professional settings. One dentist in the church is known in the larger Taiwanese community for evangelizing to his patients. People jokingly call him “pastor.” Mr. Chang, a convert of six years who is an X-ray technician, is especially excited about sharing his faith with his colleagues and patients, “I really like to share the Good News. Whenever I learn something in Bible study or church I’m really eager to share it with my patients or colleagues. I’ll tell my patients ‘God will help you. If you have any burdens, pray and God will listen. If you have disease pray and God will heal you because God listens.’ I pray with my patients. They trust us because we are professionals. And when I pray for them they trust me. And if they speak Chinese I’ll invite them to church.” Although an avid church-goer now, Mr. Chang admits that he first attended church because he needed to “save face” against persistent invitations by his neighbor, “He invited me to church a few times and I always said that I was too busy and couldn’t go. And then one morning his wife called me first and then he called me after her to invite me to church. I was too embarrassed to say no, so to save face I went.” Mr. Chang’s experience of being cornered into attending church is common. All the Buddhists in my sample had been invited to church at one time or another by a fellow Taiwanese immigrant. Like Mr. Chang, many of the Christian converts had been invited to church many times before they finally went. People remark that they found church to be an odd experience at first. Having been culturally socialized to hide their emotions, they were uncomfortable with the emotional expressiveness of the church members. For example, members at Grace Church often lift their hands or close their eyes when praying or singing, like other American evangelicals. To show agreement with the pastor, some members say “amen” out loud during prayers and sermons.

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Although attending church may be a strange experience, newcomers rarely complain about feeling unwelcome at church. On Sunday morning, members stand in the lobby greeting newcomers and old members. During the service, the pastor introduces newcomers and frequently mentions biographical information such as their hometown in Taiwan, or the location of their business in Southern California. During lunch, visitors are always served first. To incorporate new membership, the congregation has a “welcome group” or “caring group” that is in charge of welcoming and “following up” on newcomers. One of the church leaders describes the welcoming procedures as follows, “there’s a caring group and there’s a caring group leader. We have people assigned to care for that person. Of course when we assign we try not to make the person feel like it’s just a formality. That person will call the newcomer. We try to make friends with that person. That’s the right intention to have when you try to care for somebody . . . everybody has to be in a caring group at some point and you take turns.”“Follow-up” procedures such as calling and visiting are meant to make newcomers feel welcome and connected to the church community. Compared to the Sunday services, cell group meetings, and monthly Friday night fellowship meetings or other church social events are intimate settings that are more conducive to meeting others and developing friendships. Pastor Chang says that he encourages church members to bring their friends to these more personal and less intimidating meetings first. Like other Chinese churches, Grace Church cultivates personal relationships through cell group meetings and home visitations as an evangelizing strategy (Abel 2006; Zhang 2006). Among the Christian converts, many joined cell groups first before attending Sunday services. Once a month, all of the cell groups come together for a Friday Fellowship meeting at the church. Grace Church attracts non-Christians to these meetings by featuring lectures and discussions on topics that are not religious, but of general interest to the immigrant population. Popular lectures often feature not a pastor, but a professional psychologist who speaks on dealing with relationships between husband and wife, or parent and child.7 Other meetings may focus on topics such as saving for retirement, investing in the stock market, or maintaining a healthy diet. Following these meetings, members spend a good deal of time enjoying Chinese snacks and socializing. Like other evangelically minded religious groups (Ammerman 1987), Grace Evangelical Church uses social activities such as ski trips, camping, picnics, and music concerts as opportunities to attract non-Christians and 7 James Davison Hunter (1983) has pointed out that this concern for issues dealing with psychology and family is shared among many American conservative Christians.

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share their faith with them. So plentiful and attractive are these social programs that Christian churches are often accused of being “social clubs.” Indeed the common advice in the Taiwanese community is that if one needs friends one should go to church. Immigrants know that churches are prime locations for networking on both a personal and professional basis. Not only does one find clients and business partners at church, one finds friends and potential spouses. For example, when introducing single newcomers of marriageable age during the Sunday service, Pastor Chang frequently notes how eligible a bachelor or bachelorette he or she might be. The congregation chuckles but no doubt the comment raises the interest of some matchmaker, worried mother, or single person in the congregation. Grace Church knows that non-Christians are frequently drawn to its community for utilitarian, rather than religious reasons. Taiwanese attend church events to build business contacts, to find friends, or perhaps just to get someone to stop pestering them to attend church. For the church, these appealing social programs are only a means to the greater end of bringing the non-Christian to Christ. Deacon Chu contrasts church activities with those of non-Christian social groups: I have joined a social group on a ski trip, but after you came back no one will call you and invite you back unless you make some friends and that’s on a personal basis. As an organization they don’t have any intention to keep you there. They put out an event every year and they’ll get some people that will come back. But with a church, the intention is different. When they put out an event, the intention is to lead people to know God and to lead people to realize how valuable a person is, so there are follow-up procedures, and it’s to care about them. After the camp people from the church want to know how you are doing because they care about them and that’s what the Bible says.

The usage of technical language such as “follow-up procedures” illustrates how seriously church members take evangelizing. It is not a haphazard enterprise, but one that is carefully coordinated and executed. Evangelization is a religious duty of each and every Christian at Grace Church. In effect, the church embeds its institutional goals into the personal religious practices of its members. Perhaps what makes Grace Church so successful in converting Taiwanese is not only that it attracts visitors through its programs and network, but that the church quickly incorporates them and makes them indispensable to the community. The majority of Christians in my sample converted within five years of moving to Southern California. Being relatively new to Southern California, they had fewer ties and obligations to competing organizations. In addition Christians are less likely to

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have local extended family obligations than Buddhists. Once newcomers attend the church, they are encouraged to “get involved.” New and old members alike are given responsibilities in the church community that serve as “mechanisms of commitment” (Kanter 1968; Miller 1997; Lerner 1996). For example, quite soon after getting involved in a cell group, individuals are asked to host meetings in their home, even if they are not Christian. Running the church requires an endless number of rotating responsibilities among members. Cell groups rotate serving lunch on Sundays. Individuals rotate setting up chairs for services, teaching Sunday school, making tea, directing traffic, and the like. Leadership positions in the church are equally plentiful. At Grace Church, making people feel a part of the community means making them feel responsible for the community. The more invested they are in the community, the more likely they will become Christian. I do not think that the church creates volunteer positions specifically to recruit and keep new members. Relying on volunteers rather than a paid staff is a consequence of both financial necessity and religious organization. But the organizational structure of the church, specifically its heavy reliance on volunteers, shapes how individuals think of themselves as part of the religious congregation. The church relies more heavily on the voluntary involvement of the congregation to keep itself afloat than does the Buddhist temple. Whereas the church has only six paid staff members, the temple has thirty monastics to run its activities and programs. But even smaller temples with fewer monastics do not provide as much programming that the church does. The volunteers at the temple are managed and organized by the monastics. A smaller proportion of the Buddhist laity volunteers compared to the church. This organizational difference shapes how members feel toward their congregation. Temple volunteers feel that they are helping out the temple and monastics, whereas church volunteers feel that they are letting down their “brothers” and “sisters” if they neglect their church responsibilities. Unlike temple volunteers, church volunteers feel that they are indispensable to the survival of the church. Why the Christians Aren’t Buddhists Buddhist temples do less than their Christian counterparts to attract and welcome people. Buddhists do not share their religion with their friends, or invite them to the temple as persistently as Christians do. For example, when I asked one Christian respondent if she had Buddhist friends she said, “Yes, but they don’t bring me to the temple or share with me about Buddhism. Instead, we [in reference to her husband and herself] evangelize to them.”

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Evangelical Christians and Buddhists have very different understandings of salvation and the need to prosyletize. Evangelical Christianity claims that only those who are Christian can go to heaven. Although most Christians in my sample did not completely agree with this teaching, they still took the duty to evangelize very seriously. By contrast, Buddhists in my sample regard Buddhism as only one among infinite pathways to enlightenment. Several Buddhists quoted to me the popular Buddhist saying that there are “84,000 paths to enlightenment.” Buddhism also teaches that sentient beings can undergo multiple rebirths in numerous states and have many opportunities to attain enlightenment. Evangelical Christianity, however, teaches that humans only have one life to become Christian. Hence, Buddhism, in comparison to Christianity, has a more relaxed approach toward prosyletizing. This nonexclusive attitude about salvation shapes the temple’s treatment toward visitors. In comparison to the immigrant Christian church, respondents find that Chinese Buddhist temples make fewer efforts to attract and incorporate newcomers into their communities. Newcomers are not announced or welcomed at temple rituals and ceremonies. Interactions with others at the temple can be minimal unless one makes the effort to take a dharma study class or become a volunteer. Some of the Christian respondents have attended classes at a Buddhist temple or organization but stopped because they made no friends. Unlike Christians, Buddhists do not cite community as the reason for their attraction to Buddhism. While some members of the church were curious about my relationship with Jesus Christ, no one at the temple inquired into the state of my salvation or my religious practices. Many of my Buddhist respondents did not attend the temple regularly, but maintained their Buddhist practices at home. For Buddhists, temple participation is not an indication of piety. For example, in a survey conducted among Korean Americans, 97 percent of Protestants believed they must attend Sunday services compared to only 12 percent of Buddhists (Kwon 2003). Members of Grace Church would call each other if someone had missed Sunday service, however, Buddhists did not. Buddhists had a more laissez-faire attitude about differing levels of religiosity. They would often use fate to explain why some people are awakened and others are not. Institutional factors also help explain why immigrants were not attracted to Christianity in Taiwan. Christian churches in Taiwan do not evangelize to the extent that immigrant churches do. One respondent observed, “It seems like the Christians in Taiwan aren’t like the Christians here in the United States who will go out and try to evangelize. They are themselves Christian but they won’t feel compelled to share the Good News with others.” Another Christian describes his disappointing experience attending a Christian church in Taiwan after converting in the United

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States, “I’ve returned to Taiwan and went to church on Sunday morning. I’m not used to the worship service in Taiwan. During the entire service it was just me in the pew. And when I entered the church I spoke to the pastor and told him that Pastor Chang introduced me to the church it didn’t make a difference. No one even came up to me to talk after the service. So I think that if I were in my homeland it’s unlikely that I would have become a Christian.” But even if Christian churches in Taiwan were more savvy in their “marketing strategies” it is unlikely that they would have gained significantly more followers. Indeed, while the rate of Christian conversion is rising in many Asian countries such as China and Korea, the number of Christians in Taiwan remains at a stable low despite active missionary efforts. Individuals do not make religious decisions in a vacuum but are informed by social and cultural contexts. The image of Christianity as a foreign religion and its prohibition of ancestral veneration prevent most Taiwanese in Taiwan from considering Christianity as a realistic religious option (Chao 2006). In Taiwan people face social pressures to practice their traditional religion and not be Christian. For example, one respondent told me, “In Taiwan you feel like it’s very strange to go to a church. When you pass by a church you just don’t want to go in. You’re used to bai bai [“worship” in traditional religion]. Most of your neighbors bai bai. And if they are Buddhists and you go to church, people will talk about you and they’ll say that you have nothing to do with your ancestors. So you feel like it’s just a place that’s wrong or where you don’t belong.” In contrast, Taiwanese immigrants feel considerably more freedom in the United States because they are not constrained by the expectations of and obligations to their families, “There’s more freedom in America. You can do whatever you want without anyone stopping you. If you went back to Taiwan you’d have more people gossiping and your neighbors or relatives would gossip and criticize you.” Context also explains why immigrants did not become Buddhists. Although it would be more natural for most immigrants to continue their inherited religious practices in the United States, many are repelled from the temples by the negative impressions of Buddhism they had formed in Taiwan. Despite recent modernizing reforms in Chinese Buddhism in the last thirty years, many Taiwanese still associate Buddhism with superstitious, backward rituals for the deceased. For example, many respondents mention the “undignified” Buddhist funeral rituals where hired mourners wail loudly for people they do not know. Others recall being forced to drink water mixed with incense to heal bodily ailments. Western influences on education after World War II led many to adopt outlooks of scientific rationality (Chen 1994; Marsh 1996). Such that, to many Taiwanese, Buddhism seems incompatible with their modern lives. Indeed

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Chinese Buddhist organizations must constantly counter these negative stereotypes by justifying the rationality and modernity of their religion. This impression of Buddhism as outdated and outmoded is an obstacle that prevents many immigrants from seriously considering the religion as anything other than a cultural tradition. CONVERTING: BELIEVING BY BELONGING So far I have outlined how immigrant needs and institutional outreach strategies drive conversion. These explanations regard religious conversion as a change in group membership rather than as a change in worldview. In symbolic-meaning models of religious change conversion is a systematic reordering of personal meanings. In these models, the impetus for religious change is a cognitive, intellectual drive to find more comprehensive, systematic, and relevant explanations of reality. Converts are religious seekers who intellectually evaluate the religious tradition’s capacity for personal meaning. In emphasizing conversion as a cognitive and intellectual shift, symbolic-meaning models tend to neglect how nonreligious social factors also drive religious change. But the experiences of Taiwanese immigrants suggest that, rather than purely a change in meaning or a change in group membership, the processes of belonging to the community and adopting Christian meanings mutually reinforce one another. Practices Preceding Beliefs Like the converts to Orthodox Judaism in Lynn Davidman’s study (1991), most Chinese immigrants are initially attracted to Christianity for nonreligious reasons (Abel 2006; Zhang 2006). They are drawn to the religion by the friendship networks and the ethnic community that they find in the church. Practical concerns such as parenting, finances, and social belonging dominate their personal religious agenda, not the problem of meaning. Indeed, those without family in Southern California convert to Christianity more quickly than those with family in the area, suggesting that the presence of local kinship influences openness to Christianity. Other nonreligious factors, such as the social stigma associated with Christianity in Taiwan, family commitments, and negative stereotypes of Buddhism, deeply influence Taiwanese immigrants’ religious choices as well. This is not to say that religious conversion involves no religious seeking, but rather that soul searching and religious questioning frequently are byproducts of the search for solutions to concrete everyday problems.

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Becoming part of the church community means participating in Christian practices. Maintaining relationships in the church requires regular church participation. Individuals give back to the church community that has given them so much by getting involved: chaperoning a youth group event, hosting a Bible study, or organizing an outing. Newcomers who have been guests in the homes of others for cell group meetings feel that it is their turn to host and return the favors. Joining a group like the Grace Church community means assuming some of its responsibilities, regardless of religious conviction. The converts in my study, individuals acquired Christian practices before claiming Christian convictions. Studies of converts to Orthodox Judaism (Davidman 1991) and members of Alcoholic’s Anonymous (Greil and Rudy 1983) concur that people often experience behavioral changes prior to ideological commitment. Most Christian converts have been attending church for at least a few months before they actually “accept Christ.” They may be involved in the church through Bible studies, Sunday services, church retreats, and other social activities. Many even claim that they prayed regularly to God before becoming Christian. They are doing Christian things before they consider themselves Christian. Take Dr. Liu, a successful engineer in his forties who earned his Ph.D. in the United States. Dr. Liu has been actively involved in Grace for two years, regularly attending cell group meetings on Friday nights and services on Sundays, as well as church social events on the weekends. Despite his Christian behaviors, Dr. Liu has not been baptized, nor does he consider himself to be a Christian—at least not yet. He initially became involved at Grace because he was concerned about raising his children in a society that had too much freedom and no morality. “Freedom built the United States and freedom will destroy it,” he says. Taiwan, as he remembers it, had little freedom or choice. “We wanted to make sure that the kids grow up on the right track so we take them to church.” Four years ago he got involved at a Chinese Buddhist temple, attending their weekly sutra studies. He was involved for a year and then stopped. He never felt like he was part of the community. Furthermore, it was not a place that he could bring his family because they did not have programs for the children. Although he is not a Christian, Dr. Liu prays on a daily basis, both on his own and with the children before meals. He also reads the Bible and Christian literature regularly. Dr. Liu claims that he has changed after going to church and has become more mild-mannered and patient. He attributes his change to the recognition that “God made people with different gifts and not everyone is the same.” Although he exhibits Christian behaviors and worldviews, Dr. Liu has not yet converted. He does not dismiss the possibility of converting in the future, however, Dr. Liu

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claims that he cannot convert yet because he does not believe everything in the Bible. The example of Dr. Liu illustrates the typical experience for most Christians. He is drawn to the church because it is a place where he and his family can be part of the Taiwanese community. But the consequences of his involvement with the church have gone beyond his original concerns. In joining the community he has adopted the behaviors and worldviews of Christians. His socialization into the Christian community preceded his actual commitment to Christian belief. And before becoming Christian, he was already acting Christian. Religions Creating Religious Seekers In a few cases individuals are drawn to the church because they are genuine religious seekers. But the reality for most of my respondents is that they became religious seekers after being exposed to the religious message. Religion can raise questions of meaning and existence that are otherwise ignored in the normal course of life. Religion frames and articulates what may be abstract questions of meaning. And even more important, religion answers these questions decisively and authoritatively. Converts are sometimes portrayed as religious seekers whose existential questions lead to them to new religions (Roof 1993). In my sample, however, it was reverse: exposure to Christianity initiated existential questioning. Religions create distinct problems of meaning that they can best answer. Max Weber writes that the foremost question of all religions is this: “If the world as a whole and life in particular were to have a meaning, what might it be, and how would the world have to look in order to correspond to it?” (1978:451). It is this inconsistency between everyday reality and the transcendental ideal that drives the religious quest. The more articulated and developed this vision of the transcendent is in the mind of the individual, the greater the tension between the reality and ideal. This tension generates the need for explanation and for action. Most Taiwanese come to the United States with a very different experience of religion than most Americans. To Taiwanese and many Asians, religion is primarily ritual practice rather than belief or doctrine. Few immigrants had any exposure to religious education, text, or doctrine before coming to the United States. Most Taiwanese identify their traditional religion using the term bai bai which describes the act of worship, rather than commitment to a deity and community, or observance of a set of doctrines and ethical proscriptions. Indeed the concept of conviction or belief is largely irrelevant to the practice of lay popular religion in Taiwan and many parts of the world.

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The Christian symbolic universe introduces a new set of dilemmas, questions, and solutions that Taiwanese immigrants may not have considered prior to their exposure to Christianity. Under the Christian assumption that the world is created in a purposeful order by an omnipotent God, questions that are unimaginable under a different cosmological universe now become possible. For example, where a creation story is virtually unknown among most Asian religious traditions, the creation story figures prominently in the Christian tradition. One respondent told me that the Buddha is claimed to have stated that one should never wonder about one’s origins. Many Buddhist parents have told me that they are at a loss for words when their children ask them “Where did I come from?” and “Did God create me?” because they are not familiar with any Buddhist answers to these questions. Individuals who were never confronted with these questions are suddenly challenged to provide answers, and having already condemned Buddhism as “superstitious” and “backward,” many Taiwanese do not consider it as a viable source of knowledge. Religions raise the questions that they can best answer. To be sure, Christian-framed questions are often best answered by Christianity just as Buddhist-framed questions are most adequately answered by Buddhism. For example, in their interviews, individual Buddhists are distinctively concerned with the problem of suffering. This is no surprise since Buddhist teachings continually refer to the ultimate cause of suffering and Buddhist practices are oriented around alleviating the suffering of others and themselves. For those who become enmeshed in the Buddhist worldview, this desire to alleviate suffering and escape from the cycle of rebirth becomes one of the primary sources of their religious drive. On the other hand, evangelical Christianity revolves around the worship of an all-powerful deity, and is concerned with how to live one’s life in accordance with the will of God. Questions such as “Is there a God?” and “What is God’s will?” make little sense in a Buddhist cosmology. These only become problems once people are exposed to Christianity. For example, when I asked Mrs. Liao why she was drawn to Christianity over Buddhism she explains, “I think the biggest difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that Christianity tells you how God created the world. Buddhism doesn’t tell you this. They don’t tell you where people come from. Only the Bible tells us this. Just think about how amazing it is that normally a woman’s breast does not have milk but when she is pregnant she begins to lactate. There must be someone who has created this so orderly and perfectly. There must be a creator.” However, when I asked Mrs. Liao if she had ever asked these questions before attending church she admits that she did not because she was “too busy” to ponder these issues. Coincidentally these questions started to arise only after she came into contact with Christianity. Like others, Mrs.

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Liao only started to ask “Christian” questions of meaning once she was exposed to a cosmology where these questions were possible. Non-Christians who are exposed to Christianity must now reckon with the possibility that a God exists who created them and has a particular will for them. Just as the church provokes religious hunger, it also provides the nourishment to satisfy the need. In my sample, individuals were not drawn to Chrisitanity to provide meaning, but through belonging to the church some became meaning-seeking. That is, religions are not only meaning-producing institutions, but institutions that produce meaningseeking individuals. And certainly a church such as Grace Church, which provokes religious questioning, is also well-equipped to provide solutions. People wrestle with these existential questions though the communal and social support of the church. As sociologists have noted in studies of religious and secular communities, the network of interdependence that members develop within the community leads people to ask questions and seek answers within the community and not outside (Ammerman 1987; Davidman 1991; Greil and Rudy 1984; Kanter 1968, 1972). An example of this is Mr. Tsai, an energetic chiropractor in his midthirties. According to Mr. Tsai, he reluctantly attended Grace Evangelical Church for the first time after his neighbor invited him so many times that he could no longer politely refuse. He started going on a monthly basis because he claims that “the people were very nice and the free lunch was pretty good.” After making more friends he was invited to attend the Bible study meetings. He says that he and his wife became “on fire” about Christianity after attending the Bible study meetings because “we would wrestle with a lot of questions and we would learn a lot and at the same time be with our friends.” Quite soon after participating in the Bible study, the group assigned meetings at Mr. Tsai’s home. Mr. Tsai attended church weekly and become actively involved because he found the Christian message challenging and enjoyed the warmth of the Grace community. Several converts had been exposed to Christianity in the United States, but none of them had joined a Christian fellowship, nor were they interested in Christianity until joining Grace Church. The example of Mr. Ting illustrates how participating in a religious community can impassion one’s religious quest. As Ann Swidler shows in her study of middle-class Americans and love, participation in a community stimulates “a culturally guided examination of one’s life” (2001, 52). Concerns about God’s will now become real forces in individuals’ personal lives as they share these with a community of others. Converts experience religious conversion not only as an intellectual transformation in the world of symbolic meanings, but also as a profound transformation in their sense of community. The symbols and meanings of Christianity come alive in the context of a community, and the community is sustained by the sacred power of these religious symbols.

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The strong commitments to one another within the community reinforce the Christian symbolic universe because it prevents individuals from seeking answers elsewhere. This may be the reason that the majority of Christians in my sample converted within five years of moving to Southern California, before forming strong commitments to other groups. This also explains why more Christians in my sample have no extended family in the area compared to Buddhists. Taiwanese immigrants who become Christians have fewer familial obligations. They are more free to commit to the church. Once involved in the Grace community, church activities can occupy every weekend and weekday evening. For most church members, their social lives revolved around the church. Respondents told me that after getting involved in Grace, they have fewer non-Christian friends and that most of their friends are from the church. In between balancing family, work and church responsibilities, few have time to join other organizations or make friends outside of the church. Some even told me that their non-Christian relatives feared that religious activities would take them away from time spent with them. For those involved in the church, it is quite difficult to extricate themselves from the web of responsibilities and relationships that they developed. Members have come to depend on one another for support and stability. Their social commitments to the community reinforce commitment to a Christian symbolic universe by preventing them from seeking other ideological alternatives. Normalizing Conversion: Creating a Culture of Conversion But doing and believing Christian things is a very different matter from becoming Christian. After all, behaving and thinking like a Christian does not bear the same consequences of breaking tradition that converting to Christianity does. In fact, to many Taiwanese, casually attending a Christian church is an acceptable, even desirable activity, whereas converting to Christianity crosses the line since Protestant Christianity prohibits participation in rituals of ancestral veneration. To family members, conversion to Christianity may indicate that one’s loyalties are no longer bound to the family but lie elsewhere. For this reason, religious conversion is a daunting decision and requires more serious deliberation than simply joining a church. The church recognizes that this is an obstacle, and it cultivates a culture where conversion is normalized and encouraged. It does this by redefining the meaning of conversion, offering conversion scripts, ritualizing and routinizing conversion, and exerting explicit and implicit pressures to convert. As individuals become increasingly involved in the church community, their primary sources of reference are no longer their family members in

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Taiwan, or their non-Christian friends, but the new family that they have formed at Grace Evangelical Church. Individuals identify with the church as they mutually depend on the community for support. As Taiwanese immigrants become encapsulated into the symbolic and social world of Grace Church, competing social and ideological commitments fade in priority. Whereas their non-Christian family and friends may disapprove of conversion, their fellow church members celebrate it as initiation into the family of God. The community of the immigrant church turns a daunting decision into one that is quite natural and acceptable. After all, the majority of Grace members are converts themselves who struggled, with the same decision. Grace Church exposes potential converts to conversion scripts through the regular sharing of testimonies, or conversion accounts in Sunday services, Bible studies, and church journal articles. By telling their conversion narratives, converts reenact and affirm their own conversion experiences (Coleman 2003; Stromberg 1993). To non-Christians, testimonies offer scripts to reframe their experiences into the language of evangelical Christianity. As Susan F. Harding (1987) points out in her study of fundamentalist Baptist rhetoric, testimonies rhetorically enlist the listener as a participant by reconstituting him or her as a lost soul. In sharing their testimonies, converts “coach” potential converts so that they can anticipate conversion, including the doubts, struggles, and then the glory of conversion and transformation. Stories remind potential converts that Christians at one time, like them, had their doubts and struggles as well but overcame them. At Grace Church conversion is ritualized and routinized through the regular event of the altar call. The altar call is a familiar technique that Christian pastors use to call forth in public those who wish to convert. Typically at the end of a sermon, the pastor will ask anyone who wishes to commit his or her life to Christ to come forward to the altar. At Grace Church, the prayer team, a trained group of members will come forward to support and pray with the converts. For example, at a church summer retreat, Pastor Lee, the guest speaker, summoned an altar call by asking the congregation to bow their heads and close their eyes after his sermon. One need not publicly respond to the altar call. The decision can be made in private. Evangelical pamphlets in the church lobby such as, “The Choice is Yours” or “The Four Spiritual Laws,” succinctly relay the gospel message and provide the “Sinner’s Prayer,” a formulaic prayer to commit one’s life to Christ. Any member in Grace Church should also be able to share the gospel and lead others to convert. These structures and supports facilitate conversion to Christianity. Non-Christians may experience an unspoken pressure to convert within the Grace community. After all, to not be Christian is to risk being different and left out. Members show concern for one another by inquir-

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ing into one another’s relationships with Jesus Christ. Sermons and Bible studies are centered around improving one’s relationship with Jesus Christ. To participate in the church community and yet not have a relationship with Jesus Christ can be an awkward situation. Several Christians claimed that they felt pressured into getting baptized. According to evangelicals, one technically becomes Christian by publicly or privately committing one’s life to Jesus Christ. Baptism is the ceremony that officially declares this commitment to God and the church. Several respondents told me that when their parents and relatives knew that they were attending a Christian church, they warned them specifically not to get baptized. Family members fear that once having made a public vow as a Christian, their loved ones will not be able to participate in traditional rituals of ancestral veneration. Some Christian respondents are reluctant to get baptized because of familial pressure. But at the same time, they feel pressure from the church community to get baptized. A church deacon, who at one time had struggled with the decision to get baptized, told me bluntly that at the time he did so because of “peer pressure.” As he explained to me, his friends and the members of his close-knit fellowship group were constantly telling him to get baptized and so finally he did it. Other converts, however, describe what this deacon calls “pressure” as “encouragement” and “support.” Given the negative reactions of their own family members, they welcome the support and encouragement of the church community in making a difficult decision. The church also encourages baptism in less explicit ways. For example, only baptized Christians can hold certain leadership positions, such as deacons and elders. One’s authority is frequently measured by one’s spiritual maturity, or the length of time that one has been baptized. The baptism ceremony itself is a celebratory affair. Those who are baptized are officially welcomed into the family of God by the leaders and members of the church. The congregation cheers and applauds the newly baptized, who are presented with gifts and flowers and are assured by Pastor Chang that “the angels in heaven are rejoicing.”

CONVERTING FROM: BREAKING OLD TRADITIONS AND CHOOSING NEW TRADITIONS Religion in Taiwan: A Family Obligation Although the angels in heaven may be rejoicing for the newly converted, the non-Christian family members of the converts often are not. Max Weber wrote about this potential conflict between the religious commu-

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nity and one’s earthly family: “Wherever prophesies of salvation have created religious communities, the first power with which they have come into conflict has been the natural sib” (1946c [1915], 342). Indeed, the Christian idea of religious community as a basis of kinship is foreign to most Taiwanese. As anthropologist George A. De Vos writes: “In Christianity a ‘church’ is a religious brotherhood that transcends or even supplants family ties. In Confucian thought, there is no religious representation of a nonkin-centered group. This is counter to Western conceptions that religious individuals may find represented in their religious practices which constitute bonds of closeness as they share in their mutual worship of the supernatural” (1998, 371). For the more traditionally minded Taiwanese, conversion to evangelical Christianity is also a conversion from their own religious traditions. Conversion to Protestant Christianity is particularly threatening to the family because it prohibits the practice of ancestral veneration. Refusing to participate in rituals of ancestral veneration is tantamount to rejecting one’s family and lineage. In certain aspects, religious conversion represents a shift away from the old community with its corresponding obligations and narratives of meaning, and a shift toward a new family, the church. In this section, I discuss how Christian converts shed their inherited family-based religious traditions for a new religion—a choice based on a relationship with God. The family stands at the center of traditional Taiwanese religious practices (e.g., Ahern 1973; Freedman 1970; Jordan 1972; Weller 1987; Yang, Thornton, and Fricke 2000). Practices of ancestral veneration ritually enact the continuing reciprocal relationship of obligations, support, and exchange between the living and their dead ancestors. Rituals such as the offering of food and the burning of paper money and incense assure the happiness and well-being of those family members who are deceased. As the beneficiary of their ancestor’s merits, the living present these offerings to symbolize their reverence and indebtedness to them. In return, the ancestors protect them. These practices and beliefs continue to be common in modern Taiwan although the more educated are less likely to observe ancestral ceremonies (Thornton and Lin 1994; Weller 1987; Yang, Thornton, and Fricke 2000). The majority of my respondents are college-educated and were exposed to Western scientific worldviews in Taiwan. Few characterized themselves as having been religious in Taiwan, although they participated in ancestral veneration as acts of family duty. It was not important whether they believed in the afterlife or the effects of the rituals on their ancestors. They did these things out of obligation as members of the family, many Christians characterized their former religious practices as a form of blind duty. “You just follow what your parents do,” said one respondent. “Actually you don’t know what you are doing but you just have to follow. You don’t really have your own thinking.”

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Some even admitted that they felt uncomfortable with the practices but would never openly disagree: “In that kind of society I don’t think that we could speak out with the parents or elders. If we said, ‘I don’t believe this,’ we’d get in trouble. We just kept quiet. I was reluctant everytime they took me to the temple. I don’t know why. They would take the incense, worship, and then take the ashes and mix it with water and ask me to drink it.” To reject such a religious tradition is not merely to disagree with an intellectual tradition, but to reject the social commitments upon which the practices are based. For example, one respondent explained to me why he could not convert to Christianity in Taiwan: “All your family and friends in Taiwan worship idols. You cannot change. You change and they see you as a stranger.” Similarly Karen Richman (2005) found that conversion to evangelical Christianity among Haitian immigrants strained kinship ties. Often, the venerated ancestors such as one’s parents and grandparents are still fresh in the memories of the living. To refrain from participating in these religious rituals not only appears offensive to the deceased, whom one still holds dear in one’s memory, but is disrespectful to the larger family tradition. One respondent told me that when her aunt learned that she was going to convert her aunt told her “We’re Taiwanese and Christianity is not our religion. We have our religion that our ancestors gave us! Why are you believing in Christianity?” Rejecting the family obligation both to provide for one’s progenitors and to maintain their memories is regarded as the perhaps the most egregious of crimes. The consequence of breaking tradition weighs heavily on the minds of many converts and often creates tensions within the family. Mr. Hsiao, a forty-year-old building contractor, describes his experience with his family in Taiwan when he told them he wanted to become Christian: “When I told my parents that I was going to get baptized they were very very angry. In Taiwan there’s a tradition that when your parents die you have to carry incense for them (bai bai). When my mother heard that I was going to become Christian it was very hard for her and she started to cry. I tried to explain to her but she just wouldn’t listen. She said that I was very disrespectful by becoming Christian.” Difficult as it was, Mr. Hsiao converted to Christianity in the United States. In Taiwan, these family pressures can be more intense, and ultimately prevent some from converting. Mrs. Wang described her mother’s experience in Taiwan: “My mother really wanted to be a Christian but because of her mother-in-law, who was Buddhist, she felt that she could not convert. And even on her deathbed my grandmother reminded my mother that when she died my mother needed to continue with the tradition of worshipping her. Meanwhile, my mother’s own family had converted to Christian-

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ity because her sister was healed by a Christian pastor. But because my mother married out to my father’s family she could not convert.” Mrs. Wang’s mother comes from a generation when social and economic life was totally subsumed within the family. The relationships of dependence and obligation that she had developed within her family determined her daily existence. Furthermore, as a woman, she had no status or means of support outside of her husband’s family. Converting to Christianity would not only mean being disowned by his family, but also rejecting the sources of her livelihood. Although the people in my study grew up in a more modern Taiwan and did not face the same kind of economic strictures as Mrs. Wang’s mother, her example illustrates how social and economic obligations within the family can shape religious decisions. With their families an ocean’s length away, Taiwanese immigrants in the United States can no longer depend upon the extended family as they did in Taiwan. Taiwanese immigrants still fulfill familial obligations. As international phone calls and plane tickets have gotten cheaper, Taiwanese are making more frequent calls and visits between the United States and Taiwan than ever before. They also send and receive remittances. But what differs with migration is that how one fulfills those obligations and maintains these relationships may not determine one’s daily existence in the same way that it would in Taiwan. One can make daily phone calls but not daily visits. When family members in Taiwan are sick, or need immediate favors, they do not turn to their relatives in the United States, but to their relatives who are still in Taiwan—just as immigrants begin turning to those who are now nearer to them in so many ways: their brothers and sisters in Christ. Migration creates a physical distance between family members that changes their relationships and weakens religious traditions that are based on the family. In Taiwan, ancestral altars are typically housed in the homes of the oldest male family member, and occupy a prominant place in the traditional household.8 Among my respondents, however, neither the Buddhists, nor the Christians before conversion, had ancestral altars in their homes in the United States. There are many possible reasons for this: their parents were not yet deceased, they were not the oldest living son, or they had left the ancestral tablets with their relatives in 8 According to a survey conducted among Taiwanese women between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine in 1980, 66 percent of them had ancestral tablets in their house. There is no comparable data in 1986, however. It is likely that this figure only slightly decreased in 1986, since the percentage change of these women observing ancestral ceremonies only decreased two percentage points from 92 percent to 90 percent from 1980 to 1986 (Thornton and Lin 1994).

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Taiwan. Whatever the reasons, it is rare to find ancestral altars in Taiwanese American homes. Taiwanese immigrants (excluding Protestant Christians) participate in rituals of ancestral worship when they visit Taiwan, but, without altars here, they do not continue these practices in the United States. Indeed, most of the people in my sample were not especially religious in Taiwan. Although they observed ancestral ceremonies in Taiwan, they largely regarded them as symbolic gestures of family tradition. Furthermore the distance from the actual altars and a community of regular practitioners only made continuing the tradition more difficult. Grounded in living communities, religious traditions are only as vibrant as the ties that bind the community members. Without the regular celebrating, maintaining, and regulating of traditions, they can easily lose both their significance and legitimacy in daily life. Stripped of its familial context, traditional Taiwanese religion loses some of its relevance in the lives of many Taiwanese immigrants. Competing sources of traditions and communities can replace the old. The strength of the ties within the new church family can transform the “disrespectful” act to become Christian into a virtuous one. This sociological reality is strikingly illustrated in the practical considerations that one couple made when deciding to become Christian. Mrs. Hsiao had attended Grace Church for over a year and wanted to get baptized. Her husband, however, was not ready. He offered no religious or philosophical grounds. Instead he asked her to postpone her decision until they decided whether they were going to settle permanently in the United States. If they stayed, he had no objection to her getting baptized, but if they were going to return to Taiwan he felt that she should not. He pointed out that as the only Christian in an entirely Buddhist family, she would lead a difficult existence. When they lived in Taiwan, Mrs. Hsiao would help her mother-in-law to prepare offerings of fruit and incense every day at the ancestral shrine that was housed in Mr. Hsiaos parents’ home. As a Christian, she would no longer be able to fulfill these obligations. Being a Christian would not only be an extremely uncomfortable position for her, it would be disrespectful of the Hsiao family. As it turns out, they remained in the United States and Mrs. Hsiao got baptized. Her husband soon followed. Like other immigrant converts to Christianity, the decision to convert is rarely based on religious conviction alone (Douglas 2005; Min 2005; Richman 2005). In the end, practical matters such as belonging and family obligations determined the Hsiao’s religious decisions. Given where the Hsiaos lived, in the United States or Taiwan, who was their “family,” the church or their blood kin? Indeed, the presence of family in the vicinity makes a big difference, because those without family in Southern California converted much more quickly than those who did.

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The Hsiaos have converted to Christianity, and except for family religious rituals, they maintain Confucian traditions of filiality. They reinterpret filial piety differently, by emphasizing their gratitude and indebtedness to their parents now when they are living, rather than through rituals acts after they have passed on. As one respondent asked me, “What good does it do if you neglect your parents when they are alive and then worship them when they are dead?” His response illustrates the sentiments of Taiwanese Christians who regard ancestral veneration as mere symbolic acts that have no bearing on the state or comfort of their ancestors. Instead Taiwanese Christians prepare for their parents’ afterlives by witnessing the Christian faith to them. Not all converts, however, so neatly abandoned these practices of ancestral veneration. Some admitted uncomfortably and sheepishly that they had to bai bai and carry incense when they visited their families in Taiwan. But none fluidly or comfortable combined traditional religious practices with their new Christianity in the United States, as other immigrant groups have (Douglas 2005; Nakasone and Sered 2005; Richman 2005). Religion in the United States: A Personal Choice Distant from the extended family in Taiwan, the Hsiao’s inherited religious traditions became less relevant to their daily lives in the United States. After all their ancestral shrine was housed in Mr. Hsiao’s parent’s home in Taiwan, not Southern California. The Hsiaos decided to convert based on a new set of social commitments that they had made to the Grace community. And unlike their inherited religion in Taiwan, they chose Christianity. Religion as a personal choice is a concept that permeates the larger American religious consciousness (Bellah et al. 1985; Verenne 1977; Ahlstrom 1972). Both the Protestant religious tradition and religious pluralism in the United States have contributed to this voluntaristic and individualistic orientation toward religion. Becoming an evangelical Christian involves a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and the decision to commit one’s life to Christ. In place of the family, Jesus Christ becomes the ultimate moral authority. In traditional Taiwanese religion, practices revolve around consecrating the relationship between the individual and the family. In evangelical Christianity, practices revolve around strengthening the relationship between the individual and Christ. Based on personal conviction, the individual must choose free from coercion to enter into this relationship with Christ. Even those who are born into a Christian family must still experience a personal encounter with Christ to be truly Christian. Traditional Taiwanese religion is inherited and main-

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tained through a sense of familial duty. Evangelical Christianity is an ongoing willful choice to be a disciple of Christ. The rituals and rhetoric at Grace Church shape religion as a personal choice and commitment. The altar call illustrates perfectly how evangelical rituals affirm the importance of individual choice. At Grace Church, pastors use the altar call for many purposes, not just for those who wish to convert. The altar call may be for those who want to dedicate their lives to Christ (convert), but a pastor may choose to use the altar call for those who wish to rededicate their lives to Christ, or perhaps for those who wish to commit to certain changes in their lives. In such cases the altar call applies to both converts and mature Christians. Once the pastor puts forth the call congregants must individually discern whether they have been called by God to come forward or not. During the moments of waiting, Pastor Chang reminds church members to “open your heart to God” and “listen to what God is telling you.” The emphasis is upon open communication between God and the individual. Characteristic of Protestant spirituality, there is no medium that stands between the individual and God. God speaks personally and intimately. Without the personal conviction, one cannot be certain of the calling. To go forward because of social pressures or obligations would compromise the integrity of the act. As a ritual, altar calls give Christians ongoing opportunities to evaluate their relationship with Jesus Christ and publicly renew their commitments to Christ. Christianity is constantly framed as a choice and commitment at Grace Church. For example, on several occasions I have heard evangelical Christians make references to the image of Jesus knocking on the door of your heart, followed by the question “are you going to let him in?” In a church newsletter one contributor wrote, “The Holy Spirit is willing to modify our old attitudes, appetites and our lives if we give him permission” (italics are mine). A pamphlet titled, The Choice is Yours, in reference to the choice to become Christian, is distributed in the church lobby. During singing, songleaders may ask those who want to change their lives for Christ to lift up both arms outstretched. At the end of one service Pastor Chang told the congregation that those who wanted to listen to Christ should shout, “yes Lord!” in unison. These examples illustrate how evangelicals at Grace Church carefully structure religious experiences as active choices rather than inherited obligations. The church teaches that some traditions can be obstacles to Christian growth because they operate as social pressures that prevent people from following their convictions. Evangelical Christians often portray Christ as a revolutionary individual who goes against Jewish tradition to obey God. The evangelical tradition borrows from the narratives of the early Christian church as a persecuted people, who in the face of great social adversity remain faithful to God (Smith 1998). These stories are narra-

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tives that evangelicals use to interpret their past actions and orient their future behavior. Through the lens of evangelical Christianity, rejecting family traditions can be praiseworthy behavior if done in obedience to God. Sermons and church literature give countless examples of Christians who go against social traditions to obey God. For example, during one sermon Pastor Chang recounted the story of a man who wanted to but did not become Christian because it went against his family’s tradition. Finally on his deathbed, this man gained the courage to go against tradition and convert to Christianity. Pastor Chang warned the congregation to beware of how our traditions can prevent us from becoming better Christians. During a Bible study, when church members discussed the story of Aaron constructing a golden calf for the Israelites to worship, one person compared the Israelites to themselves, saying that unless they watched themselves they could easily “follow the crowd” and revert to their old and sinful ways of worshipping idols. Taiwanese Christians do not regard most Taiwanese traditions as sinful, but take great pride in Taiwanese culture and traditions. However, some traditions, such as “superstitions” and “idolatry,” are clearly wrong to them. What Taiwanese Christians find most objectionable about traditions is not necessarily the traditions themselves, but the blind acceptance that tradition evokes. Taiwanese Christians frequently portray non-Christians as people who cannot resist societal pressures because they lack both independent convictions and the courage to follow them. For example Buddhists are those who blindly follow tradition without recognizing that they are worshipping inanimate and powerless objects of wood or gold. Far from abandoning tradition, Taiwanese Christians often claim that they are the true bearers of Taiwanese tradition because they continue to preserve the values of thrift, honesty, and hard work in comparison to the tide of modern Taiwanese who have been brainwashed by Western values of materialism and hedonism. They heedlessly follow the gods of wealth and status, finding salvation in temporal things such as Mercedes Benzes, Gucci purses, and degrees from top universities. The source of their idolatry is the same as it is for Buddhists; the failure to recognize the true source of salvation because of traditions, trends, and peer pressure. Despite the evangelical Christian rhetoric of individual choice and the emphasis on individual convictions, becoming Christian is not about individuals as individuals leaving their traditions and entering into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. On the contrary, becoming Christian is about individuals entering into a relationship with Jesus Christ through the community. It is only through belonging to these new communities that people adopt new traditions and reject the old. As immigrants become immersed in the social community of the church, they begin to interpret their own lives through the evangelical

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Christian world of symbols and rituals that glorify individual conviction and personal choice. They, too, begin to see themselves as individuals who have the freedom to go against tradition and social pressures to follow their higher calling. No longer mere extensions of the family who “don’t have their own thinking,” they are “children of God” who have the freedom to choose. The Christian God that they have chosen becomes a higher source of authority than the family traditions that they inherited. CONCLUSION Taiwanese immigrant Christian converts use religion to reconstruct communities in the United States. For middle-class immigrants who, for the most part, come with marketable skills, the desire for group belonging and security draws them to the church. Evangelical Christian practices of intentional intimacy, solidarity, and accountability create a new basis for community in the United States. While conversion to Christianity is indeed an individual choice, it is important to recognize that it is one that is communally informed. Religious traditions are grounded in living institutionalized communities that are tied together by social commitments and obligations. Religious symbols and rituals acquire their sacred power to transform human beings only when they are collectively revered. As institutions, religions are informed by organizational goals to maintain and sustain these communities of tradition. People do not evaluate religions as if they are abstract intellectual traditions. Factors such as social obligations and practical needs profoundly shape the process of conversion. As the case of Taiwanese immigrants illustrates, converts are not only converting from an old worldview to a new worldview, they are also leaving an old community to enter a new community. By coming to the United States, immigrants distance themselves from the community of social relationships upon which they based their inherited religious traditions. As they symbolically sever the religious ties that bound them to their communities of kin in Taiwan, they simultaneously create new ties of choice that bind them to their church communities in the United States. In one sense, conversion is a radically individuating choice that frees them from old obligations and traditions. On the other hand, conversion constrains individuals to a new set of traditions and commitments. These new traditions and obligations have transformative consequences for the ways that Taiwanese immigrants reconstruct their new selves and their families in the United States, as I discuss in later chapters. This new community of Taiwanese Christians also has significant ramifications for the religious experiences of other groups in the immigrant community, especially the Buddhists.

3 Becoming Buddhist FROM EMBEDDED RELIGION TO EXPLICIT RELIGION

One day I was taking a walk with my neighbor. She asked me if I was Buddhist. At that time I said, “I think I’m a Buddhist but I’m not practicing.” And she said, “What is Buddha going to do for you? This is the millennium and you’re going to die unless you believe in God!” And so when I went to the temple I told a nun about the incident and asked how I could respond to my neighbor’s question. She told me to come to her classes and I started going regularly. —Mrs. Lin, Practicing Buddhist

CONVERSION TO EVANGELICAL Christianity only tells half of the story of religious change among Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. Consider how evangelical Christianity has shaped the religious experience of Mrs. Lin, who became a practicing Buddhist in the United States. When Mrs. Lin immigrated in 1987 to attend the University of Tennessee for her master’s degree in nursing, she was only nominally religious, like most Taiwanese immigrants. She had a statue of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva that she kept in her home, but this was more for decoration than devotion.1 In 1991, the Lin family moved to Southern California in order to raise their children in a community with more Chinese. Here Mrs. Lin lived only ten minutes from a Chinese Buddhist temple, Dharma Light Temple. However, she rarely went except to bring occasional visitors or for special celebrations like the Lunar New Year. She could have attended dharma classes or meditation classes at the temple but she had no interest in “religion.” The topic of religion, however, seemed to come up increasingly in her interactions with other Taiwanese. Several of Mrs. Lin’s Taiwanese coworkers had converted to Christianity after coming to the United States. In the Chinese strip malls she would find Chinese Christian tracts lying around. Two of her husband’s sisters had converted to Christianity as 1 “Kuan Yin Bodhisattva, also known as the Goddess of Mercy and the Bodhisattva of Compassion is the human incarnation of the Avalokitesvara Buddha and is popularly revered by Chinese.

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well. Her coworkers and relatives repeatedly invited her to church and tried to convert her. Usually she made polite excuses, but on a few occasions she let herself be talked into going. She found the sermons interesting but not moving. She also felt uncomfortable with the Christian insistence that only their God was true and that all other gods were false. Neither did she like the church’s “social club” atmosphere. Mrs. Lin found the Christian “friendly” persistence so irksome and confrontational that she started avoiding conversations about religion—that is, until one day when she had a conversation with her neighbor, who was also an immigrant from Taiwan. Like others, she had converted to Christianity after coming to the United States. In their conversation her neighbor asked Mrs. Lin if she was a Buddhist and Mrs. Lin replied, “I think that I’m a Buddhist but I’m not practicing.” Her neighbor then proceeded to expound on how Buddhists worshipped false gods and that Mrs. Lin should be seriously concerned with her soul, especially at the cusp of the new millenium. She prodded Mrs. Lin with questions about Buddhism and salvation but Mrs. Lin could produce no satisfying answers. The next time that Mrs. Lin went to the temple she relayed the story to a nun who told her to start coming to her dharma class for answers. This incident sparked Mrs. Lin’s transformation from being “a Buddhist but I’m not practicing” to becoming a “practicing Buddhist.” For the past three years, Mrs. Lin has gone to the temple regularly for Dharma classes and volunteering. She officially became Buddhist by taking refuge in the Triple Gem (guiyi san bao),2 a Buddhist practice similar to that of Christian baptism, as well as taking the Vow of Five Precepts.3 Mrs. Lin has also become vegetarian and incorporates bowing and sutra reading into her daily morning routine. Now when Christians invite her to church she makes no excuses. She tells them, “I’m a practicing Buddhist.” Mrs. Lin’s story illustrates how the religious context of the ethnic community shapes the transformation of Buddhist identity and practice in the United States. Taiwan has experienced a revival in Chinese Buddhism in the past thirty years. But most immigrants do not become “practicing Buddhists,” in Taiwan, where temples are plentiful, but in the United States. Why does Buddhism become so important to immigrants like Mrs. 2 “Taking refuge” means to return and rely. Buddhists take refuge in the Triple Gem— the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The following is the vow that Buddhists make when taking refuge at one Chinese Buddhist temple in Southern California: “To the Buddha I return and rely, returning from delusions and relying upon Awareness and Understanding. To the Dharma I return and rely, returning from erroneous views and relying upon Proper Views and Understanding. To the Sangha I return and rely, returning from pollutions and disharmony and relying upon Purity of Mind and the Six Principles of Living in Harmony.” 3 Devotees who take the Vow of Five Precepts promise not to kill, lie, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, or abuse their body with alcohol or drugs.

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Lin only after they immigrate to the United States? Scholars have long noticed this pattern of revitalized religiosity among immigrants to the United States (Hansen 1940; Herberg 1960; Smith 1978; Warner 1998). Because of the religious and ethnic pluralism of the United States, religion becomes a way for immigrants to stake their identity and build community (Warner 2000). In the process, religion itself changes, shifting from being taken for granted to actively embraced. This approach has largely focused on how the encounter with pluralism in mainstream society drives religious change. But religious realignments and religious tensions within the ethnic community may also be a source for religious transformation. In this chapter, I describe the changes in individuals’ orientations toward Buddhism in the United States as a shift from Buddhism as an embedded religion to an explicit religion. The changing meaning of religion and religious identity within the ethnic community, and not religious pluralism in mainstream America, is the major source of this transformation. I discuss how popular religion in Taiwan is embedded in culture. It is a taken-forgranted tradition that is neither articulated, nor a source of identity. People do experience religious pluralism in Taiwan through exposure to Christianity. However, as a “foreigner’s religion,” Christianity does not produce social differentiation. In the United States, Buddhism becomes an explicit religion, an articulated set of religious practices and beliefs that is a significant source of social identity. Most Taiwanese immigrants in my sample “rediscover” Buddhism as they deal with death or grapple with existential questions of meaning. Importantly Buddhists rediscover Buddhism in the context of a strong evangelical Christian presence in the ethnic community. The personal, frequent, and oppositional interactions with Taiwanese American Christians force Buddhists to define and articulate their identities, practices, and beliefs vis-a´-vis Christians. To both distinguish themselves from Christians, and fit into American society, Buddhists redefine themselves in increasingly modern and American terms.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES IN TAIWAN The Religion with No Name—Taiwanese Popular Religion as Embedded Religion The popular religion that most Taiwanese practice is quite different from the institutionalized practice most Westerners recognize as “religion.” Taiwanese popular religion has no formal institutional, doctrinal, or priestly basis. Indeed it does not even have a name (Yang, Thornton, and Fricke, 2000; Weller 1999). For example, my respondents had difficulty

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answering the seemingly simple question, “What was your religion in Taiwan?” Most could not identify their religion in Taiwan by name, but instead described their religious practices, like offering sticks of incense (giah hew/shang xiang) for their ancestors and gods and burning spirit money (siou kim/shao jin) to ensure the comfort of the deceased. Taiwanese popular religion is a mixture of Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and folk religious thought and practice (Jordan 1972; Weller 1987). It involves practices of worship and propitiation directed toward supernatural beings: ancestors, gods, and ghosts.4 Many Taiwanese do not even associate these practices with the word “religion” (zonggau/zongjiao), which describes something institutionalized, textual, and priestly (Weller 2000). Practiced by 90 percent of the population, Taiwanese popular religion is deeply embedded in the fabric of the culture and society. These traditional religious practices are so widely practiced that they produce neither identity nor differentiation among Taiwanese. They are taken-for-granted features of life that do not need to be identified or explained. This became very evident during a conversation that I had one day with Mr. Huang during a visit to southern Taiwan. Mr. Huang was a farmer; he had an altar devoted to Tho Te Kong/Tudi Gong, the Earth God, on his property. Tudi Gong is one of the most popular deities in Taiwan. There are altars and temples devoted to him throughout the island. Every day Mr. Huang would bai bai, or worship, Tudi Gong in hopes of a bountiful harvest of his betel nut crop. He would usually offer fruit and sticks of incense, but on occasion would offer meat. I asked Mr. Huang what religion he was. He paused and then asked me with a quizzical look, “Am I not Buddhist since I offer sticks of incense?” No doubt he had never been asked this question before. Few practicing Buddhists would agree that his practices are “Buddhist.” Not only is incense no indication of religious tradition, but offering meat goes against the most basic Buddhist teaching not to kill.5 Mr. Huang’s puzzled response illustrates that for most people in Taiwan, “religion” is not a significant source of social categorization like it is in the United States. His answer suggests that the problem was my question, not any ignorance on his part. In the Judeo-Christian religious environment of the United States, clear demarcations of orthodoxy and 4 Taiwanese draw a distinction between the supernatural beings—ghosts, gods, and ancestors. Ghosts are propitiated so that they do not cause trouble; gods are worshipped for help; and ancestors are worshiped because one owes them something (Jordon 1972; Wolf 1974). 5 This man’s response illustrates the awkwardness of using the word “religion” to describe the “religious” practices of most people in Taiwan. Scholars claim that there was no clear translation of the word “religion” into Chinese until after the twentieth century. The Chinese are reported to have borrowed the term from the Japanese, who themselves imported it from Western philosophy (Weller 2000).

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orthopraxy mark the boundaries of each religious group. This is not the case in Taiwan, where people pay devotion to a pantheon of deities drawn from a mixture of religious traditions. For example, Mr. Huang’s tour of temples where he frequently worshipped included a Confucian temple, a Taoist temple, and a temple devoted to his ethnic Hakka lineage. Later he showed me an altar on the side of the road, strewn with flowers and fruit and dedicated to the spirits of a mother and her three children recently killed in a car accident. Mr. Huang had made offerings at the altar in hopes of placating the ghosts of the deceased who died so close to his own property. “I did it so they don’t haunt me,” he explained chuckling, half jokingly and half seriously. He had even attended a Christian church with his friends to worship the Christian God, he told me proudly. Like most Taiwanese, Mr. Huang did not regard worshipping gods and spirits of different traditions as a dilemma. Rather, all gods are deities that deserve to be worshipped. Like Mr. Huang, some of the Taiwanese immigrants in my sample used “Buddhism,” as a generic label for their religion in Taiwan, even though it only bears some resemblance to Buddhism. Immigrants who converted to Buddhism, however, were different. Although equally uncertain about how to label their former religion as the others, they made it clear that their current practices of Buddhism differed from their earlier religious practices in Taiwan. As one respondent told me, “what we practiced in Taiwan, that’s not Buddhism.” This concern for identifying what is “true Buddhism” only developed after they became practicing Buddhists. I shall return to this subject shortly. Religion as Family Obligation—Taking Care of the Ancestors For most Taiwanese, the majority of worship takes place within the home and involves the worship of ancestors. My respondents recalled having an ancestral altar in their homes, or the homes of their relatives, and worshipping on a regular basis. Many of them characterized their religious practices as acts of family obligation rather than “religion.” For example, when I asked one respondent about her parent’s religion she replied, “They were just like normal Taiwanese people. They don’t have any particular religion. They worship ancestors and that’s it.” Quite literally, Taiwanese religious practices are family obligations, for Taiwanese believe that the ancestors continue to depend on the regular veneration and offerings of the living for their well-being. The spirits in the afterlife have the same needs they had in the earthly world—shelter, food, money, and respect.6 Living and dead ancestors are bound by con6 For further reading on Taiwanese popular religion, see Clart and Jones 2003; Jordan 1972, 1994; and Weller 1987, 1999, 2000.

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tinuing relations of reciprocal obligations and support. For this reason, worshipping ancestors is one of the most widespread ritual practices in Taiwan. Several of the respondents, many of whom are scientists, claimed that they were not religious in Taiwan because they found the popular religious practices of appeasing supernatural beings as “superstitious” and “unscientific.” But they still participated in rituals of ancestral veneration, regarding these as deep-seated family traditions that must be honored for the sake of family solidarity. Temple Worship The people in my sample also participated in religious acts outside of ancestral veneration. For example, worshipping gods on the first and fifteenth of each month with each new moon is quite common in Taiwan. Respondents recalled visiting temples in times of trouble to seek help from the gods. For example, many visited temples before the ominous university entrance exam that would determine their future careers. Illness, lost love, and financial woes were among the most common troubles. Like other Taiwanese, they characterized their devotion as utilitarian and contractual (Chao 2006). They made offerings and promises to deities in return for their help. For example, one person promised a deity that he would become a vegetarian if the deity granted him a promotion in his job. He got the promotion and he became a vegetarian. Faced with dilemmas, some respondents also sought divination services at the temple. One method was through the use of (pwah pwei/jiao bei) divining blocks—two pieces of wood, rounded on one side and flat on the other, cut into the shape of a crescent moon. Devotees would come to the temple with a particular question they wanted the god to answer. Devotees would throw the divining blocks on the floor, and the position of the blocks indicated the god’s answer. For more complex problems, respondents might use another method called “pulling fortunes.” Individuals would randomly select a numbered strip of paper that corresponded to a divination verse. Temple employees then helped worshippers interpret the verse in regard to their particular problem. Some respondents, primarily women, would also seek the advice of fortune tellers when dealing with specific problems. Fortune telling might take place on temple grounds, but some would also seek the services of those independent of the temple. All these are temple services that require a fee. While these popular religion temples draw worshippers from the vicinity, they are not communities or congregations. They do not have regular religious services and religious devotion takes place individually rather than communally. Individuals become members of temples through fi-

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nancial contribution, not regular participation. Religious participation is not a reliable measure of religiosity in Taiwan. For example, 72 percent of Taiwanese claim to be religious and 80 percent belong to a religious organization, but approximately 60 percent attend religious services less than once a year and 21 percent only on special holy days.7 Most popular religion temples have no priesthood, although Taoist or Buddhist priests may be hired to conduct rituals. Temples tend to be individually organized, often around families, and not institutionally centralized, although this is changing with modernization in Taiwan (Jordan 1994). No external canon unifies doctrines across popular religion.8 The people in my sample were unaware of any religious texts or doctrine associated with their religion. One respondent admitted, “I used to pray without any idea of what I was doing. I just prayed because everyone else did it.”9 Institutionalized Religion—Buddhism and Taoism Unlike Taiwanese popular religion, Buddhism and Taoism are institutionalized religions with professional clergy, doctrine, and core texts. However, prior to the development of humanistic Buddhism (see chapter 1) in Taiwan in the last three decades, the laity was largely unfamiliar with Buddhist teachings. Because of the syncretic nature of popular religion in Taiwan, most Taiwanese have worshipped at Buddhist and Taoist temples, and employed the services of Buddhist and Taoist monks for funerary services. However, they did not necessarily distinguish Buddhism and Taoism as distinct traditions from their popular religion, although this has changed with the rise of orthodox Buddhism in Taiwan. These trends are reflected in my respondents’ religious identities. Most immigrated as Buddhism became popular in Taiwan. For example, all fifty respondents likely had some religious interaction with Buddhism and Taoism in Taiwan, however, only two identified their religious experiences as Taoist, and only four recalled being exposed to Buddhism as an orga7

These are figures according to the 1995 World Value Surveys of Taiwan. Please refer to Harrell 1974 and Weller 2000, 1987 for further reading on temples in Taiwan. I am also indebted to Bruce Williams for some of this information. 9 In the last three decades, a number of pietistic sectarian movements have developed in Taiwan. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the Way of Unity (Yiguandao), which has over a million followers. Most of the sects combine elements of Eastern and Western religions, and have a strong message of morality. These sects are more centralized and institutionalized than Taiwanese popular religion, with a leadership structure and regular meetings among followers (Weller 2000). Because these sects are a fairly recent religious development in Taiwan, none of my respondents mentioned any interaction with them in Taiwan. They did, however, become aware of sects such as Yiguandao after immigrating to the United States as Yiguandao also gained popularity. 8

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nized religion in Taiwan. One respondent’s mother-in-law was a member of a lay Buddhist sect, or “vegetarian sect” (tsaigau/zhaijiao), whose devotees were primarily elderly women. One respondent’s father had became a monk. Another person’s father was a devout disciple of a prominent Buddhist nun. Another respondent had friends in a Buddhist student organization. Buddhism was not as popular when most of my respondents lived in Taiwan as it is today. Only 11.2 percent of Taiwanese claimed to be Buddhists in 1984, with the number who were practicing considerably less (Laliberte´ 2003). This statistic is mirrored in my own sample of Taiwanese immigrants, the majority of whom left Taiwan in the 1980s and early 1990s. The only two who claimed to be practicing Buddhists before immigrating to the United States had immigrated in the early 1990s, when Buddhism had become popular in Taiwan. The state of Buddhism has changed quite drastically in Taiwan in the last three decades (e.g., Chandler 2004; Jones 1999; Lalibert 2004; Weller 2000). Today Buddhist literature, television programs, and lay organizations are well-known among Taiwanese all over the world. Taoism, on the other hand, did not undergo such a reform in organization and thought. Before the reform in Buddhism, both Buddhism and Taoism were similar in that their priests earned an income through ritual services for the public. For the laity, Taoist and Buddhist temples had been sites for religious devotion but not religious education. People worshipped both Taoist and Buddhist deities. Modern Chinese Buddhist organizations started in the late 1960s, and became especially prominent in the 1980s and 1990s when most of my respondents were leaving Taiwan. Hence, my respondents’ experience of Buddhism in Taiwan was largely indistinguishable from that of popular religion. Many immigrants who were welleducated and disdainful of popular religion lumped Buddhism in the same category as popular religion and regarded it as “superstitious” and “backward.” Many also associated the religion with illiterate and elderly women who had joined “vegetarian sects.” At the time, Buddhism was not of much interest to the educated middle-class population of Taiwanese who were immigrating to the United States. Christianity in Taiwan: A Welcome and Nonthreatening Presence Many respondents had some contact with Christianity in Taiwan. However, it was never a real threat to their traditional religious practices. Comprising anywhere from 2–4 percent of the population in the last fifty years, Christians have always been a minority in Taiwan. However, Christianity’s presence looms large through the schools and hospitals that have been established by western Christian missionaries throughout the island (Ru-

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binstein 1991; Swanson 1981). Christian missionaries escaping China during the Communist Revolution directed their energies toward Taiwan. For example, in Taiwan today there are twenty-five Christian hospitals— fourteen Protestant and eleven Roman Catholic—compared to two Taoist and three Buddhist hospitals (Taiwan Yearbook 2005). Among institutions of higher education, ten claim Christian affiliation compared to one that is Taoist and eight that are Buddhist (ibid.). Many respondents interacted with Christianity in Taiwan as children rather than as adults. For example, many recalled being thrilled as children attending Christmas celebrations or watching choir performances. Taiwanese associated Christian churches with the distribution of candy and milk and English language classes. These luxury items symbolized the possibilities of upward mobility and modernity in a nation still struggling to develop its economy. Christians tended to be more educated than the general population (Swanson 1981). Being Christian became synonymous with being educated and modern. In comparison, Buddhism was regarded as superstitious and backward. Many of the Buddhist respondents claimed to have had this impression before they converted to Buddhism. Mrs. Chang, an articulate woman in her mid-forties made the following comments: I admit it, too, that I almost became Christian because of that when I was young. At the time Taiwan was still recovering from Japanese colonialism and Taiwan was pretty poor. We were actually receiving a lot of aid from the United States and the distribution of flour and butter was restricted to one per family. There was a big contrast between the rich and poor. At the time I had a lot of friends who came from doctors’ families and they were all Christian. They laughed at us being Buddhist. They laughed at our statues. In Taiwanese they would say “your gods are flies,” because gods and flies are similar in pronunciation. They would laugh at us because we would worship the statue of the Buddha. They would say, “oh, your Buddha has a fly in it.” We were so frustrated. And of course they were rich because they were from the doctors’ families and they dressed very Westernized while we were still wearing the traditional dress. Looking at them we thought they were gorgeous. During that time people were tired of tradition and Westerners just took over what was superior there.

Despite these draws, few people converted. Most Taiwanese still considered Christianity to be a foreign religion of white missionaries. Many respondents were first exposed to Christianity through missionary institutions, not personal interactions with Taiwanese Christians. Some had attended Christian schools, others had attended religious services at a Christian church. While some had even become fairly knowledgeable about Christianity, they regarded this as an exercise in “Western cultural educa-

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tion.” Taiwanese wanted to learn about Christianity because it was “Western” and “modern.” In fact, many Taiwanese were drawn to churches in Taiwan because of the English language classes that they offered. One respondent told me, “I went to church a lot to practice my English. It was my only source to practice my conversational English because the missionaries speak English.” But Taiwanese did not convert to Christianity in large numbers because of the Protestant Christian prohibition against ancestral worship (Chao 2006). Christians were regarded as people who were disloyal and disrespectful toward their families and ancestors, even though Taiwanese admired Christian charity. As one respondent described it, “becoming Christian is like giving up your parents.” The family pressure against conversion was so strong that even to those who participated in Christian institutions did not consider converting. Mrs. Wong, who attended a Catholic elementary school as well as participated in a Christian youth fellowship and church choir, explained: “I never wanted to get baptized even though I was pretty involved with Christians. I loved attending church and singing in the choir. But I knew that my family wasn’t Christian and it just didn’t seem like I should get baptized. I think the Christians knew this and they never pressured me to get baptized either.” Furthermore, to Taiwanese there was no reason to become Christian when loyalties to multiple gods and the mixing of religious traditions did not present themselves as a problem. Mrs. Wong’s parents sent her to a Catholic school and approved of her heavy involvement with Christian activities when she was a child and teenager. Christian activities were fine so long as they did not claim one’s exclusive loyalty. Christians in Taiwan existed smoothly as a minority religious group and they did not overstep their boundaries by aggressively spreading their religion. Western missionaries from mainline Protestant traditions developed the Christian presence in Taiwan through social institutions rather than through evangelism (Rubinstein 1991). As a minority religion in Taiwan, Christianity was perceived as too foreign to be a threat to Taiwanese tradition. While the Taiwanese welcomed Christianity as the bearer of educational and medical progress, they never converted to the religion in significant numbers. RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES Given the importance of family to Taiwanese religious practice, separation from the extended family significantly reduced the religiosity of Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. Half of the respondents claimed that after immigrating to the United States (and before their conversions)

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they did not observe any religious practices, even ancestral veneration. One respondent said, “I think the major reason that I had a break from religious practice when I moved to the U.S. is the lack of family. You’re away from your parents so there’s nobody to talk to about Buddhism.”10 None of the respondents kept an ancestral altar in their homes. Traditionally ancestral altars are in the home of the eldest son and not every household has an ancestral shrine. But with extended households and the proximity between kin in Taiwan, they were able to observe ancestral veneration regularly. This is not the case in the United States, where the majority of my respondents’ parents still live in Taiwan. With increased distance from parents and in-laws, immigrants no longer participated in the daily rituals of ancestral veneration. One respondent even told me that his wife was thrilled to move from Taiwan because now she no longer had the burdensome responsibility of preparing the daily offerings for his family’s ancestral altar. Convenience is another factor. One has to make time to go to the temple in the United States whereas in Taiwan there is a temple within walking distance from one’s home. As one respondent said, “Here it takes more effort to go to the temple. In Taiwan it’s on every streetcorner and it’s very common.” Half of the respondents claimed that after immigrating (but before converting) their temple visits were reduced to special holidays like the Lunar New Year, or for showing out-of-town guests. Some occasionally visited the temple with particular concerns and worries. For example, before she was a Buddhist, Mrs. Wu, a nurse in her late thirties, says that twice she went to Dharma Light Temple to donate flowers to the Buddha when she hoped to find a good husband. A few of the immigrants maintained private devotions to certain deities such as the Buddhist “goddess of mercy” Kuan Yin or the popular female deity Ma-tsu.11 These devotions, however, were not regular. Because it was difficult to find temples that offered divination services, some Taiwanese immigrants created their own make-shift divination devices, such as tossing a coin, to determine a deity’s response.12 A few also continued to consult fortune tellers or astrological sources. With the distance from their families, and the paucity of temples in the United States, Taiwanese immigrants observed popular religious practices less often, if ever. 10

By “Buddhism” this respondent is referring to the traditional religion in Taiwan. Ma-tsu is a deity that is of special importance in Taiwan and the Fukien province in China where most Taiwanese trace their ancestry. She is believed to have been born off the Fukien coast and is credited with having saved her father and brother, both fishermen, when their boat capsized. She therefore has a particularly loyal following among fishermen in Taiwan. 12 In the name of orthodoxy, modern Chinese Buddhist temples do not offer divination services that are common in temples of popular religion. 11

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GETTING INTRODUCED TO BUDDHISM Before becoming practicing Buddhists, my respondents were like most visitors at Dharma Light Temple who come to pray, light sticks of incense, make a donation, and then leave. They treated Dharma Light like popular religion temples in Taiwan. Although the temple offers meditation classes, dharma classes, and regular chanting services, they did not participate in these. But something happened to make them reconsider religion and take Buddhism seriously. Unlike Christians, Buddhists were not attracted to their religion because of the community or friendship networks. Their experiences in Taiwan did not lead them to think of religion as a social outlet, or the temple as a community. Furthermore, more Buddhist respondents had extended family in Southern California compared to Christians. Buddhists probably needed the community of the church less. Instead, Buddhist attraction to the religion was largely emotional and intellectual. My respondents were introduced to Buddhism in one of three ways. Only three of the respondents came from Buddhist families in Taiwan and continued these practices after coming to the United States. Of the remaining group, about half encountered Buddhism through participation in funeral rituals of a family member and the other half were introduced to Buddhism through friends. Introduction through Funeral Rituals Immigrants who experience the death of a family member must choose what religion the funeral service will be. Since many families may have both Christian and Buddhist members, it is not uncommon to have two funeral services. For those who choose a Buddhist funeral, proper mourning practices of “seven seven”13 (chi chi) include forty-nine days of a vegetarian diet and participating in sutra (scripture) chanting rituals to trans13 Chi chi refers to seven seven-day periods. Seven being a number that symbolizes completion in both Indian and Chinese culture. In Buddhism, it is believed that the consciousness departs from the body after a person dies. Though the consciousness does not have a form, it can continue to perceive. It is believed that the consciousness will linger around the body until it realizes that its bodily form is deceased. This realization takes about seven days. The consciousness then travels or wanders around, encountering many testing situations that will determine its next rebirth. Around the seventh seven-day period, the consciousness makes the decision of its next rebirth. During these forty-nine days it is very important that the consciousness remains lucid when encountering the situations that will determine its next rebirth. Because of this, the family will chant sutras, or invite monastics to chant sutras in the hope that the Buddhist teachings can serve as guidance for the consciousness. Usually a memorial service is held at the home or temple at least every seven days to read the sutras.

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fer merit to the deceased’s karmic balance. This enhances the possibility that she will be reborn into a better life realm. It is often this extended and concentrated contact with the temple and monastics that initiates immigrants into Buddhism. Frequently concern for a deceased loved one’s afterlife prompts individuals to carry in Buddhist practice beyond the prescribed forty-nine days. Many immigrants cannot participate in the collective remembering of family members in Taiwan who have passed away. Engaging in the Buddhist practice of transferring merit, whether on their own or through the temple, connects immigrants to the deceased and becomes a way to continue their filial duties and pay homage to their ancestors. An example of this is Mr. Tang, a wealthy retired businessman in his fifties who had lived in the United States without religion for well over twenty years until the tragic deaths of both his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law. His sister-in-law died in a car accident and subsequently his mother-in-law committed suicide in grief. Helpless and bewildered, his wife wanted to find a medium to communicate with her mother. She approached Dharma Light Temple for help, not knowing that they did not perform these sorts of “popular religion” services. The nuns told her that they could not help her communicate with her dead mother, but that she could do something even better for her mother and sister by coming to the weekly chanting services and transferring merit to them. This motivated Mr. Tang and his wife to begin seriously practicing Buddhism. Mrs. Chung, a forty-five-year-old computer scientist, became involved in Buddhism out of a similar concern for her grandmother’s afterlife: My grandmother passed away but I couldn’t go back to Taiwan because at the time I just graduated and started a job. I also had visa difficulties. But I wanted to do something for my grandmother because I couldn’t be there. So I started going to Dharma Light Temple because they were the only temple that had the ceremony for ancestors that pass away. So I went there everyday for the next forty-nine days, or seven weeks. And then I found out that a monk offered Dharma classes and teachings and I started going there every Wednesday and I started getting involved as a volunteer at the temple.

Turning to Buddhism allowed Dr. Lai, a doctor in her early forties, to grieve over her mother’s death and continue showing love and respect for her. I was very close to my mom and I was very sad when she passed away. Even though she didn’t experience a lot of pain I was so sad to lose her. After she died some monks came to our house to chant but I didn’t understand them While becoming vegetarian is not mandatory, it is believed that by doing so merits can be transferred from the living to the deceased.

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at all, so I asked them if there were any books that I could read about Buddhism. So they got me some books and my husband and I read a lot of Buddhist books and gradually felt that that’s the religion we belong to. I didn’t believe in rebirth right away but I gradually started to believe in that. Whenever I read those Buddhist books it was a big comfort for me. My pain was relieved because I was so worried about her and I wasn’t quite sure where she was and I just want to make sure that she’s OK. Buddhism really helped me deal with sadness over my mother’s death. I started chanting during that time. In the beginning I chanted for my mom because I felt so guilty that I didn’t spend that much time with her and I didn’t tell her how much I loved her. Even though I stayed with her for three months before she died I still felt it was not enough because she was such a wonderful mom. I felt so guilty about her, so I tried chanting a lot for her because I felt that that was the only thing I could do for her at that moment. Surprisingly, whenever I chanted for her, my pain disappeared inside my heart, and I felt calm and peaceful. I feel that whenever I’m chanting or reading Buddhist books I’m very close to my mom. I feel like the sun is shining on me.

At first, Dr. Lai did not believe in rebirth or the effects of the practices on her mother’s afterlife. When many respondents participated in these funeral rituals, it was irrelevant whether they “believed” that their actions benefited the karmic balance of the deceased.14 But like Dr. Lai, Buddhist traditions became personally meaningful when they used these communal symbols to express their personal grief. For Mrs. Chung, regular visits to the temple for forty-nine days familiarized her with Buddhism, monastics, and the temple. These respondents were drawn to Buddhism because religious practices provided an emotional connection to their deceased loved ones. Introduction through Friends Mr. Lan’s experience illustrates how some Buddhists were introduced to the religion through family and friends. Mr. Lan, a fifty-five-year-old engineer, became interested in Buddhism when his brother, a devout Buddhist from Taiwan, visited for one year. At first Mr. Lan was dismayed that his 14 The Weberian emphasis on meaning as the key to religious change (Horton 1971; Frazer 1922; Douglas 1966; Tambiah 1970; Geertz 1973; Bellah 1970a) tends to rely on explanations of the conceptual and intellectual superiority of one religious system over the other without acknowledging that often practice precedes intellectual assent, as is the case with these Buddhists. Becoming Christian or Buddhist is rarely a “rational” or “logical” decision, but neither is it irrational or illogical. One becomes Buddhist by doing Buddhist things. It is like learning a language where once you speak it you must assume the truth of the rules. For these respondents, the association of Buddhist practices with feelings of deep connection

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brother had become such an ardent Buddhist. He was convinced that his brother had been brainwashed by a superstitious cult. The two men debated about Buddhism every day. Mr. Lan claims that the logic and reason of his brother’s arguments finally convinced him to reconsider the possibility that Buddhism might be a relevant religion for modern people. During this exploratory stage, he was surprised by the analytical sharpness of a Buddhist master whom he heard give a teaching: “My brother took me to hear a Tibetan lama give a teaching. This was my first time officially listening to a teaching. It was amazing! The lama was around eighty years old. His body was very weak but his mind was so very clear and sharp. When he gave the teaching it was as if he emanated some kind of power. He had a very powerfully analytical mind. I thought what he said was very reasonable and it made me more comfortable about Buddhism and so I started learning more and more.” For Mr. Chen, a man in his late thirties who attended college in the United States, the experience of his friend Li from Taiwan convinced him to consider Buddhism. Li was an extremely wealthy and successful businessman who had a fast-paced and decadent lifestyle. Li experienced a very dramatic conversion to Buddhism and subsequently changed his lifestyle to one of material simplicity, vegetarian diet, and Buddhist cultivation. Mr. Chen could not believe his eyes when he saw Li again. Here was his friend who had reached the pinnacle of success and rejected it all for Buddhism. It was because of Li, Mr. Chen told me, that he began to reconsider Buddhism as something other than “grandmother’s religion.” Most Christians were also introduced to the religion through friends, but this process was different from the way that Buddhists were introduced to Buddhism. First, Christians learned about the faith through active social involvement in the church. Christians first belonged to the church before believing. On the other hand, Buddhists learned about the religion through Buddhist literature and media that their Buddhist friends shared with them. Buddhist respondents articulated how they first learned about the religion through reading alone and/or discussion with friends, all separate from belonging to a temple or Buddhist organization. The Christian conversion process was primarily social whereas the Buddhist conversion process was chiefly intellectual. Second, like Christians, Buddhists experienced obstacles to becoming Buddhist. “Tradition” was an obstacle to conversion to them both, but in very different ways. To Christians, the obstacle was the tradition of ancestral veneration. To Buddhists, the problem was their impression of Buddhism as “traditional” and unmodern. Like Mr. Lan and Mr. Chen, to loved ones became the stronger draw to Buddhism than the coherence, credibility, or truth of its doctrine.

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many were initially resistant to Buddhism because they associated it with the religion of their grandparents, a generation in Taiwan that was largely unschooled. They became open to Buddhism once they personally came into contact with others like themselves, whom they considered modern and educated, and had also become Buddhist. Buddhist converts, especially men, identified turning points in their conversion processes when they realized that Buddhism was indeed rational, logical, and compatible with modern science. On the other hand, Christians expressed their faith in spite of science and logic. Third, Buddhists were often introduced to the religion through their friends and family visiting from Taiwan rather than fellow immigrants in the United States, as the Christian converts were. Taiwanese American Christians were far more active prosyletizers than Taiwanese American Buddhists. THE TEMPLE IN THE CONVERSION PROCESS The temple and church communities play strikingly different roles in the conversion processes of the Buddhists and Christians in my sample. For Christians, the church community draws them to the religion. Immigrants see the church as a social resource. People go to church in order to make friends. The case is very different for Buddhists. Buddhists do not regard the temple, or their religion, as a social outlet. No one told me that she goes to the temple to make friends or to relieve his or her loneliness. Individuals see the temple and other Buddhist organizations as places centered around teaching and learning, and not socializing, although that does happen. For example, Dr. Lee, a serious practitioner who frequents several Buddhist temples in Southern California told me, “At church they’ll help you to find a husband or wife, but at the temple, people focus on self-cultivation and enlightenment.” In fact, one temple in particular prided itself on not being a social place, claiming that social temples were not orthodox. Buddhists admitted that it was far more difficult making social connections through their religion than through Christianity. Mr Tang commented on Dharma Light Temple, “We don’t socialize there. People go there and leave.” Buddhists were far less likely to have their social worlds revolve around their religion in comparison to the Christians. Buddhists also tended to have more non-Buddhist friends than Christians had non-Christian friends. And a few Buddhists admitted feeling socially isolated at the temple. Buddhists do not feel the same obligation as Christians to attend the temple regularly, and so many, even the most devout, do not. For example, when I asked the lay leader of one Buddhist temple how many people

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attend the Saturday chanting service he shrugged his shoulders and said it was impossible to say since the number varies widely each week. Taiwanese American Buddhists attend the temple on an “as needed” basis, as another lay leader put it. Dharma Light Temple and other Chinese Buddhist temples in the area have regular weekly scheduled events, for example, chanting ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday, meditation classes, and dharma classes. All of the respondents have participated in these at one time or another, but some no longer find these necessary or conducive to their Buddhist practice. Other immigrant groups who are Buddhist and Hindu also tend to visit the temple only occasionally (Cadge and Ecklund 2006; Kwon 2003; Min 2005). Buddhists in my study frequently use the term “convenient means” to describe any practice that is conducive to enlightenment. The term highlights a very practical orientation toward Buddhist practice (temple rituals, chanting, bowing, meditation). Religious practices, including temple participation, are considered “means” toward the end of enlightenment. Not all practices, however, will be personally conducive to enlightenment. For example, Mr. Jan told me that he actually avoids the temple because the crowds are noisy and distracting. Mrs. Hou, a temple volunteer who rarely attends temple rituals, claims that “The function of the temple is for all the beginners who are suffering or need a place to go to. . . . My place in the temple is inside me. I don’t need to go to a place to seek comfort. I don’t need outside help.” Mrs. Lin does not attend chanting ceremonies anymore because they are no longer helpful to her practice. Instead, she emphasizes how her work as a nurse is where she practices compassion, and where she really practices Buddhism. “Just chanting and bowing isn’t practice,” she claims. Even the Dharma Master of Dharma Light compared the temple to a gas station, encouraging people to visit only when they needed spiritual fuel. Similar to the practice in Taiwan, Buddhists in Southern California did not exclusively join one temple, but worshiped and practiced in multiple temples. This practice, however, may be distinctive to Southern California where there are at least six Chinese Buddhist temples that Taiwanese may attend. Buddhists in Southern California do not feel that they are disloyal by attending other temples. Each of the temples has a different emphasis on Buddhist cultivation. For example, Dharma Light Temple emphasizes Buddhist education, another focuses on meditation, and another on chanting Amitahba Buddha’s name. Again, Buddhists see the temples as a “convenient means” toward enlightenment. Individuals should be free to attend whichever service is most helpful to self-cultivation. Instead of communities revolving around the temple, Buddhists developed “pockets of community” through their various lay Buddhist organizations and associations. Like the Thai American Buddhists studied by

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Wendy Cadge (2005), Taiwanese American Buddhists understood “sangha” or Buddhist community to mean the community of monastics, not including the laity. People were far more committed to the lay Buddhist groups that they organized outside of their temples than to their temples. Some of these were groups that were organized around studying the teachings of a particular dharma master. Others were lay organizations devoted to charitable activities, meditation, or chanting. Others were organizations devoted to the general study of the dharma. These groups would meet from as frequently as once a week to once a year. Being smaller groups, interactions were more intimate. Buddhists could belong to a lay group in a way that they could not belong to a temple. But even here belonging was not the defining feature of these organizations; religious education and practice was. Buddhists repeatedly reminded me of this difference between Christianity and Buddhism: Christians socialize whereas Buddhists gather for education. And indeed, compared to Christian gatherings, very little time was devoted to socializing. Many people came for the teachings and left soon afterward. Becoming “Buddhist” in the United States: From Embedded to Explicit Religion In this section, I discuss how the American context shapes the Buddhist religious experience for Taiwanese immigrants. Buddhism, I argue, shifts from being an embedded religion to an explicit religion. It becomes an articulated identity, system of belief, and regular practice among Buddhists. This transition is an example of how culture operates on a continuum of cultural embeddedness that ranges in how “explicit and self-conscious versus implicit and taken-for-granted their meanings are” (Swidler 2001, 94). Ann Swidler (ibid., 99) writes about how during “unsettled” periods of social transformation and ideological contention, “ideologies—explicit, articulated, highly organized meaning systems” proliferate. Ernest Gellner (1981) similarly argues that crisis and threat are opportunities for a purer and more articulated faith, that is otherwise latent, to emerge. Taiwanese carry their “taken-for-granted” notions of embedded religion with them to the United States. Although Taiwanese immigrants may participate in Buddhist activities, they may not identify as Buddhist or be able to explain their Buddhist beliefs. Consider the case of Mrs. Lin who I introduced at the beginning of this chapter. She was the one who told her neighbor, “I think I’m a Buddhist but I’m not practicing.” How then does Buddhism become an identity and articulated meaning system for Taiwanese Americans? And what is distinctive about becoming Buddhist in the United States?

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To explain religion’s significance among immigrants, many scholars have pointed to the nature of migration to the United States and the conditions of ethnic, racial, and religious pluralism that immigrants encounter here compared to their countries of origin (Haddad and Lummis 1987; Herberg 1960; Warner 1993; Williams 1988). Under the more religiously pluralistic and secular conditions of the United States, religion becomes less taken for granted and what was before inherited becomes more consciously practiced (Kurien 1998, 2002). Whereas religion might have been inherited or assumed in the homeland, it cannot be in the United States, where religion is both pluralistic and voluntaristic. No mere transplants of traditional institutions, immigrant religions are “communities of commitment” (Smith 1978, 1178). Religion takes on a different form when individuals enter into it through their own volition. Raised to the level of consciousness, religion becomes a powerful organizing force that brings an articulated coherence and meaning to their lives. Whereas these studies focus on the interaction between immigrant congregations and the larger American religiously plural landscape, my research examines how religious pluralism within the ethnic community shapes religious change for Taiwanese American Buddhists. Taiwanese immigrants have the most meaningful and personal encounters that with others within the ethnic community. Oppositional interactions with coethnic Christians drive the shift in Buddhism from embedded religion to explicit religion. Encountering Taiwanese Evangelical Christians In Taiwan, Christianity was perceived as a foreigner’s religion. But Christian converts cannot be ignored among Taiwanese in the United States (Chao 1995). In Southern California, there are 195 Chinese Protestant churches, and only 45 Buddhist and Taoist temples and organizations. Even this figure for temples is relatively high in comparison to other metropolises with a large number of Taiwanese immigrants. Chinese Christians proudly display their marks of Christianity on their cars with symbols of the Christian fish and English bumper stickers like “Got God?” and “Praise the Lord.” A neon sign with a cross and “Jesus saves” in English and Chinese hangs from the side of a building along a freeway in the heart of the Chinese immigrant community. In the local Chinese newspaper, churches place nearly a third of the advertisements. In Taiwan, whenever I told someone that I was studying Taiwanese converting to Christianity in the United States, invariably he or she would share an example of someone who converted as well.

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The interactions with Christians are not only more frequent in the United States, but the nature of these interactions is different. Taiwanese immigrants’ contact with Christianity is no longer through less personal secondary networks such as social institutions or occasional “Western cultural events” as it was in Taiwan. In the United States, their close friends and family members have converted to Christianity. Among the Buddhist respondents, all except for one had family members who had converted to Christianity after moving to the United States. Many had had Christian roommates or Christian coworkers, clients, or bosses. One recent survey of 68 Taiwanese Americans in Southern California has Buddhists actually outnumbering Christians 24 to 18 percent, but Buddhists see things differently (Lien 2001).15 The visibility and vocal presence of Christians made Buddhists feel like they were minorities within their own Taiwanese community. The immigrants’ interactions with Christians in the community are also colored by the fact these Christians are evangelical, as opposed to those in Taiwan who followed the mainline traditions. Evangelical Christians are eager to evangelize and are more outspoken in their beliefs. Despite having close Christian friends and family members, the Buddhist respondents admitted that the topic of religion was always tense and they tried to avoid it, even if usually unsuccessfully. Their Christian acquaintances were extremely persistent about evangelizing and inviting them to church. For example, Mrs. Lin told me about one experience she had with Christian friends and family. “I hosted my sister-in-law’s fiftieth birthday party in my house. I spent the whole week cleaning and preparing the house and then all these people from her church came over and tried to convert me that night. They prayed for me and all that stuff. I couldn’t believe it! I feel like religion is your decision. If you want to practice it then practice it. You don’t have to get other people.” Most of the Buddhist respondents have attended a Chinese Christian church at the prompting of their Taiwanese Christian friends. They went out of feelings of obligation and guilt, and because their friend had been 15 My sense is that this estimate of Protestant Christians among Taiwanese Americans in the National Asian American Pilot Survey (NAAPS) is slightly low, and that only a portion of the 24 percent who identify as Buddhist are practicing. In Chen Hsiang-Shui’s study of Taiwanese Americans in New York, he found that 27 percent of the 100 households he surveyed were Christian and 26 percent were Buddhist (1992). Furthermore the Taiwanese Americans in the NAAPS sample are less educated than the average Taiwanese American. According to Chen Hsiang-Shui, professionals are more likely to be Christian than members of other classes. The lower educational attainment of the NAAPS sample may account for the smaller number of Christians. In both studies, however, the sample size of Taiwanese Americans is small, and we cannot draw conclusive generalizations.

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so persistent. One man told me that even though his boss knew that he was Buddhist, he would continually invite him to church. He would visit on special occasions like Christmas or Easter because “there’s no way I could refuse his invitation.” A few had even regularly attended a Chinese church before becoming Buddhist. Not only in personal interactions but in the public space Christians seemed ubiquitous. Mr. Chang, a devout Buddhist in his fifties, commented: “You know Christians, they always invite you to church. This is a very important thing. They think that if they invite you to church then ‘job done.’ They always invite you no matter what. You go to the supermarket and there are Christians there inviting you to church.”16 Despite Christians’ enthusiastic attempts to reach out to others, many perceived Christians to be closed and critical of non-Christians. Even though they had friends and family who were Christian, Buddhists often felt excluded or judged by Christians. A Buddhist man told me that before he became Buddhist he occasionally visited a Taiwanese church but stopped going because “they taught to discriminate against us.” Buddhists felt that the source of Christians’ social exclusivity came from their insistence that only Christianity is the true and right religion and that their God is the only god. Mrs. Cheng, whose brother-in-law is a Christian minister, had the following impression of Christians: “For some reason Christians are very exclusive. They don’t accept other religions and that’s something that they have to change. I have a lot of Christian friends who look at me and say, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ And I say, ‘you can say you feel sorry for me because I’m not a Christian because you can’t share with me but you can’t criticize me for being a Buddhist because you don’t know Buddhism.’ ” Mrs. Wang, whose husband’s entire family is Christian, gave similar comments: “I find Chinese Christians to be arrogant. They think that unless I’m a Christian or you’re a Christian you are not my member. I cannot accept that. That’s why I never got into it.” Buddhists realized that their exclusion is based not only on not being Christian, but on belonging to a religion that Christians and other “modern Taiwanese” consider outmoded and backward. As noted earlier, several of the Buddhist respondents themselves held this perception before becoming Buddhists. One respondent, who is a successful woman business executive, 16 I witnessed this myself going to the grocery store in cities with a high concentration of Chinese immigrants. But equally interesting is that on occasion I have also seen Korean immigrants attempting to evangelize and pass out Christian tracts to Chinese Americans.

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told me how when she went to the temple her Christian mother-in-law yelled at her, “What? Go to the temple? My God you are so superstitious!” Some respondents confessed that because of Christian ridicule they were less than forthcoming, and even surreptitious, about their religion. One respondent reported that she is ashamed to let her Christian Chinese coworkers know that she is Buddhist. Another told me that when his Christian mother visits him, often for months at a time, he and his wife do not attend the temple because “if she [his mother] finds out, she will be very angry.” On the other hand, they feel compelled to attend church services on Sundays with his mother. He and his wife secretly practice their Buddhism at his business office and not in the home when his mother is around. To his Christian mother, their Buddhism is “a shame to the family.” Mrs. Lin claims that most of her friends are Christian. Buddhist images that are common in the homes of other Buddhists are missing in her own home because she fears friends will criticize her religion. Instead, she has built a shrine in her guesthouse where she places all of her devotional objects. She shares this space with her non-Christian guests but not Chinese Christians. Encountering Non-Chinese Christians Buddhists feel far more comfortable with their religion around non-Chinese Christians, or as they would say “American Christians,” then around Taiwanese American Christians. Jerry Park (2005) similarly found that Asian Americans experienced more religious discrimination from coethnics than from others. Sharon Suh has also revealed that Korean American Buddhists feel stigmatized and discriminated by the predominantly Christian Korean American community (2004). Buddhists experience discrimination from coethnic Christians for several reasons. Americans regard Buddhism as a part of a foreign Chinese culture and tradition, one that should be respected. In American society, Buddhism is racialized as Asian (Chen 2002). Americans assume that Chinese are Buddhist. One respondent told me how her Anglo-American friend told her to “stay Buddhist, stay Chinese.” Americans embrace multiculturalism and are respectful and accepting of Buddhism. Few Buddhist respondents spoke of nonAsian Americans trying to convert them. Illustrative of the difference between Chinese and American Christians is the following account from a Buddhist respondent: Chinese and American Christians are a little bit different . . . like when the monk bowed during my father’s funeral ceremony all of my American friends bowed, too. They respected the customs and followed the service. But among my Chinese Christian friends, they did not. They refused to burn the incense and they remained standing when everyone else was bowing.

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Chinese Christians don’t like the images of the Buddha. They say that this is a sin whereas the Americans don’t have these feelings.

Some Buddhists suspect that Americans harbor prejudice toward Buddhists but do not verbalize these sentiments. In the United States, critiques directed toward Buddhism can be interpreted as racist. Perhaps fearful of offending the Chinese who are the new professional class in their communities, Americans are never outrightly critical of Buddhism in their personal interactions. One Buddhist respondent said, “Chinese Christians will say ‘hey I don’t like you,’ but Americans can’t say that because we can sue them for it!” One Taiwanese pastor claimed that when the local white churches heard that some Taiwanese immigrants were thinking about building a Buddhist temple in their neighborhood, they asked him to deal with the “problem.” They reasoned that if they, as whites, spoke out against the site of the temple it would appear racist as opposed to him, who is Taiwanese. Taiwanese immigrants’ personal interactions with non-Chinese Christians are minimal and usually take place in a professional context. Linguistic barriers further prevent immigrants from engaging in lively debates about religion and existential questions with those who do not speak Chinese. Some of the immigrants who do not work outside of the ethnic community have no non-Chinese acquaintances at all. For the most part, Taiwanese immigrants in my sample rarely socialize with non-Chinese in their free time. Those who have lived outside of Southern California claim that while they had non-Chinese friends before moving to the area, that number decreased substantially after moving. Because of the critical mass of Chinese in the Southern California area, Taiwanese immigrants are able to create homogeneous personal networks. Many immigrants continue to refer to non-Chinese as “foreigners” (wah goh lung/wai goh ren) even though as immigrants they are the foreigners in the United States. Immigrants experience religious pluralism both within and without the ethnic community. They experience, however, a different kind of pluralism in these two spheres. In both communities Buddhists feel that they are a religious minority, but the non-Chinese Christians are too socially remote and religiously tolerant to be a competitive and threatening presence. By comparison, Taiwanese Christians are perceived to be aggressive evangelizers and even hostile to those who are not Christian. Interactions with Christians within the ethnic community are both more intense and more threatening, since the more frequent and personal interactions with Christians provide greater opportunities for tension and opposition to develop. Indeed, Buddhists experience not merely religious pluralism, but religious opposition within the ethnic community.

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RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS Buddhism as a Self-Conscious Identity These encounters with evangelical Christian coethnics shape religious transformations among Buddhists in two ways: Buddhism becomes a selfconscious identity and Buddhism becomes an articulated system of belief. Stigmatized for their religion, Buddhists become defensive and perceive themselves as a persecuted minority. Scholars have written about how the presence of opposition is a significant factor in drawing boundaries and identity-building (Cohen 1985; Elliot 1986; Taylor and Whittier 1992). In his study of American evangelicals, Christian Smith (1998) makes the argument that the perception of opposition from outside not only enhances group solidarity but invigorates religious commitment. Immigrants come to think of themselves as “Buddhist” only once there is a clear community to define themselves against—the evangelical Christians. And in the attempt to defend themselves, their religion takes on a new salience and importance in their lives that it did not in Taiwan. By placing such significance on one’s status as Christian or non-Christian, Taiwanese American Christians make “non-Christian” a meaningful category that it is not in Taiwan. In their attempts to define and identify what is Christian and non-Christian, Christians introduce a discourse of religious categorization. Where immigrants had previously viewed practices such as carrying incense, or bai bai (worship) as “family traditions,” Christians identify these as “religious,” albeit a “false religion.” In doing so, Taiwanese Christians draw a distinction between tradition and religion that most Taiwanese do not. Being Taiwanese themselves, Taiwanese Christians have the license to be culturally self-critical in a way that non-Chinese Christians cannot without appearing to be racist. By labeling accepted traditions as “false,” “superstitious,” and “sinful,” Christians identify and articulate those things that were previously the taken-for-granted “common sense” (Geertz 1975) of the culture. By raising these traditions to consciousness and reassigning them to the category of “religion,” Christians make them not merely something to be inherited or followed without thought, but something one deliberately chooses and consciously practices. Christians are a sizable presence in the ethnic community and the symbolic categories they assign others have real consequences. When immigrants are excluded or ridiculed for belonging to the “wrong religion,” they have to reconsider exactly what these traditions mean to them. Taiwanese immigrant small business owners who are Buddhist feel that they are losing potential clients because they do not belong to Christian circles, a similar experience among Koream American Buddhists in the overwhelmingly Christian Korean community (Suh 2004). Given the social

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costs of being Buddhist, it is simply not enough to be Buddhist by default. Immigrants who had participated in Buddhist rituals and perhaps even incorporated Buddhist practices in their daily lives all along begin to identify as Buddhist once there is clearly something at stake in being Buddhist. In the face of evangelical Christian opposition, religion, considered “tradition,” now becomes a conscious choice. Buddhism as an Articulated Belief The need to defend themselves against evangelical Christians challenges Buddhists to rethink how to be religious. They learn that is no longer enough to be religious by merely doing religious acts, as it was in Taiwan; one must be able to articulate and explain one’s religious beliefs. For evangelical Christians, being Christian is predicated upon belief, the intellectual acceptance of the Gospel. Knowledge of the Bible is critical to comprehend God’s will. And the capacity to articulate this knowledge through evangelization is a duty of all Christians. As individual Christians are expected to be both apologists and evangelists of their faith, they transfer this expectation to Buddhists and set a template for how to be religious.17 Before in Taiwan, only monastics knew Buddhist scriptures. In America, lay Buddhists must acquire this knowledge to defend their faith. As it so happens, recent developments in modern Chinese Buddhism have made Buddhist classical texts and teachings more accessible to the laity. So, the explanations and resources are there, but the competition and threat from Christians motivates Taiwanese to reexamine their faith tradition. In the process, Buddhists appropriate the Christian style of approaching their religion as a set of articulated beliefs. For example, when evangelizing, Christians frequently broach the topic by asking questions such as, “How do you know you’ll go to heaven after you die?” or “Who created you?” or “How do you know that your god is true?” Part of the evangelizing strategy, whether consciously or unconsciously adopted by Christians, is to present non-Christians with existential questions to which Christians have already formulated and articulated answers. Few people, regardless of religious tradition, can articulate a knowledgeable and thoughtful response to such questions on the spot. Many of the people I interviewed admit that they have never pondered these issues, and the questions provoke them to consider these topics. Framed by a set of Christian cosmological assumptions, these questions are most suitably, or perhaps merely most easily, addressed by Christian 17 This pattern of religious isomorphism has historical precedents. In the nineteenth century, Italian Catholics started to adopt Protestant practices of revival meetings, lay group meetings, and emotional spiritual renewal when they faced competition from Protestant evangelists (Finke and Stark 1992; Dolan 1978).

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answers. For many Christian converts, these types of questions start them on their intellectual inquiry into the Christian faith. But others are disturbed by the aggressiveness of Christians and find their insistence that “there is only one god” to be unreasonable. Ironically, to these people, the Christian attempts at evangelization only prompt them to examine their own tradition for answers. For example, one respondent told me about a time when devotees at his temple (not Dharma Light) were repeatedly invited by a Chinese church to engage in a “discussion” about Buddhism and Christianity. Sensing that the discussion would likely be less than civil, they declined several times. Finally the Buddhists accepted reasoning that unless they rose to the challenge, they would appear to be cowardly and intimidated by Christians. Unbeknownst to them, the discussion was preceded by a lecture delivered by a Christian scholar of Buddhism, who warmed up the audience by pointing out the inconsistencies and weaknesses of Buddhism. My Buddhist respondent described the subsequent discussion as being before a firing squad of zealous evangelical Christians challenging them with Bible verses and accusations of idolatry. Despite the unpleasant encounter, he claimed that the “discussion” was a learning experience and impressed upon him and others from the temple the need to defend and explain their beliefs. Soon afterward, they started a class for this very purpose. Encounters such as these challenge Taiwanese American Buddhists to approach their religion more thoughtfully and to formulate sophisticated and coherent reasons for their religious choice. Respondents shared similar stories of not feeling adequately knowledgeable to explain or defend their faith against the Christian “attacks” on Buddhism. In a class at the Dharma Light Temple, students frequently asked how to respond to Christian challenges. Christians asked Buddhists why they were vegetarian. Christians would tease Buddhists with questions such as, “[a]re you afraid that you’re eating your grandmother?” Buddhists would respond by referring to the religious precept not to kill and the cosmic solidarity of all sentient beings. They would also offer scientific arguments suggesting the superior health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Although the class was originally designed to help immigrants explain Buddhism to Americans (meaning non-Chinese), the Buddhists used the information to defend their faith from other Chinese. DEFINING BUDDHISM IN THE UNITED STATES Encountering competition from the Taiwanese Christians motivates Buddhists to differentiate themselves from other groups. Max Weber (1978 [1922]) argues that competition and threat between religious groups in-

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vigorate the development of religious doctrine as groups are forced to define and distinguish themselves from others.18 Here Swidler’s (1986) understanding of how culture operates during “unsettled” periods is particularly instructive. “Bursts of ideological activism occur in periods when competing ways of organizing actions are developing or contending for dominance,” she writes. “People formulate, flesh out, and put into practice new habits of action” (279). Perceived as superstitious, backward, and outmoded, Buddhists respond by rearticulating Buddhism as modern, scientific, and rational. They differentiate themselves from the traditional religion of Taiwan that they themselves saw as truly outmoded. They also differentiate themselves from Christianity, which they claim is less modern than it appears. Taiwanese American Buddhists, however, face different challenges in positioning themselves in the larger American society. Knowing that they are foreign, unfamiliar, and exotic to Americans, the Taiwanese American Buddhists in my study, who are eager to spread the dharma in the West, define themselves as a more modern and Western religion than Christianity. Living in the United States pushes Buddhists to construct a more coherent and organized view of who they are and what they believe. Pure Buddhism is Not Chinese A frequent comment among the Buddhists was that they became “real Buddhists” in the United States, and that what they practiced in Taiwan was not “true Buddhism.” Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh (2001a) and Stuart Chandler (2004) have also noted this concern with orthodoxy in other immigrant religions in the United States. Ernest Gellner (1981) argues that crisis and threat are opportunities for a purer and more articulated faith, which is otherwise latent, to emerge. Taiwanese Buddhists felt the special need to distinguish Buddhism from Chinese culture, and in fact used their position as Buddhists to critique Chinese culture. Taiwanese popular religion, Buddhist respondents insisted, contains some elements of Buddhism but should not to be confused with it. In the centuries that Buddhism existed in China, it became tainted by Chinese culture. For example, consider the comments of Mrs. Chu, a forty-fiveyear-old computer scientist: 18 Weber writes, “The establishment of a religious congregation provides the strongest stimulus, though not the only one, for the development of the substantial content of the priestly doctrine, and it creates the specific importance of dogmas. Once a religious community has been established it feels a need to set itself apart from alien competing doctrines and to maintain its superiority in propaganda, all of which tends to place the emphasis upon differential doctrines” (1978 [1922], 460).

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A lot of people have the wrong knowledge about Buddhism and it is very difficult to change it because the image is too deep. They think that Buddhism is just going to the temple and doing things for the ancestors so that they’ll come back as humans or go onto a better life. But actually this is not Buddhism. Buddha, 2,000 years ago, never had this ceremony. It developed only when it came to China. This is a Chinese ceremony and wasn’t even included in Buddhism. Now it’s difficult to teach people that this isn’t exactly the way you’re supposed to do it. People do it because if descendents feel guilty and want to repay their ancestors they can do something. Right now we are trying to correct this behavior. But this is not the right way.

Mrs. Wu, a forty-five-year-old Buddhist convert who comes from a Christian family, makes the following observation about Taiwanese mistaking their practices for true Buddhism: A lot of people believe in Buddhism but they are not really Buddhists. A lot of people from Taiwan worship Ma-tsu and they think that’s Buddhism. But actually that’s not Buddhism, but on the surface it looks like it. A lot of people say, “I’m a Buddhist,” but they don’t really know what a Buddhist is. You see a lot of people, they bow every day but they don’t know why they bow. They just do a lot of ceremonies, but what’s really important aren’t the ceremonies but your practice on the inside. . . . A lot of people come to donate some money and to burn incense to get some kind of blessing. They think that by doing that they’ll be closer to Buddha, but that’s not Buddhism.

Mrs. Wu’s response shows that Buddhists make the same criticisms of traditional religion that Christians make of Buddhism. She suggests that followers of traditional religion are ignorant—“they don’t know what a Buddhist is . . . they don’t know why they bow”; ritualistic—“they just do a lot of ceremonies”; and opportunistic—“a lot of people come to donate some money, to burn incense to get some kind of blessing.” In defining themselves, Buddhists must respond to what they believe are misconceptions that Christians and modern secular Taiwanese hold about Buddhism. By differentiating Buddhism from Taiwanese popular religion, Buddhists claim that stereotypes of Buddhism are superstitious and false. It is Taiwanese culture, not Buddhism, that contains these superstitious and unmodern elements. Buddhism in Taiwan was tainted by Chinese cultural practices. In the United States, they practice true Buddhism, purified from Chinese tradition. Buddhism is a Form of Education and Christianity is a Religion Buddhism, respondents told me, is not a religion, but a form of education. Buddhism is a practice to change and improve the self, and not a way to

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manipulate or appease the gods. Religion is considered superstitious and unscientific because it involves external forces to change situations to which there is no empirical causal relationship. Rather than coercing supernatural forces to change reality, Buddhism is about changing yourself to deal with the unexpected and often inhospitable experiences of life. Buddhists argue that because of this, Buddhism is not a religion, but a form of education. Through this line of reasoning, Buddhists turn the Christian criticism of Buddhism on its head and lump “modern” Christianity into the same superstitious category as outmoded traditional Taiwanese religion. Christianity and traditional religion are similarly “superstitious” in that they appeal to supernatural and external forces to change situations. Buddhists, instead rely on themselves. For example, Mr. Tang comments: “People go to the temple and light incense and want to make a tradeoff with god by buying a plate for $7 or $14 and make an offering. They demand for their wishes to come true and the Buddha to give them what they want. They are no different from Christians. Christians pray the same thing—for their kids to be well and so forth. They don’t know the true meaning of Buddhism. They are different from those Buddhists who try to understand Buddhism. I’m changing into this type of person.” In comparison to Buddhism, many of the respondents describe Christianity as “simple” and “unsophisticated.” One respondent explains that Christ had to use simplistic concepts because his disciples were predominantly uneducated fishermen. Although critical of Christianity, Buddhists never charge it with being false or wrong. Christianity is just one of the “84,000 paths to enlightenment,” albeit a less sophisticated one. One respondent describes the two religions as follows: “Christianity is like kindergarten and Buddhism is like graduate school.” Many of the respondents characterize Buddhism as scientific and factbased. This is particularly true for men, many of whom are trained in science-related fields. Dr. Lee expresses this popular sentiment: “I find that Buddhism is the most scientific education compared with other religions because in other religions they want you to believe first. Believing is the only way for you to have emancipation. But in Buddhism they want you to question. They want you to think for yourself and through meditation and practice find out the truth for yourself.” Dr. Lee suggests that other religions are not scientific because they require faith without adequate proof or testing. Buddhism escapes the Christian “religion vs. science” dilemma because it requires no leap of faith as Christianity does. As a form of education, Buddhism encourages the same systematic, critical, and analytical thinking that science does. In describing their religious practice, Buddhists frequently use the word “investigation.” Rather than passively accepting truths handed down from an authority, individuals are supposed to use their critical faculties to

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investigate the truth for themselves. Mrs. Kuo invokes science as authority when she suggests that Buddhism is a “great religion” because it can be tested and proven by the scientific method. “I think Buddhism is going to be a great religion for Americans because Americans are scientific. They don’t just take things for granted. I know that there are a lot of great scientists who are here in this country and if they can eventually adopt the theory and experiences and put it through an experiment they are going to realize what a great religion it is.” Respondents also point out that several prominent scientists are Buddhist. Several told me that Einstein once claimed that if he were religious he would be Buddhist. Others refer to Stephen Hawking, another prominent scientist who is Buddhist. The Buddhists use scientific language to describe Buddhism, but few can coherently explain why Buddhism is scientific. Using scientific language suggests that Buddhism is compatible with modern science and not, as Taiwanese Christians claim, backward and superstitious. Buddhism as a Modern Western Alternative to Christianity As a religious and racial minority, Taiwanese American Buddhists face an added burden of proving that Buddhism is compatible with American society. Like other non-Western religious congregations (Chandler 2004; Chen 2002; Singh 2003), Dharma Light Temple had to overcome resistance from local officials and residents. As Jaideep Singh (2003) claims, arguments protesting the added traffic and noise of non-Christian religious congregations often veil racist fears of the foreign and unfamiliar. As a consequence, the Buddhist temple takes great pains to be civil, neighborly, and, above all, American, certainly more than Grace Church does (Chen 2002). But Taiwanese American Buddhists want more than acceptance by mainstream America. Many Taiwanese American Buddhists see themselves as propagators of the dharma in this new country. Unlike the Christians who cater to only coethnics, many Taiwanese American Buddhist temples attract the participation of non-Chinese members, particularly white devotees. Similar to other Asian American Buddhist temples (Numrich 1996; Yang 2002a; Yang and Ebaugh 2001b), Dharma Light Temple has a separate English-language or “parallel” congregation that includes the non-Chinese. Forward thinking Buddhist leaders realize that if Buddhism is going to have a future in the United States, it must reach beyond the ethnic enclave. Both the need to prove Buddhism’s legitimacy and the desire to spread Buddhism to Americans shapes how Taiwanese American Buddhists define their religion.

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In conversations, Buddhists frequently point out the growing popularity of Buddhism among Americans. Many refer to famous Americans who are Buddhist, such as the actors Richard Gere and Steven Segal as well as the basketball coach Phil Jackson. Buddhists also take great pride in the growing number of Americans attending the Dharma Light Temple. In particular, many point out that Brad Rogers, the English dharma teacher at the temple, not only holds a doctorate from a prestigious American university but used to be a Christian minister. In their eyes, the conversion of such a highly educated white Christian testifies to the compatibility between Buddhism and Western culture. Buddhists describe themselves as people with quintessentially American qualities of individuality and independence, people who in fact embrace these American characteristics even more than Christians do. When asked to describe the typical American and the typical Taiwanese, respondents associated independence and individuality with Americans and interdependence and collectivism with Taiwanese. Buddhists see Christianity as a fashionable trend in the immigrant community. Similar to Korean American Buddhists who have become a stigmatized minority within the Korean American community (Suh 2004), Taiwanese American Buddhists characterize Taiwanese Americans who become Christians as people who just want to fit in. Christians, they argue, are no different than worshippers of traditional religion who blindly follow “tradition.” As one respondent says, “[a]ll those Christians are just like those people who bai bai. They go to church and perform their rituals.” In their conversion narratives, some Buddhists describe themselves as individuals who have the will to resist the crowd. Respondents refer to obstacles they faced from both Christian and nonreligious immigrants. One respondent told me how her old friends alienated themselves from her after she became Buddhist: “My friends thought that I was crazy that I went to Dharma Light Temple so often. Some of my friends talked to my sister and said, ‘talk to your sister, tell her not to go to Dharma Light Temple!’ They think I’m crazy.” Having become Buddhist despite ridicule and negative stereotypes, Buddhists emphasize their religious choice as one of authenticity and sacrifice. Buddhists often say that Christians are more worldly, their religious commitments less rigorous, merely attending their “social club” on Sundays and bringing along others. Being Buddhist, they say, is not just about dressing nicely for church on Sundays to pass out one’s business card. It is a far more serious commitment that requires sacrifice and dedication to disciplining and changing oneself. Mrs. Kuo, a computer scientist in her mid-forties, who is always impeccably dressed in designer clothing, offers the following comments: “A lot of my friends here are Christian. They do it because they go with the flow because that’s where all their

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friends are. They like the Christian way instead of the Buddhist way. They don’t have to wear robes. They can wear anything they want when they go to church.” Respondents also appeal to cherished American values to legitimate Buddhism. For example, many claim that Buddhism is more equal and democratic than Christianity. In Buddhism everyone has the potential of becoming a Buddha, whereas according to Christianity only Christians can go to heaven. The following is a typical response: “Christians say that everybody who becomes Christian will go to heaven when they pass away and those who aren’t Christian will go to hell. I don’t think that this is fair because I believe that everybody can go to heaven if they are good. I don’t think that religion makes a difference that if you go to my church you will go to heaven and if you don’t go to my church you will go to hell. Buddhism is more fair because everybody can go to heaven if you are a good person. That’s fair and equal.” Another respondent uses the phrase “equal opportunity” to describe Buddhism in comparison to Christianity. She claims, “Buddhists are more about equal opportunity than Christians. They only have one god and in Buddhism we can all become Buddhas.” Similarly another respondent characterizes Buddhism as being more “tolerant” and “liberal” because of the belief that everyone can potentially become a Buddha. These Taiwanese American Buddhists, whose origins are indisputably Asian, legitimize their relevance in the American context by appealing to modern science and Western values. As religious minorities they bear the burden of proving that they can conform to American society. Buddhism as a Choice and Not a Tradition Very few respondents describe Buddhism as being more authentic to Chinese culture, although this is implied in many of their remarks. Similarly no respondents defend their religious choice on the grounds that they want to maintain Chinese tradition or family tradition, although their responses suggest this. For example, Buddhists say that they do not become Christian because it is not their family tradition, implying that in comparison Buddhism is. For many, Buddhism evokes an emotive connection to their family. Many Buddhists tell me that Buddhism makes them feel close to their parents or grandparents who are in Taiwan or have passed away. However, when explaining why they are Buddhists, they appeal to modern Western values rather than to family duty or Chinese tradition. Tradition and duty still do operate on the consciousness of immigrants once they move to the United States, for we see in the case of the Taiwanese

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Christians that the sense of breaking tradition and shirking familial duty continues to weigh heavily in their decision to convert. Instead, Buddhists narrate their religiosity as an individual choice, not as maintaining tradition. Even those who grew up in practicing Buddhist families do not claim to be “keeping tradition.” And while Buddhists can easily criticize Christians for betraying their cultural traditions by converting to a Western religion, few say so explicitly. By appealing to arguments such as science and Western principles of equality and democracy, Buddhists distance themselves from the old representations of Buddhism as traditional and superstitious, and cast themselves as rational individuals who are guided by scientific principles compatible with modern Western society. To appeal to cultural tradition to defend their religious choice would only demonstrate that Buddhism is not in fact an authentic “choice,” but another case of “following tradition.” For these educated, middle-class immigrants who see themselves as bearers of enlightenment to the West, the rhetoric of science and rationality is more powerful than tradition.

CONCLUSION Like other immigrants groups, Taiwanese Buddhists experience a revitalized religiosity after migrating to the United States. Buddhism shifts from an embedded religion to an explicit religion in the United States. Scholars have traditionally interpreted this shift as a response to immigrant interaction with American religious and ethnic pluralism. Instead, I suggest this shift is a response to a newly formed religious pluralism within the ethnic community, especially where there are many evangelical converts. The experience of religious opposition within the ethnic community shapes the transformation of Buddhism for Taiwanese immigrants. A substantial proportion of the ethnic community, evangelical Christians introduce a new discourse of religion and a category of social identity whose consequences extend to all. By defining others on the basis of their religious affiliation, evangelical Christians create a religiously charged environment where religion becomes a socially meaningful category, a quality it never had in Taiwan. Whereas religion in Taiwan was deeply embedded in the social unconscious, the religious conflict and tension that immigrants experience in the United States raises religion to such a level of consciousness that immigrants become “practicing Buddhists.” The need to define, differentiate, and defend themselves from evangelical Christians motivates Taiwanese immigrants to approach Buddhism deliberately and consciously through the study and careful application of its teachings to their lives. Furthermore, Buddhists define themselves in

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modern and Western terms out of a desire to propagate the dharma to Americans and distinguish to themselves from Christians. As I shall discuss in greater depth, Buddhism and Christianity become a “rationalizing” force for immigrants in the context of their new American homes.19 That is, religion changes from being merely the assumed “common sense” or “tradition,” and crystallizes into a powerfully coherent set of beliefs and practices that can transform individuals. How Christianity and Buddhism provide coherent narratives and systematic practices for Taiwanese immigrants to reorganize their lives in the United States is the subject of the next two chapters. 19 Here I draw the distinction between “rationalization” as Weber uses it to refer to formal systematization on the level of religious doctrine and institutional organization, and religion as a “rationalizing” force to refer to the coherent reordering of personal meanings at the level of the individual. It is problematic to equate the two and assume that individuals who belong to world religions are therefore more rationalized. It is common for even members of world religions to approach their religion in a piecemeal and utilitarian manner that would appear to be “irrational” and more befitting for members of a “traditional” religion. For example, the propitiation and bargaining with deities that is supposely characteristic of “traditional” religions are not uncommon practices among Christians of Western modernized countries. Though a religious system might be systematically codified, believers might not have access to it for various reasons, such as general illiteracy of the population, or the purposeful establishment of a sacred language to which the general public is illiterate in order to maintain a religious aristocracy. Alternatively, as Robert W. Hefner (1993a) suggests, “a religion’s central doctrines may remain latent for long periods, only to be taken up when conditions favor their revivalist application to new historical circumstances” (18). This indeed is the case for evangelical Christianity (Martin 1990) and scripturalist Islam (Gellner 1981). Similarly this interpretation might be applied to the revival of Chinese Buddhism in Asia and abroad.

4 Becoming American Men and Women OTHERWORLDLY NARRATIVES AND THIS-WORLDLY SELVES

There is a saying in Chinese—“A woman serves her father, then her husband, then her son.” Before becoming a Christian, others told me who I was. As a woman, I was never my own person. —Mrs. Liao Here you have to work triple hard to get back the status you had in Taiwan. —Mr. Tsai Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form. —from the Heart Sutra

IN THE Confessions Saint Augustine describes his conversion as liberation from his old lustful self: “For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity. These were the links which together formed what I have called my chain, and it held me fast in the duress of servitude.” (64) Writing in this familiar tradition of the Christian confessional, highly visible Americans, from the writer Anne Lamott to former Nixon advisor Chuck Colson, offer similar narratives of religious emancipation from an old life of vice—addiction to drugs, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity—to a new life of virtue and piety. In their conversion narratives, Buddhist and Christian Taiwanese immigrants also tell stories of liberation from their old selves and the birth of new virtuous selves. But whereas typical American evangelical conversion narratives recount tales of transformations from addictions to eating, alcohol, or sex (e.g., Griffith 1997; Miller 1997; Tipton 1982), Taiwanese immigrants narrate their religious conversions as freedom from traditional Taiwanese expectations that prevent them from being who they really are. Men and women, Buddhists, and Christians, all tell similar stories of discovering, through religion, authentic selves that transcend familial and societal definitions. There is a striking difference in how men and women describe what they are liberated from, and the new selves they have become. In this

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chapter I discuss how gendered experiences of immigration shape the construction of new selves in the United States. The self is not a fixed entity, but crafted in culturally and historically specific contexts in which race, gender, and ethnicity hold different meanings (Kondo 1990). Taiwanese women who are traditionally defined by their kinship roles experience fewer kinship obligations and more independence from extended kin in the United States. They use religion to define an authentic self who is more independent of family. Contrary to scholars who argue that immigrant religion reproduces patriarchy in the United States (Ebaugh and Chafetz 1999; George 1998; Kim 1997; Kim 1996), the evidence from Taiwanese immigrants shows that women also use religion in ways that challenge patriarchal definitions of women’s selfhood. Taiwanese immigrant men, many of whom had defined themselves on the basis of their careers and achievement, are forced to reexamine their sense of selfhood in the face of racism and downward mobility in the American workplace. To immigrant men, religion offers the possibility of a self independent of social status and achievement. In addition to gender, distinct understandings of salvation and religious community among Buddhists and Christians shape how Taiwanese immigrants situate what they call their “true selves” in the world.

RELIGIOUS DUALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN AUTHENTIC SELF The idea of religious self-transformation as the revelation of an essential true self presumes that humans inhabit a dual reality.1 Max Weber claimed that salvation religions like Christianity and Buddhism, are in constant tension with the world (1946, 329). Salvation religions posit a dualism between a true, perfect reality and the imperfect, fragmented, and illusory world that we inhabit. In the evangelical Christian tradition, the world is a fallen and flawed place because of original sin. Humans, who are socialized into this world, become socialized into the sin of this world. In con1 Portions of chapter 4 have appeared in “A Self of One’s Own: Taiwanese Immigrant Woman and Religious Conversion.” Gender and Society 19 (2005):33–57. The suggestion that Christianity and Buddhism provide frameworks for the construction of selves might appear contradictory to the religious ideal of selflessness through self-transcendence. For Christians, the notion of dying to the self is expressed in the Pauline letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The concept of self is even more problematic for Buddhists who aspire to the principle of non-self (anatta), which suggests that the self as an independent and bound entity is an illusion. Emptiness is true liberation from the bondage of a sense of self. Despite the religious theories of selflessness and non-self, however, Christians and Buddhists objectify and represent the self in their everyday lives. I am not making an argument concerning

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trast to the fallen world is the “the kingdom of God,” or the world as God intended, and created it to be. In Buddhism, the world is not fallen or sinful, but rather impermanent and illusory. Suffering arises from the tendency, or the habit, for humans to regard the empirical world as permanent and real. A parable from the Lotus Sutra compares the unenlightened to children who do not know that they are playing in a burning house that will soon disappear. Humans become attached to finding fulfillment in things that they do not realize are impermanent. Salvation religions like Buddhism and Christianity offer “salvation” from the illusion, suffering, and failures of the empirical world. The possibility of an alternative and true reality apart from the world gives religious people a potential context from which to critique, reject, and even transform the world as it is. Salvation religions are therefore in constant tension with the world because of the very different systems of value and criteria they present in opposition to “the world.” Because Weber (1996c) believes the values of religion and the secular world are inherently opposed, he argues that religion leads individuals to devalue and even reject the world and its corresponding obligations, commitments and values. As the religiously devout reexamine and reconstruct the world through a religious lens, they also reexamine and reconstruct the individual self who is situated in the imperfect world. Robert Bellah (1970a) argues that the religious devaluation or rejection of the empirical world against an “ideal world” has enormous consequences for the construction of individual subjectivity. In contrast to the “empirical” or socially defined self, religion privileges the authentic self or essence. Bellah claims that it is precisely the dualism, or the “world rejecting” character of historic religions that makes it possible for a “clearly structured conception of the self” to emerge: “Devaluation of the empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self, or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions” (33). A person’s “worldly” identities and corresponding obligations become devalued as “a man is no longer defined chiefly in terms of what tribe or clan he comes from or what particular god he serves but rather as a being capable of salvation” (33). For example, Buddhism maintains that the chief source of suffering is the illusion of the empirical self, who, conditioned by worldly desires and attachments is unable to recognize its own impermanence. Buddhism the ontological existence of a self. Rather, as a sociologist, I am interested in how individuals use religious notions of the self or non-self to constitute themselves in the world.

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teaches that enlightenment comes from the deep knowledge that there is no self, only Buddha nature (Buddhata).2 The sense of the empirical self as an independent and bounded entity is an illusion. One’s Buddha nature, the inherent nature that all sentient beings possess to become enlightened, is obscured by the attachments to the illusory world. A temple publication quoted the following passage from the Suragama Sutra to convey this idea: “Fundamentally, everyone has a pure clean mind, but it is usually covered by the defilement and dust of worldly desires which have arisen from one’s circumstances. This defiled mind is not of the essence of one’s nature: something has been added, like an intruder or even a guest in a home, but not its host.” In a class at Dharma Light Temple, Venerable Man-yi compared the empirical self to an onion. She said, “You strip the empirical self down and there is no core. The empirical self is conditioned by the environment. It is not the ultimate self so let it go.” In letting their empirical selves go, Buddhists devalue their social identities to the enhancement of their Buddha nature. Here the story of the first meeting between the Fifth Patriarch3 and Hui-neng, the future Sixth Patriarch, illustrates the way Buddha nature transcends social categorization. When the Fifth Patriarch asked Hui-neng where he came from Huineng replied, “Ling-nan.” Testing Hui-neng, the Fifth Patriarch then remarked, “Ling-nan is a place for barbarians and the uncivilized. They do not have the Buddha nature.” To this, Hui-neng replied, “People can be classified into northerners and southerners, but there is no such difference in Buddha nature.” Hui-neng’s reply so impressed the Fifth Patriarch that he passed the lineage onto him, making him the Sixth Patriarch. The message of this exchange is similar to that in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Both Buddhism and Christianity maintain that humans possess an ultimate essence or nature that transcends social categories. For evangelical Christians, the conversion process is literally understood as the birth of a new self, as exemplified in the term “born again.” In the Gospel of John 3:3, Christ tells the Jewish leader Nicodemus, “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The new, transformed self, Christ reminds his followers, will live in tension with the values of the material world: “No one can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). In the Acts of the 2 “Buddha” comes from the root of the verb budh—which means to wake up, to understand, to comprehend what is happening in a deep way. 3 “Patriarch” refers to the leader of Chinese Ch’an school of Buddhism.

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Apostles, Paul reiterates this theme of dualism between Christ and the world saying, “We must obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). As Taiwanese encounter American life, they question some of the traditions that had once defined their personhood in Taiwan. Taiwanese immigrants in my sample discover that they are not the same persons that they were in Taiwan. They find some Taiwanese traditions and expectations constraining and limiting in the United States. The dualistic or “worldrejecting” character of Buddhism and Christianity gives Taiwanese immigrants the framework to “renounce” the old selves that now seem limiting, confining and dissonant in the context of their American realities. In the religious worldview, people are freed from the social institutions and traditions that once defined and confined them so that they can become not only new selves, but their true selves. For Christians, it is the process of becoming “born again,” of establishing a new and godly self. For Buddhists, it is the concept of awakening one’s Buddha nature, one’s authentic essence. In both cases, this true self/essence transcends the parameters of social definitions or particularistic ties. Yet paradoxically, it is their worldy, everyday gendered experiences as men and women in the United States that determines how Taiwanese immigrant Buddhists and Christians understand and construct their new, authentic selves.

WOMEN AND THE TRANSFORMED SELF: A SEPARATE SELF FROM THE FAMILY Becoming New Selves: Women Working out Taiwanese Traditions and American Contradictions The Taiwanese immigrant women I interviewed use religion to negotiate old traditions and to construct new traditions of gender and selfhood in the United States. In migrating to the United States, Taiwanese women face a number of contradictions and tensions between their present American realities and the Confucian ideals of womanhood with which they were raised. The Western conception of the self as an autonomous unit is foreign to most Taiwanese. Like other traditional Confucian societies, a person’s identity is deeply embedded in a communal context (Kim 1997). Individuals are defined relationally, according to their location in the kinship structure (Hsu 1967). For Taiwanese women, this traditional structure is a patriarchal one. Being a woman means belonging to, and hence subjugation to, men—first their fathers, then their husbands, and then their sons. Even the figure of the domineering mother-in-law participates in this patriarchal institution, since she wields her power only by virtue

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of her relationship to her son. A woman marries out of her own family to belong to her husband’s family (Lu 1984). She is expected to devote her life to his family by taking care of his parents and worshipping his ancestors. A traditional Taiwanese woman’s life revolves around the family, and her identity is defined by her relation to the family. Traditionally a Taiwanese household is composed of parents, sons, and their wives and children. Half of the women respondents were married before coming to the United States. Most had lived in a patrilineal extended household as married women at some point in Taiwan. In the last three decades, urban middle class Taiwanese have moved toward nuclear households. However, this is still a temporary arrangement. Today most young couples live with the husband’s parents before establishing their own nuclear household, however, they revert back to extended households when the husband’s parents become older and move in with them. (Farris 2004; Weinstein et al. 1994). And families still tend to live in the same city as the husband’s parents (Farris 2004; Weinstein et al. 1994). The extended family continues to be a significant source of identity, belonging, and obligation (Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994).4 In the United States, the extended family plays a far less prominent role in the lives of Taiwanese immigrants. Many have no or few family members nearby. Eighteen of the fifty respondents have no extended family in Southern California. Those with family members in Southern California tend to have one or two siblings, and not extensive family networks. Multigenerational households are far less common in the United States. Only two respondents have elderly parents who lived with them in the United States. Four have parents who live in Southern California but not in the same household. Taiwanese told me that the elderly prefer not to live in the United States because of an apparently common perception that they will be mistreated by their children. Instead, most elderly parents stay in Taiwan and visit their children in the United States for several months at a time. These extended visits cause much tension among respondents, especially between women and their mothers-in-law. While immigrants continue to honor their obligations to their extended families in Taiwan through regular remittances, phone calls, and visits, 4 The majority of my respondents left Taiwan in the 1980s. According to a study of Taiwanese conducted in 1986 (Weinstein et al. 1994), 44.2 percent of couples between the ages of 20–39 lived in the same household and 25.1 percent lived in the same city as the husband’s parents. This translates to 69 percent of couples coresiding in the same city as the husband’s parents. Married children maintained very close relations with the husband’s parents. Among those living in the same city as the husband’s parents, 49 percent saw each other daily, 67 percent several times a week, and 79 percent at least once a week. Even among those living elsewhere, 21 percent of couples saw the husband’s parents several times a month and 49 percent at least once a month. Married children also maintain a sense of

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these obligations take on a different meaning at such a long distance. Because of their lower status within the traditional extended family, women especially welcome the distance as a relief from the burdens of living with in-laws in Taiwan. For example, Mrs. Yang claims that her overbearing in-laws controlled her life when she was living in Taiwan. In fact, it was because her in-laws wanted a family member to have American citizenship that she and her husband immigrated to the United States. Now with the distance from them, she feels that she has more control over her own life. Another woman told me that she has more free time in the United States because she does not have to spend so much time attending to “family duties.” Although distance liberates women from certain onerous demands of the extended family, it also means they cannot depend on its support. In the United States, women, for better or worse, have to become more independent. Women talk about having to figure things out on their own in the United States. Like other middle-class Asian immigrants (George 2005), in Asia they relied upon hired help or relatives for domestic duties that they now face alone. Immigrants without family are especially likely to turn to religion because, as we have seen, the church functions as an extended family that provides immigrants with practial help. As the extended family diminishes in prominence in the United States, so, too, does the sense of self that revolves around it. Life in the United States makes women question some patriarchal qualities of traditional Taiwanese womanhood. As children in Taiwan, the women I interviewed were brought up to cultivate the womanly virtues of obedience to, and dependence on, male relatives. Compared with American women, one respondent says, “Chinese women are more obedient. At home, we listen to our husband. My mom always said, ‘Whatever the husband says you must go along.’” Mrs. Wu, a woman in her midforties with an M.B.A. degree, remembers how her parents would tell her “it’s not good for a woman to think too much.” Some women also report being treated as inferior because of their gender. For example, Mrs. Pang, who belongs to a family of eight girls and no boys, remembers her grandfather telling her and her sisters, “all you girls are useless because you belong to another family.” As daughters they were “spilled water” (puchuqu de shui) who would transfer their filial piety, earning, and reproductive powers to the husband’s family after marriage. Although expanding economic and educational opportunities in Taiwan have challenged some of these concepts of womanhood and gender relations in the last few decades (Chang 1996; Farris 1994; Thornton and financial responsibility for the husband’s parents. Eighty-five percent of all couples gave money to the husband’s parents occasionally and 42 percent regularly.

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Lin 1994; Xu and Lai 2002), the immigrant women that I interviewed still characterize womanhood in Taiwan in these traditional Confucian terms. This can partially be explained by a tendency for immigrants to portray their past in static and “traditional” ways. But it also reflects the timing of the women’s emigration and the rise of a popular feminist movement in Taiwan. A popular Taiwanese feminist consciousness took hold in the late 1980s (Farris 1994, 2004), when the majority of my female respondents were immigrating or had already left. Women in Taiwan now experience many of the same changes as Taiwanese immigrant women in the United States. My respondents, who missed feminism in Taiwan, now discovered it as immigrant women in the United States. Like other American immigrants, these Taiwanese women adapt to the financial demands of raising a family by working outside of the home. At the time of the interviews, more than half of the respondents worked outside of the home. Nearly all of them have been employed at one time or another in the United States. Among those who are employed, half work in sales, clerical and administrative positions in coethnic businesses. The rest work in the mainstream as professionals like dentists, computer programmers, and nurses. For professional women, their careers give them a sense of status and identity outside of the home (Espiritu 1999). Paid employment gives women a degree of economic independence and financial power in household matters that their mothers did not have (Espiritu 1999; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994).5 For example, consider how employment changed the gender dynamics in the home of Mrs. Chen, a working-class woman who has lived in the United States for seventeen years: In Taiwan he [her husband] used to take care of all the financial matters and I didn’t know how much money he made. All of our money was in his control. It’s not like that here in America. There, he was working and he took care of all the payments. I had to ask him for money. Now because I work we have a joint bank account. Financial matters are joint decisions. My name is on those documents so he needs to ask for my permission. Before in Taiwan he bought two houses without even telling me. Now he can’t do that.

Even those women who do not contribute to the family income agree that living in the United States widens women’s traditional sphere of authority. For example, Mrs. Wang, makes the decisions regarding financial 5 Women in Taiwan have always worked but not necessarily for paid employment. Women’s paid labor force participation has increased dramatically in the last two decades (Yi 2002). In 1974, when my respondents’ mothers may have worked, 30 percent of the paid workforce were women, mostly under 25, and in blue collar jobs. The female workforce was composed of working-class women. My respondents’ mothers, who were middle-class, tended not to engage in paid labor.

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investments in her household: “When we deal with financial investments I often make the inquiries because he’s at work. I have the time to look at things. He consents with the decision that I’ve made.” Because of these new responsibilities in the household she is “forced to learn” so that she can “contribute to the decision.” Mrs. Wang adds that the survival skills she needs in the United States clash with the traditional Taiwanese womanly virtues of submissiveness and obedience. “If a wife is trained to be submissive,” Mrs. Wang says, “she will be submissive no matter what. She won’t fight back. It’s very tough. In this country you need to learn to speak out for your own rights and fight back.” As mothers, women feel that that need to be more aggressive to protect their children as minorities in American society. For example, when Mrs. Lin first moved to the United States, her seven-year-old daughter came home from school with scraped knees. American children at school had made fun of her for being Chinese and pushed her on the ground. Mrs. Lin did not know what to do. In Taiwan she could have expected that the teacher would protect her daughter and punish the other children, but here . . . what? She told her friend, Li, about the incident. Li was also a Taiwanese immigrant, but had been living in the United States for ten years while earning his Ph.D. Li told her that she needed to take action. He promptly called the school principal, reported the event, and warned him that such racism would not be tolerated. Looking back, Mrs. Lin says, “I didn’t know how to fight for her because my English was bad. From that time on, both she and I learned that you have to fight for your rights.” In the United States, Taiwanese women see first-hand how American women live. And as a result, they question the hierarchy and patriarchy of their own traditional culture even more deeply. Many Taiwanese women in my study make envious remarks about what they see as the equality between American women and men. As one respondent puts it: “In America, women and men are on the same level. If men do it, then women do it, too. Men and women earn money and go to college. In America women are better off. In the house, men also help out. In America, it is more equal.” Taiwanese women also perceive American women to be more independent. When asked to describe a typical American women and a typical Taiwanese woman, Mrs. Liu, a woman in her early thirties, with a bachelor’s degree from an American university says: “American women are independent. They have a lot of space to do things that they really enjoy. The typical Taiwanese woman is not independent. She will look upon marriage as the most important thing in her life. She will try to secure herself financially through their marriage.” Many of the respondents admire these perceived qualities of American women while they criticize their own Taiwanese ideals of womanhood.

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They claim that their normative Taiwanese traditions feel static and confining when their realities are so different in the United States. Their new American lives cultivate and even require a new independence from men (and the family) that challenges their traditional Taiwanese notions of womanhood. The development of separate careers and income from men, the example of independent American women, and the need for immigrant women to “fight for [their] rights” in the American public all nurture a new notion of womanly selfhood in contradistinction from the traditional Taiwanese self. Since women are traditionally defined by their relationships to men in the family, it is no surprise that it is also in the family where these tensions of negotiating a new self are most pronounced. In the context of these everyday familial negotiations, Taiwanese immigrant women use religion to work out these contradictions between Taiwanese traditions and their new American realities. Even though immigrant women’s participation in the labor market may lead to greater independence and equality, some women may still need the symbolic and moral resources of religion to legitimate the departure from the old kincentered self to a new independent self. While some scholars claim that immigrant religious congregations tend to preserve patriarchal authority (George 1998; Kim 1996; Kim 1997; Ebaugh and Chafetz 1999), examining how immigrant women use religion in their everyday lives reveals a more complex picture. Like other religious women, for example, Korean American Buddhists (Suh 2004), Brazilian Pentecostals (Mariz and Machado 1997), Colombian Evangelicals (Brusco 1995), and American Evangelicals (Griffith 1997), Taiwanese American women use religion to challenge and transform their place within the traditional family. Taiwanese immigrant women use their new identities and obligations as Christians and Buddhists to carve out spaces of independence from their roles and expectations of family—or even subtly to redefine them. Here I turn to the examples of two women, one Christian and another Buddhist, who use the religious language of authentic selfhood to work out a self distinct from the family, specifically from the obligations of in-laws. A Christian Woman’s Experience: “Becoming Her Own Person” “There is a saying in Chinese,” Mrs. Liao explains to me, “‘A woman serves her father, then her husband, and then her son.’6 Before becoming a Christian, others told me who I was. As a woman, I was never my own person.” For nearly twenty years, Mrs. Liao, a fifty-year-old housewife, was “not her own person” until she had the courage to “rebel” and con6

This is know as the “three submissions” in the Confucian classic Li Chi.

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vert to Christianity five years ago. Having married into the Liao family, Mrs. Liao was obliged to act as a proper daughter-in-law and always defer to her mother-in-law’s wishes. According to Mrs. Liao, she could do nothing right in the oppressive eyes of her mother-in-law, who lived in a neighboring town in Southern California. From small details, like the way she sliced her vegetables, to more important concerns, like childbirth, her mother-in-law aggressively voiced her opinions. Mrs. Liao’s mother-in-law was an extremely devout Buddhist. As a traditional daughter-in-law, Mrs. Liao would follow her in bowing and worshipping the “idols.” As Mrs. Liao explains, “Whenever I went to her (mother-in-law’s) house, the first thing that she would do is bring me to her room with her idols, and she would ask me to bow and worship them. I obeyed, but I didn’t know what I was bowing [to] or worshipping.” Mrs. Liao’s sister, who was a convert to Christianity, introduced her to Grace Evangelical Church. Although Mrs. Liao was drawn to Christianity, she felt that, as the daughter-in-law of the Liao family, she was dutybound to continue worshipping the gods of her mother-in-law. Her husband did not want her to convert either, knowing that it would disrupt the family peace. For years, Mrs. Liao quietly suffered the pressure from her in-laws. But in her early forties, the years of repressing her “true feelings” started to take their toll on her body. Mrs. Liao began to experience debilitating migraines and heart problems. Her doctor told her that these were stress related. Mrs. Liao attributed them to the stress that she experienced from her mother-in-law. Because Grace Church was a place where she felt a great deal of peace, she started to attend more regularly. Here she met others like herself who had converted to Christianity despite their families’ disapproval. With the support of the community she found in the church, she gained the courage to “rebel” against her mother-in-law and converted to Christianity a year later. She reflects on her preconversion days: “From the beginning, I was just following my in-laws, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t my own person. I just wanted to make them happy. But I myself was so unhappy. It was as if I could be happy only if they were happy and that I would be unhappy if they were unhappy. Their pressure made me rebel. I’ll tell you frankly, my in-laws pushed me to become Christian. Even though Mrs. Liao had lived in the United States for fifteen years, she describes herself as a person who, prior to conversion, lacked a sense of an independent self. In this context, Mrs. Liao’s refusal to worship her in-law’s gods and instead worship the Christian God was an assertion of independence from her husband’s family. In the United States, Mrs. Liao has a far more egalitarian relationship with her husband. Quite often, he must obey her rather than she obey

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him. She is the one who makes the financial decisions for the household, and many of the business decisions for his company. Thus she no longer fits the mold of a virtuous traditional Taiwanese woman dependent on her man. And yet as long as she continued to worship her mother-in-law’s idols while secretly wanting to be Christian, she felt like an extension of her husband, not her own person. Although Mrs. Liao claims that her in-laws “pushed” her to become Christian, another way to view this story is that Christianity “pushed” her away from her in-laws. I do not mean that Christianity instructed Mrs. Liao to disobey her in-laws, but rather that Christianity offered Mrs. Liao an alternative model of selfhood and morality that allowed her to reinterpret her actions in ways that were morally acceptable to her. In Taiwanese tradition, filial piety is one’s supreme duty. Indeed, the Hsiao Ching (Classic of Filial Piety), one of the Confucian classics, says that “Serving parents when alive with love and affection and when dead with grief and sorrow—this completely exhausts the basic duties of living men” (chap. 18). Christianity and Confucianism share the same teaching to honor one’s parents. However, unlike in Confucianism, in evangelical Christianity, God’s supreme authority over any human person or institution makes disobeying one’s parents to obey God acceptable—even commendable (Bellah 1970b). This is particularly evident in the Gospels, when Christ warns his followers that his teachings will challenge and even destroy family relations as they know them: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; And a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’ He who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:34–39). As Weber argues, “Wherever prophecies of salvation have created religious communities, the first power with which they have come into conflict has been the natural sib” (1946c, 342). Because kinship obligations figure so prominently in traditional Taiwanese culture, the tensions between secular kinship commitments and the kingdom of God are all the more heightened. The Christian dualism between the world and the kingdom of God provides converts with a framework to narrate their personal transformations from their “old selves” (worldly kin-centered selves) to their “new selves” (godly selves). To women converts, their kin-centered identities become devalued as their Christian identities grow in importance. Before becoming Christian, Mrs. Liao’s identities as “wife of Mr. Liao” and “daughter-in-law of Liao family” determined who she was and how she should act. After becoming Christian, her new identity as a “daughter of God” takes precedence over her secular identities and legitimates her

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freedom to act outside of traditional expectations, even if it means disobeying her mother-in-law. Mrs. Liao’s kinship obligations as daughter-in-law still matter to her. But she will not let her kinship obligations interfere with her own commitments as a Christian. She now refuses to bow to her mother-in-law’s “idols.” She no longer allows her children to worship her mother-in-law’s gods or participate in any non-Christian religious practices. By asserting her self-autonomy through religion, Mrs. Liao has reshaped her life away from the terms set by her mother-in-law, and the broader Confucian expectations of kinship obligations. Mrs. Liao is now an active member of Grace Christian Church. This commitment has changed her circle of influence. The church members have become her extended kin. Now she spends less time with her in-laws on the weekends so that she can participate in church activities. Mrs. Liao sends her children to a Christian school over the strong objections of her in-laws. On one level, Mrs. Liao’s story is about one woman’s struggle to gain independence from traditional kinship structures. But to Mrs. Liao and many other Taiwanese women, this is primarily a story of religious selftransformation. It is precisely because evangelical Christianity frames the world in opposition to the kingdom of God that Mrs. Liao is able to engage in an otherwise reprehensible act from the perspective of the Taiwanese tradition. She sees her former self as someone who was defined by the values of “this world,” most prominently, by the earthly demands of being a good daughter-in-law. This secular value prevented her from doing not only what she wanted to do, but, more importantly, what God wanted. A Buddhist Woman’s Experience: “Letting Her True Nature Come Out” Such dynamics are not limited to Christian converts. The story of Mrs. Tseng’s spiritual awakening as a Buddhist similarly illustrates how religious conversion transforms Taiwanese women from traditional kin-defined self. Like Mrs. Liao, her experience embodies the familiar Chinese trope of the long-suffering daughter-in-law serving an oppressive motherin-law. Whereas Mrs. Liao does not hold a career outside of the home, Mrs. Tseng’s career as an accomplished doctor gives her an independent and respected professional status beyond the family. And yet Mrs. Tseng, who is forty-six years old and married with one daughter, claims, “I didn’t like myself deep inside my heart,” before her conversion to Buddhism seven years ago. A self-proclaimed perfectionist in both her professional and personal life, she aimed to win the praise of others. She had attended

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the top medical school in Taiwan and had been awarded a prestigious research fellowship at an American university. She was adored by her husband and daughter as a devoted wife and mother. But she still did not like herself deep inside her heart, she explains, because she could not live up to the expectations of her overbearing Christian mother-in-law. Although none of the respondents were living with their in-laws permanently, many, including Mrs. Tseng, had in-laws from Taiwan visiting for months at a time. Mrs. Tseng says: “I tried my best to please a lot of people. I tried to be a perfect daughter-in-law, but my mother-in-law would tell me that I wasn’t good at this and I wasn’t good at that. And I believed her, and I started to blame myself. I didn’t like myself deep inside my heart.” Although Mrs. Tseng had converted to Christianity to marry her husband, it was not until she encountered Buddhism, in the aftermath of her own mother’s death, that she claims she started truly to know and like herself. To Mrs. Tseng and other Buddhists, knowledge of self is one of the first steps to enlightenment. In Buddhism, ignorance enslaves humanity to an endless cycle of suffering. The human condition is one of perpetual delusion, in which humans regard the empirical world as permanent and real, when in fact it is impermanent and illusory. As one monastic said to me, “We are living in an eighty-year dream state.” As humans, we are socialized to see this world as the ultimate reality. To Mrs. Tseng, knowledge of self means recognizing one’s true self as Buddha nature. “Buddhism enhances you as a person,” she says. “You as a person are responsible for yourself. And you find yourself from within yourself. Through calm or chanting time, it gives you space to think about yourself and refine yourself as a human being. It’s not about being liked by other people, but about letting your true nature come out.” Salvation, for Mrs. Tseng, is the realization that she is mired in a world of illusions where happiness comes from meeting the approval of others, especially those in positions of superiority to her. Her attachment to pleasing her mother-in-law was preventing her from true happiness and fulfillment. Buddhism not only gives Mrs. Tseng a sense of peace and calm, it also grants her new independence from traditions. By prioritizing the awakening of her Buddha nature over meeting the demands of her mother-in-law, the boundaries of kinship expectations no longer define her existence. She realizes that who she should be is not who others think she should be. Buddhism teaches her that there is no one that she “should” be, but that she only needs to discover who she really is. This does not mean that she totally disregards her obligations to her mother-in-law; rather, she now approaches them with a new perspective. Before, she would hide her Buddhism from her mother-in-law and would leave home early to practice her chanting and bowing in her medical office. Now she is open and un-

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apologetic about her Buddhism. She will still accompany her mother-inlaw to Christian church services. However, she maintains the Buddhist altar in her home despite her mother-in-law’s strong disapproval. Through her Buddhist identity, Mrs. Tseng has carved out a space of independence from her mother-in-law. She continues to fulfill her obligations as a daughter-in-law, but only when they do not infringe on her own personal religious practice. She holds her Buddhist religious obligations sacred. The temple offers a distinct space where Buddhist women can establish a separate identity from the family.7 Like many of the women I interviewed, Mrs. Tseng devotes a few hours a week to volunteer at Dharma Light Temple. Volunteers serve in a variety of capacities, such as answering the phone, translating Chinese documents into English, maintaining the grounds, and so on. Like the Korean Buddhist women in Sharon Suh’s study (2004), Mrs. Tseng is more than a mother, wife, and daughter-inlaw at the Buddhist temple. Here her identity revolves around her true self—her Buddha nature—and not her kinship obligations. Little else has changed in Mrs. Tseng’s situation with her mother-in-law, who continues to nag and criticize her. What has changed, however, is that these kinship obligations no longer determine her existence. Buddhism, according to Mrs. Tseng, has freed her to seek her true happiness, and to be who she believes she really is. The cases of Mrs. Tseng and Mrs. Liao illustrate that both Buddhism and Christianity can offer women alternatives to traditional kin-centered definitions of self. What is significant is how both women use their religion in the contexts that they are in. In traditional Taiwanese culture, religious and familial duties are inextricably linked. The cult of the family, or ancestral worship, is not about personal piety, but about offering provisions for one’s ancestors in their next lives. Daily rituals of ancestral veneration provide links to one’s past and foster moral solidarity among family members in the present. As women who married into their husband’s families, Mrs. Tseng and Mrs. Liao were expected to maintain the husbands’ families’ religious traditions, whether traditional Taiwanese religion, Buddhism, or Christianity. For example, Mrs. Liao’s mother-inlaw frequently asked her to pay homage to various deities. Mrs. Tseng converted to Christianity in order to marry her husband. In this context, religious conversion represents what Mrs. Liao regards as a “rebellious” act, for it is an act of independence from the family. To her, religious conversion is as much about converting to Christianity as it is about converting from Buddhism, the religious tradition of her in-laws. 7 Huang and Weller (1998) argue that modern Buddhist movements serve this same function for women in Taiwan.

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This is similarly the case for Mrs. Tseng, who converted from Christianity, the religion of her in-laws, to Buddhism, the religion of her own choosing. It is precisely because religion holds such symbolic weight within the family that conversion to a “world-rejecting” religion can produce such dramatic consequences for these women who are so defined by the family. Exercising the True Self: Religion, Family, and the Cost of Independence In contrast to the obedient and dependent kin-centered women they are supposed to be, women converts describe their new authentic selves as independent selves. In particular, women converts describe their relationships with their husbands in increasingly independent and individuated terms. At times, exercising their true selves means prioritizing religious commitments over their husbands. As I have discussed earlier, the “world rejecting” nature of salvation religions can lead individuals to reject aspects of the family. For example, in his own journey to enlightenment, the Buddha left his wife and child to pursue the spiritual quest. Buddhist monasticism is modeled on the Buddha’s renunciation, or rejection, of domesticity to be in a state of permanent “homelessness.” In the case of Taiwanese immigrant women, asserting their new independent selves through religion can create tension with their husbands. Mrs. Liu’s spiritual awakening is an example of how women’s religious self-transformations may cause rifts with men. In her mid-twenties, Mrs. Liu ended a significant relationship with her boyfriend, Mr. Lan. They had been dating for nearly three years and were considering marriage, but Mrs. Liu always felt that there was something wrong about them as a couple. Mr. Lan was a very traditional Taiwanese man and expected Mrs. Liu to be a traditional Taiwanese woman. As she describes it, he wanted her to be “obedient, traditional, and conventional.” Mrs. Liu claims that she always tried to live up to this expectation. Mr. Lan and others who knew her always thought that she was quiet, docile, and sweet. But according to Mrs. Liu, this was not who she really was. She explains: I have this pattern of people misunderstanding me as being very obedient, traditional, and conventional. But inside of me there is this almost rebellious side that wants to break through the relationship. And this happened again and again with my boyfriend and other people. People who were attracted to me felt like they were attracted to a quiet, obedient Taiwanese girl but later they realized that I wasn’t really like that and they tried to make me like that. That just killed the relationship and I wanted to break away from it.

Through Buddhism she came to identify her tendency to please people as a problematic pattern that needed to be changed. She realized that the

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cause of her suffering was her attachment to the security that the approval of her boyfriend and others provided. She says: The Venerable started talking about why we suffer and it’s because of our greed and ignorance. It dawned on me why it’s so difficult for me to break up with my exboyfriend is because I had this greed for his material supplies. He always provided me with the best in the world. This gave me a sense of security. I was crying so much because this sense of security was lacking. And it was because of my greed for this sense of security that I could not be free anymore. And so I felt, “Oh, okay. This is the answer.”

Mrs. Liu describes her old self as “trying to be secure and agreeable to a lot of people and trying to be the popular one.” She says, “it was the possibility of living freely that made me take Buddhism seriously.” But free of what? Mrs. Liu explains, “I have this choice to not suffer anymore and I want to break free of those kinds of habits of wanting to have a secure life and have everybody praise me.” Buddhism liberated Mrs. Liu to be her true self—a self who is free from both societal approval and the material security that a man provides. But exercising her true self came at a cost—her relationship with her boyfriend. For both Buddhist and Christian women, attending to their religious selves can create tensions with their husbands. For example, Mrs. Huang claims that although Buddhism has made her life more joyful and meaningful than ever before, it is also a source of strain in her marriage. Mrs. Huang immigrated to the United States in 1982 to pursue a master degree in computer science at a large state university. A former computer programmer, she is now a housewife and mother of a nine-year-old girl. Before converting to Buddhism, she was, in her own words, a “typical society lady.” Always impeccably dressed in the latest designer fashions, she was a socialite who flitted around from one party to the next, making the necessary social appearances to build her husband’s expanding international software business. After a friend of hers introduced her to some Buddhist books, she started to question the meaning of her life. Her beautiful things lost their luster and her endless parties became monotonous. She was increasingly disillusioned with the way her life had become so shallow. She turned to Buddhism to fill this void and started to devote herself to Buddhist practice. Instead of attending glamorous parties, she now attends chanting ceremonies. Instead of hosting charity events, she volunteers as the telephone receptionist at the temple. Her friends and family worry that perhaps she has lost her mind. This transformation in Mrs. Huang created problems in her marriage. Her husband relied on her to host and accompany him to social events where a great deal of his informal business dealings took place. Now her

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time is occupied by activities at the temple. Even when she has the time to attend her husband’s events, she quite often refuses because they do not accommodate to her new vegetarian diet. As Mrs. Huang says, “Buddhism changed our lifestyle.” Now the most basic decisions of where and what to eat have become points of tension in their marriage, as Mrs. Huang’s Buddhist vegetarian diet precludes even onions and garlic. Equally if not more disconcerting to her husband are the times she insists on practicing sexual abstinence for religious observance. “During times of intense ceremony and ritual, I’ll separate myself from my family and husband,” she knowingly admits. “That’s changed our relationship a lot.” Her husband is not a practicing Buddhist, but at his wife’s urging, he has agreed to “take refuge,” a practice similar to the Christian ritual of baptism. Commenting on the effect of her conversion to Buddhism on her husband, Mrs. Huang says, “I’m more my own. I make choices differently from my husband. This creates some distance, but gradually he’s become more supportive.” Prioritizing religion over their husbands is a way that women exercise a more independent self. As the case of Mrs. Huang illustrates, religious conversion creates new moral commitments that can compete with those of the family. Many women have similar experiences of balancing their familial and religious commitments, especially when their husbands do not share in the same religious enthusiasm. For example, after becoming a practicing Buddhist, Mrs. Wu, a business executive, started to attend the activities at Dharma Light Temple more regularly. She tried to bring her husband and son along. Her son went willingly but her husband refused to attend the temple. This has created rifts in the family because now her husband must compete with Buddhism to spend quality time with his wife and son. Similarly Mrs. Yang, a nurse who is a Christian convert, struggles with her non-Christian husband over church attendance. Like other evangelical women (Alumkal 1999; Pevey, Williams, and Ellison 1996), Mrs. Yang believes the biblical teaching that the man should be the head of the household, but her acceptance of his headship is a qualified one. She claims the right to measure his actions against biblical teachings and, where he goes against them, she refuses to follow him, recognizing the primacy of God’s authority over that of her husband. She says, “I agree with what the Bible says but sometimes if my husband asks me not to go to church I cannot follow him.” Reflecting on how this affects her marriage she comments, “This makes things very hard.” Among the Buddhists I interviewed, women tend to be more religious than men. This is obvious at the temple, where women participate in greater numbers in chanting ceremonies, dharma classes, and volunteering. Greater representation of women over men seems to be the case at other Asian

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American Buddhist temples (Cadge 2005; Kwon 2003; Suh 2004). At the Christian church, men and women are more equally represented than at the Buddhist temple, where fewer of the women report their husbands sharing their same level of religious devotion. This may be due to greater opportunities for lay leadership positions (which are predominantly male) in the church than in the temple (Ebaugh and Chafetz 1999). Among my respondents, religion tends to cause more marital tension for Buddhists than for Christians, perhaps because the husbands of Christian women tend to share more in their religious commitments. In none of the cases do religious commitments actually lead people to reject their families, much less the institution of the family. Rather, religion is a way for women to negotiate or “bargain” (Kandiyoti 1988) for a more autonomous self within the constraints of the family. New religious commitments offer women wiggle-room to fashion new priorities, often leading, as I suggest, to the formation of religious obligations that may compete with traditional familial expectations. But Taiwanese immigrant women’s sense of selfhood is still tied to their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Women want to reject some traditional kinship obligations, like the absolute authority of the husband and his elders, while preserving other traditional familial responsibilities. Religious license is constrained by the desire to keep intact the nuclear family, and, to a lesser degree, the extended family. Women pursue religion to the extent that it does not compromise the integrity of the nuclear family. The case of Mrs. Chen, a homemaker who immigrated nine years ago, illustrates how a woman may alter her religious practice to preserve a peaceful relationship with her husband. Knowing that her husband strongly disapproves of her “superstition,” Mrs. Chen tries to hide her Buddhist practice from him. Unlike other Buddhist homes, hers has no religious icons. She strategically postpones her morning practice of chanting and meditation until after he leaves home. Unbeknownst to him, she meets with a sutra study group one afternoon a week. She rarely participates in temple activities, only when her husband is out of town at business meetings. Mrs. Chen’s husband knows that she is religious. After all, he sees her Buddhist books on the bookshelf. But she feels he is less tolerant than the husbands of other women who openly practice their religion. His disapproval of Buddhism is so strong that Mrs. Chen thinks that it could seriously damage their marriage and family. Weighing such severe costs to the family, she chooses to tiptoe around the tense issue of religion and render it as invisible as possible. Many Buddhist women, like Mrs. Chen, strategically compromise their own religious practices for the sake of their families. Many Buddhist women want to prepare only vegetarian meals, as prescribed by their religion. However, as the family cooks, few women actually do this because

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of their husbands’ eating habits and the concerns for their growing children’s dietary needs. Women also mentioned that family responsibilities keep them from participating in Buddhist retreats, which run as long as ten days. More generally, women were concerned about neglecting their responsibilities as mothers. Where religious commitments conflict with maternal obligations, women curb or hide their religious activities—as they see it, “for the sake of the family.” The women in my sample want to maintain their religious commitments, however, not at the cost of radically threatening the family. The religious (Buddhist and Christian) and cultural stigma against divorce discourages it among these women. Equally significant is the fact that as immigrant women they may not have kin to rely upon, and some may not have the language and skills to make it on their own. One woman who is in an unhappy marriage admitted that she would get divorced were it not for the fact that she could not support her children and herself in the United States. Short of threatening their families and marriages, most of my respondents are willing to challenge some traditional familial expectations in order to exercise their religious commitments. Respondents vary, however, in how far they will challenge their husbands. With my relatively small sample size, I cannot comment conclusively on how women’s education and income influence their bargaining power with their husbands. Women like Mrs. Chen, who bent their religious practices to accomodate their husbands, do not hold paid jobs. The lack of a separate income may affect how a woman asserts her true self in the face of husbandly disapproval. But the evidence also suggests that both working women and nonworking women expect their husbands to accommodate in varying degrees to their religion. For Taiwanese immigrant women struggling with the discrepancy between their new realities in the United States and the normative traditions of Taiwanese womanhood, religious language gives voice to their experiences and offers a vocabulary to declare a new kind of womanly self. Religion can be a catalyst for transformation, as its rejection of “this world” becomes a metaphor that these women use to reject certain kinship expectations that they now find constraining in the United States. To my respondents, being good Christian and Buddhist women also meant being good mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law. But what kind of womanly self does religion sanctify in relation to the family? Is it a self who is only mother, wife, and daughter-in-law, as in the traditional Taiwanese model of womanhood, or is it a self who has purpose and meaning outside of kinship? For my respondents, religion offers the possibility of an ontologically and empirically separate self, whose purpose and commitments

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may converge with the traditional Taiwanese family, but may also diverge from the traditional kinship expectations. Women exercise their true, independent selves through the pursuit of these extrafamilial, religious goals, albeit never at the cost of radically threatening the nuclear family. MALE NARRATIVES OF SELFHOOD: BLOCKED MOBILITY AND THE RECOVERY OF THE TRUE SELF In this section I turn to the migration experiences of men, and men’s narratives of the transformed self. In contrast to women, who are traditionally defined by their roles in the family, Taiwanese men’s sense of selfhood is deeply tied to their status outside of the home. Experiences of blocked and downward mobility figure prominently in their conversion narratives. Although professional Taiwanese immigrant women also face blocked mobility in their careers, this theme is only marginal to their narratives of a transformed self. Like women, men use religion to work out the contradictions between their Taiwanese expectations and American realities. I argue that religion liberates men from cumbersome and dissonant career expectations that cannot be realized in the United States. Taiwanese immigrant men use religion to construct a transformed self that is much less yoked to career status. American Dreams and Taiwanese Male Realities Commenting on the differences between life in the United States and Taiwan, Deacon Wang explains, “In Taiwan, you have more relatives and protection. Here, you’re by yourself—alone—especially for us immigrants who don’t have white skin.” Deacon Wang immigrated to the United States in 1977 to get his doctorate in physics from the University of Southern California. Despite his considerable human capital, he echoes the common theme of being alone, different, and vulnerable that emerged in my interviews with other Taiwanese men. He explains: “When you immigrate, the first thing that affects you most is finances. You don’t have any income. You don’t have any friends. Here friends are different from Taiwan. In Taiwan, at least you have parents still around you. You don’t have to worry about having nothing to eat. The house is already paid off. But here you have nobody. So you’re kind of desperate. You even think about going back to Taiwan to look for another job. So because something happened to me, I confessed myself to God.” American realities challenge men, as they do women, to reexamine who they are and how to make sense of their new lives in the United States.

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Taiwanese men, who had defined themselves on the basis of their careers and achievement, must reexamine their sense of selfhood in the face of financial vulnerability, racism, and downward mobility in the American workplace. The “something” from which God delivered Deacon Wang was a string of unemployment and dead-end jobs. Wang’s statement illustrates how immigrant men use religion to make sense of career disappointment in the United States. Like other Taiwanese immigrants, Deacon Wang is part of an elite group, composed mostly of men, who pursued graduate studies in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The only son in a family of ten children, his parents had invested heavily in furthering his career. In Taiwan, he was always the star pupil. Family and friends alike agreed that his future was very promising. He originally intended to return to Taiwan after his education, but he became rooted in the United States when he got married and had children in graduate school. Yet life here was a big blow to his self-esteem. He was the cream of the crop in Taiwan, but now he struggled to keep mediocre jobs: over-qualified but still not good enough because, he claims, he is not white. Deacon Wang is an example of the “brain drain” of Taiwan—the technical, intellectual, and professional elite who migrated en masse to countries like the United States for advanced graduate degrees and then stayed (Tseng 2001). Eighty-three percent of the men in my sample are college educated and 55 percent have advanced degrees. Women are also quite educated. Fifty-eight percent of the women are college educated and 27 percent have an advanced degree. Most Taiwanese immigrants with advanced degrees receive them in the United States. The exception is doctors who tend to be educated in Taiwan, but receive their medical training in the United States. In Taiwan, professional immigrants were students at the top of their class who felt like they “earned” the opportunity to pursue an education in the United States. Professional Taiwanese male immigrants are engineers, computer programmers, and doctors and dentists who, like Deacon Wang, work in American workplaces where they are a minority. The exceptions are doctors and dentists who work with a substantial number of coethnic patients. Similar to the findings of Chien-Juh Gu’s (2006) study of Taiwanese immigrants in the United States, professional immigrants face considerable barriers to professional advancement, despite having their American degrees. Language still poses a problem for some of them. Dr. Lin, a medical researcher, has lived in the United States for seventeen years and still claims that her English is an obstacle in her career. She vividly articulated the same language struggles that men expressed:

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CHEN: Were there any difficulties that you encountered in living in the United States? DR. LIN: The toughest thing is the language. I’m still working on that. Even though I had a good education in Taiwan it still didn’t prepare me for speaking English here. For instance, my TOEFL test score was very high, so I had a lot of confidence in my English. I thought my English was great according to the test. But I remember the first day I came to work nobody could understand what I was talking about. Iwas so frustrated. I was trying to tell them what kind of medical termsI was describing and nobody could understand me. I even had to spell it out to them. I felt really bad about myself. I was so frustrated. Sometimes I even felt like people were treating me like a fool because of my English. I knew that I wasn’t inferior knowledge-wise or technically, but I just couldn’t express it right.

Language difficulties make other career challenges even tougher. Immigrants learn quickly that to succeed in the American workplace, they not only have to do the job right, but develop good relationships with those who matter. They must network. But as foreigners they are clearly at a disadvantage because they do not have American social skills. Taiwanese immigrants in my sample socialize with other Chinese. Interactions with non-Chinese are largely confined to professional settings. Men tell me that they cannot understand the jokes that their American colleagues make when they are socializing. Others express awkwardness with American customs. And some claim that they feel excluded from their colleagues’ social lives. For example, the experience of Mrs. Wang at her husband’s company party illustrates how discomfort with American customs may exacerbate social distance and alienation from Americans: “I went to a party with my husband. All of his friends tried to hug me because that’s just courtesy. I wasn’t used to that kind of contact and it made me nervous. When they would try to hug me I would run away from them. That really embarrassed his friends. And my husband was really upset with me. I felt bad that I ran away, too. I had nothing against that person but it was just an automatic response.” Professional Taiwanese immigrant men, in comparison to women and nonprofessional men, are most likely to mention experiences with racial discrimination. They are also more likely to work in multiracial work settings as employees. Professional men feel professionally vulnerable because they are not white. For example, Deacon Wang shares his experience of racial discrimination in several American companies: You have to understand that the company is a heavily political place. No matter how hard you work, sometimes they don’t judge you by that. They

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judge you by how well you get along with them. How well you please them. I learned from experience that whenever you’re in a job the first person you need to please is your boss. You cannot fight with your boss. As an Oriental you’d be the first one to go. In Taiwan it’s a little bit different because the companies are small and family-owned and the relations are more familial. My current company is public and they don’t care about you, just the quarterly earning report.

He further reflects on how his race isolates him from important networks that will further his mobility: “I’d be more successful there [in Taiwan] because there are more opportunities there and you don’t feel alone. Here you struggle and you’re fighting for yourself. You move to a company and you’re the only one who is Oriental. You need to fight your way around. Most of my friends in Taiwan who got doctorates like me are now the heads of their departments or professors in the university.” Another professional, Mr. Chang, works as a medical technician in a large hospital where he is one of few Asians in his department. He believes whites think that foreigners like him are taking jobs from them. When his hospital laid off one hundred people four months ago, he expected to be one of them because he is Asian. He explains his fortuitous fate as “luck” and evidence that “God loves me.” Professional immigrant men use antagonistic words like “struggle” and “fight” to describe their relationships with others in the American workplace. They know that in the United States they are perceived as quiet and passive (Espiritu 1999). Several men claim that they were passed over for promotions by less qualified people due to this stereotype. Immigrant men feel the burden to prove themselves because of their race. One immigrant told me while pointing his finger at himself, succeeding in the United States means “watching out for number one.” No one is watching out for their interests in the American workplace. Immigrants learn that unless they “fight back,” they will be easily overlooked and stepped on. For example, Mr. Tsai offers the following reflection on succeeding in the United States: Values change a lot in the United States. When you bring your traditions or habits to this country they might not have any value. Let me give you an example. In Taiwan you have to treat people well. But here you have to compete with people. If you don’t compete, or just treat them nicely and you don’t fight back, they think you’re a coward or you don’t have the ability or the guts to do whatever you want. You have to compete with people here. You have to fight back or you won’t succeed. Here you say, “I want this. I want that.” But in our Chinese culture you cannot say “I want this.” I had never heard people say “I want this.” But here it seems normal and natural. I was frustrated by that. I finally realized that I had to adapt to this kind of culture. If you’re living here you have to change yourself.

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Mr. Tsai learned how to become more aggressive and competitive after working in an American company where he felt that he needed to attend staff meetings “in order to defend myself.” After losing a promotion that he felt that he rightfully deserved because of his race, Mr. Tsai vowed that he would shed his cooperative demeanor for a more competitive one. Nonprofessional men also express frustration and discouragement in their careers. Although the majority of my male respondents have bachelor degrees, only the men who received American advanced degrees or training are able to translate their skills to professional careers in the United States. Despite their college and graduate degrees from Taiwan, men without an American degree follow the same career trajectory of noncollege educated Taiwanese immigrants—they work as employees or owners of small businesses in the ethnic economy. Whereas professional immigrants face blocked mobility, nonprofessionals face downward mobility. Like Filipino and Indian immigrant men (Espiritu 2003; George 2003), many Taiwanese immigrants are former professionals who cannot transfer these skills and credentials to find professional employment in the United States. A classic case is Mr. Jan, a successful pharmacist in Taiwan for ten years before immigrating to the United States in 1985. A relaxed man in his late forties, Mr. Jan explained to me that he used his savings as a pharmacist to start a new life for himself, his wife, and son in Orange County, where his sister was living. Mr. Jan knew that after coming to the United States he would no longer be able to practice as a pharmacist since his license was not transferable. Still he was confident that he could make a comfortable living by opening his own business. Looking back on his earlier misconceptions of life in the United States, he comments wistfully, “I thought it would be easy to move here. That’s my big mistake. I thought I could establish a restaurant or business, but of course I don’t have much money and I realized it wasn’t so easy. I found out the only thing I could do was find a job and work for somebody else to make money.” Even finding a job was not easy. He explains, “I tried to find a good job but I have no educational background here and my English is limited. I ended up finding a job in a small Taiwanese company that sold sunglasses.” There Mr. Jan claims he was exploited by one of the more established Taiwanese, an unfortunate but common occurrence in most immigrant economies. “They wanted me to do everything but I was paid very little.” With a sixty-hour work week, his salary totaled no more than minimum wage per hour. After three years he found another job as a car salesman at a white dealership. He considered himself fortunate since “Americans don’t like to hire Chinese to work with them.” Although being a car salesman was beneath what he ever imagined he would be in

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Taiwan, he took the job willingly because of the substantial increase in pay. This job, however, required even more of his time and energy. He worked six days a week from 9 a.m. to midnight. After four years as a car salesman, a friend encouraged him to pursue a real estate license. This friend, another Taiwanese immigrant, had earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the best university in Taiwan but was now selling real estate. Racial discrimination, along with a lack of language skills and American credentials, prevent many educated Taiwanese immigrants from finding jobs in American companies. Instead, these Taiwanese immigrants use their ethnic connections to open small businesses (Tseng 2001). In particular, Taiwanese are concentrated in the motel, real estate, import-export, and high-tech industries. For example, among my male respondents, onefourth of them are realtors.8 With a growing Chinese population in Southern California, real estate has become an attractive career for Chinese immigrants. Even American-educated Taiwanese professionals who have faced the glass ceiling leave American companies and work in Chineseconcentrated industries. For example, Mr. Lu, who holds a JD and a LLM from the University of North Carolina, left an American law firm to open his own real estate agency that caters to a Chinese clientele. After Dr. Wu, an engineer with a doctorate from Rutgers University, was laid off from his job, he also decided to go into real estate. Dr. Wu’s dream was always to become a research scientist and not a real estate agent. But after his disappointing experience in the American workplace, and faced with the need to support his American family, selling real estate to other Chinese immigrants seemed to be his best option. RELIGIOUS SOLUTIONS TO WORLDLY WOES: RELIGIOUS RENUNCIATIONS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM Vulnerability, insecurity, and disappointment in their careers are prominent themes in men’s conversion narratives. Immigrant men come to the United States expecting to succeed, but are deeply disappointed in the process. Just as women use the theme of religious dualism to interpret the contradictions between traditional womanhood and their new realities in the United States, men use religious dualism to make sense of inconsistencies between the expectation and reality of their careers. Gendered experiences as immigrants in the United States profoundly shape narratives of true selfhood. Christianity and Buddhism lead men to reexamine and renounce career-defined selves and offer different pathways to realizing 8 Although my sample is based on snowball sampling, none of the realtors were introduced to me through other realtors.

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their true selves. Christian male respondents find their true selves are imbued with a new Christian purpose and calling, and institutionally affirmed through leadership roles in the church. Buddhist male respondents adopt a more solitary path to self-knowledge, involving practices of selfdiscipline and self-renunciation. Christian Narratives of Male Selfhood: “Becoming Who I Was Created to Be” Evangelical Christians explain that through “accepting God as their Lord and Savior” they become not only transformed selves, but their authentic selves—the persons that God originally created them to be. Finding and knowing the authentic self is a challenge in a secular world full of false messages about who they are and who they should be. Society, of course, sends men and women different messages about who they should be. For Taiwanese men, who come with expectations of upward mobility, the reality of struggling and possibly giving up a career is a blow to their sense of self. Christianity, with its language of calling and created purpose, infuses their lives with a new basis for self-worth. An example of this is Deacon Chu, a personable and confident leader in the church, who works for his family business selling mobile phones. In the early 1980s, he immigrated to the United States as a teenager and experienced prejudice in school and in the workplace. He struggled with a sense of low self-esteem for years because language obstacles prevented him from fitting into mainstream American society. He recalls that he rarely spoke in school because of his accented English. And because of language difficulties he also did poorly in school. He was deeply ashamed of his performance. He knew that his low grades were no way to repay the sacrifice his parents had made to bring the family to the United States. Taiwanese society was telling him that he was not worthy because of his low academic performance. American society was telling him that he was not valuable because he was not white and spoke English with an accent. Becoming Christian, however, changed these feelings as he started to realize that he was valuable and that God had created him for a distinct purpose. I was very afraid of this society because of the bad experiences that I had before. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself, especially because of the language. But the Bible introduced to me that everybody is created for a purpose and it’s up to that person to find out their purpose with God. Nobody can really tell you this. You have to personally experience it. And I experienced it at that moment at the retreat. I started to realize that God had created me for a purpose. I was valuable on this earth. And that’s when

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I decided that Christ is my savior. I considered that the beginning of my conversion.

Deacon Chu told me later in the interview how he had his own worldly ideas about who he was that stood in contrast to who God made him to be. He says that trying to be someone he is not, he “loses” himself: I used to want to be a very articulate and strong leader who can influence a lot of people. But I came to realize that that’s not who I am. It’s painful to realize that when you want to be that person. God wants me to be myself, which is a very quiet person . . . but everyone is created in a certain unique way and you just cannot be somebody else. You just have to find that self. For example, Deacon Chen is a very successful businessman. He’s a very outspoken person, very aggressive and in meetings he’s always the one who brings out issues and fights for them. I wanted to be like that. But after two years I know that’s not me. I cannot be like that, and I want to be like him because he’s a really successful business person, a very talented manager in a big corporation. But I realize that he and I are really different. If I try hard to be like him, then I lose myself.

The Christian concept of calling makes a person’s individuality and uniqueness sacred. Grace Church teaches that everyone has a unique calling depending on the gifts that God has given him. Each person is responsible for cultivating his own unique talent and should not be tempted to be like someone else. As Deacon Chu’s statement suggests, not everyone is called to be a successful businessman like Deacon Chen. Christians at Grace Church refer to the parable of the talents in the Gospel of Matthew 25 to support their notion of calling. In this parable, a master leaves on a trip and gives each of his four servants a certain amount of money. When the master comes back he holds each one accountable for investing his money. The one servant who hides his money in the ground is punished for failing to develop this money. One respondent interprets this parable in his own life as follows: “We’ve been created by God. He has given us a position or station in life. So as the Bible says, if he gives you 1,000 talents then you have 1,000, if he gives you 5,000 then you have 5,000. If you’ve used your talents wisely then that is your worth. In the future when Jesus comes again you will be accountable for the gifts that you’ve been given.” This response indicates that people are given different talents and that they have the duty to respond to God’s call. But God’s calling for Christians is often in tension with the expectations of the world. For example, Pastor Chang claims that he resisted his calling to be a minister for secular reasons, including the fear of disappointing his non-Christian parents and

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the desire for material wealth. To follow his calling as a minister, he had to resist these worldly expectations. Pastor Chang reiterated this tension in a sermon when he gave the example of several men who had left prestigious jobs as doctors and engineers to follow the call to be ministers and missionaries. At the end of the sermon he told the congregation, “don’t let this world win us over.” At another point he said: “We cannot always hear God’s voice very clearly because there are a lot of human distractions. Things competing with God’s voice might be the desire to get a nicer car, or a bigger house so others think more highly of you.” To support his argument he quoted a biblical passage from Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men.” Christians, he reminded them, live in an uneasy tension where worldly goals may often be contrary to Christian goals. Church members are encouraged to realize their callings through service to and leadership in the church. In contrast to the disappointment that Taiwanese immigrant men experience in their professional lives, the religious community is a place where there are plenty of opportunities for leadership and involvement. Like other immigrant congregations, leadership positions in the immigrant religious congregation offer men an alternative system of status to their careers (George 2003; Shin and Park 1988; Suh 2004). Similar to the findings of other studies (Ebaugh and Chafetz 1999), men at Grace Church tend to occupy leadership positions such as deacon and elder. Some scholars note how immigrant religious organizations particularly elevate the status of men to preserve a patriarchal authority that is challenged in the home and work spheres following migration (George 1998; Kurien 1999). Because the church is a voluntary community, the participation and contribution of its members are absolutely necessary to its survival. At Grace Church, there are only six paid staff: the pastor, an assistant pastor, an English ministry youth group leader, a Mandarin ministry youth group leader, a choir director, and a part-time secretary. To maintain the church and its programs, pastors must delegate most of the responsibilities to members of the congregation. Men occupy most of the leadership positions. Leaders are elected into constantly rotating positions, thus allowing for more members to become leaders in the church. For example, other than elders and deacons, there are chairpersons for the couples group, sisters group, choir, youth group, family cell groups, and college group, to mention only a few. Unlike Christian women I interviewed, most of the male Christian respondents have held, or are currently holding, church leadership positions. Holding a leadership position raises men’s self-confidence and selfworth. For example, Mr. Hou describes: “Right after I became Christian, I became very involved in the church. I started seeing things differently,

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there was a lot of confidence in me. I participated in choirs, fellowships, activities, leadership training, leading Bible studies. I would say the first three or four years were the very crazy years when I practically got involved in everything I could as far as church goes.” Another example is Deacon Wang. He attributes his professional downward mobility to his race and lack of social skills in American society and yet he has held several leadership positions at Grace Church as a cellgroup leader, deacon, and church host. Despite the disappointment that he feels in his professional life, he is highly regarded in the Grace community as an effective leader. Like Mr. Hou and Deacon Wang, Mr. Jang attributes his leadership skills to Christian conversion. Mr. Jang, a quiet and soft-spoken engineer in his mid-thirties, told me that before becoming Christian he was quite shy. But now, after getting involved in church he has “opened up” and leads the high school fellowship. In the church, Mr. Kau has found his calling as worship leader9 at Grace Church and is often a featured solo singer in the choir. He describes here how the church has encouraged him to sing and develop confidence in his gift: People told me that my voice was a gift from God. I began singing after I became a Christian. I still remember how Teacher Lu, the choir director, chose me to sing a solo after she heard me rehearsing in the church and said, “Wow you have a great voice! You should really develop that. You should start taking it seriously.” So I got a lot of confidence from that. From that I knew that I had something special that not a lot of people are born with. That’s when I started to sing. I know that if I don’t use this voice to praise God, this voice will probably be taken back. It’s probably strange to a lot of people but it’s not strange to me because I know that it was given to me. You know, it’s God’s grace. He gave me a good voice so I should sing for Him.

Beyond its religious merit, singing for God also has its social benefits. The Grace Church community values Mr. Kau for his deep and beautiful voice. This “gift from God” has earned him respect from others, but perhaps more importantly he has developed a confidence in himself that he brings into his interactions in the church and outside. Denied these opportunities in mainstream society, men find in the church community a safe space to develop their talents, take leadership positions, and raise their status. In the church, they reconstruct an alternative sense of self based on God’s call and service to the church. 9

A worship leader leads the congregation in singing before the service.

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Male Buddhist Narratives of Selfhood: “Knowing Myself” In contrast to Christian men’s articulation of true selfhood through Christian calling and purpose, Buddhist men’s narratives focus on transforming the self through renouncing the self and its worldly desires. Whereas Buddhist women renounce their attachments to familial approval, Buddhist men renounce their attachments to status and material success. Like Christian men, Buddhist men use religion to articulate a transformed self in the face of frustration, struggle, and disappointment in their careers. They describe this process of awakening the true self as “knowing myself.” An example of this is Dr. Wong’s religious experience in the United States. Dr. Wong is a medical researcher who was at the top of his field in Taiwan. After coming to the United States for a position at a prestigious research university, he experienced many setbacks in his career. His English, which was considered superb in Taiwan, was incomprehensible to many people in his department. He felt socially awkward and could not fit into the professional culture of his workplace. Like other Taiwanese professionals, his work suffered and he did not get the promotions he expected. Accepting that as an immigrant he would have to work harder than others, he persevered, only to be further frustrated and disappointed in himself. In the midst of this, his wife introduced him to Buddhism. Through Buddhism he realized that the source of his suffering was not a lack of ability, but his attachment to these definitions of happiness and success. While he is still ambitious, he says that Buddhism has helped him to act more relaxed and “more myself.” When I ask what he means by this, he explains that Dr. Wong, the medical researcher, is not who he really is, but flesh and bone that will decompose with time. His true self is his Buddha nature. Dr. Wong uses the language of authenticity to describe the realization of his Buddha nature. The Buddhist Dr. Wong is not only a new Dr. Wong, but more importantly, he is the true Dr. Wong. Rather than turning outside of oneself for salvation, Buddhism claims that one need only turn within to realize one’s own Buddha nature. Buddhist respondents frequently claim that the objective of Buddhist practice is to turn inward and “find myself.” For example, Mr. Huang, a young pharmacist, told me, “Buddhism gives me the chance to know myself and to really become myself.” When I asked another respondent why it is important to meditate, he said, “it’s because you get to know your true self through meditation.” Knowing the true self means recognizing the illusory and impermanent nature of the empirical self and that one is, in essence, Buddha nature. Buddhist practice, then revolves around disciplining the mind and body

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to let go of, or renounce, the attachments to the empirical self. And for men, that empirical self is defined by status and career success. For example, consider Mr. Jan’s reflections on how Buddhism reprioritizes worldly status. He says, “Buddhism’s most basic and important question is ‘Can I let go of my desires and escape this cycle of suffering?’ Then it doesn’t matter what kind of status and material things you have. At the point of death, everyone is the same. In the end, everything starts from zero.” A serious practitioner, Mr. Jan tells me that Buddhism has helped him most in “learning how to deal with difficult times.” For Mr. Jan, the pharmacist-turned-realtor, these difficult times have been financial ones. In the mid-nineties, the real estate market in Southern California was very slow and he was nervous about his finances. When he prayed, it was not for more business and money, because, he said, “If that’s not my karma, then I cannot do anything to change it. . . . My karma is a result of the things I did in my former life.” Rather, he prayed that that his heart and mind would change and let go of their attachment to success, so that he could be at peace, even in this trying financial circumstance. The concept of karma helps Mr. Jan to interpret and accept whatever happens to his business. He recognizes that ultimately he cannot control his business fortunes. But he can control his heart and mind—his perception of reality and his desire for success. “You see, there are some terrible things that happen in society,” he explains. “But some people continue to go on with life because they realize they can’t do anything about it. Other people get all worked up and worried if something happens to them and they want to control it. My heart is peaceful.” Buddhism also helps Mr. Tsai make sense of the struggles in his career. Mr. Tsai, an engineer at a large American company, claims that Buddhism has made him feel “more comfortable with my life.” When I ask him to elaborate, he explains that he used to feel frustrated and angry at work. He had a tense relationship with his supervisor at work. He claims that she had a higher position than him, even though he had a master’s degree and she only had a bachelor’s degree, because she was white and he Asian. She ignored him at work and humiliated him by criticizing his performance in front of others. He knew that he did his work well—even better than she—but he could not defend himself because of his poor English. Buddhist teachings helped him to understand that the source of his anger and frustration was attachment of the ego. Both he and his supervisor were attached to their careers. He realized that in his supervisor’s mind, he was a threat to her. She treated him badly because of her fear that he might replace her. But that could never happen, he insisted. “She’s a Caucasian woman.” For both Mr. Jan and Mr. Tsai, Buddhism offers the possibility of a self apart from the limits of their location as Asian immigrant men. For Mr. Jan, karma is a way to explain the things that he does not have control

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over—not only the vicissitudes of the real estate market, but also the realities of life as an Asian male immigrant in white American society. By offering an alternative explanation of reality, Buddhism helps them to renounce the old status-oriented self. Buddhism does not make men withdraw from their careers. The men I spoke to still strive for advancement in their careers. Mr. Tsai and others claim that they have adopted more American qualities in the workplace by becoming more aggressive. But renouncing their attachments to a statusoriented self helps professional immigrant men deal with the frustration and disappointment they often experience in the United States. For them, part of becoming American is accepting that they will face disadvantages as minorities in a white society. This is a hard lesson to learn for immigrant men who come from a privileged class in Taiwan. Religion helps them to make sense of, and accept, their American reality as immigrants. For Buddhist men, the temple community is not central to the transformation of the self as the church is for Christian men. Consistent with the findings of Wendy Cadge (2005) and Sharon Suh (2004), immigrant Buddhist men are far less involved in the temple than their Buddhist female counterparts. The temple does offer men an alternative system of status, but to a far lesser extent than the church. Some of the men I interviewed are leaders in the temple laypersons group. A few have become dharma lecturers. And some have volunteered at the temple in some capacity. But structurally, Dharma Light Temple is a far less democratic organization, and has fewer lay leadership positions than Grace Church. Temple decisions are made by the abbott and other monastics. Even the head of the lay organization at Dharma Light Temple is a monastic, and not a lay person. Despite the changes toward more congregational forms of organization in the United States, the temple is still understood to belong to monastics, as it is in Taiwan. Dharma Light Temple is different from other Buddhist temples because of its large sangha, but even smaller Asian American Buddhist temples regard the sangha as the monastic community and not the laity as in Euro-American Buddhist communities (Cadge 2005). By contrast, at Grace Church, the church is the lay community. And although the pastor is the leader, he is still considered an employee who is hired by the congregation. The Buddhists I studied have a more solitary approach toward salvation that may not include the temple community. Korean American Buddhists seem to have a similar attitude toward the temple (Kwon 2003). Every human being is an unrealized Buddha. The source of enlightenment is within every person and not an external source. Mr. Huang, who is well-versed in Christianity, compared the two religions this way: “If I’m a Christian, I will depend on God because he’s the way, the truth, and the life. In Buddhism everyone will be his own god and his own way.”

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The temple may even be unnecessary to enlightenment. Every person, by virtue of her own karmic circumstances, struggles with different attachments and has a unique journey toward enlightenment. Buddhists tell me that Buddhist principles and practices are merely guideposts to awakening one’s Buddha nature, but in themselves are neither magical formulas nor strict rules or restrictions. For example, one respondent says, “The Pure Land10 is in yourself. No one can help you get there. You don’t have to go to the temple to find it. Everyone’s Pure Land is different.” Some of the more serious practitioners even claim that they stay away from the temple altogether because it does not help them toward their own spiritual enhancement. In fact, one Buddhist woman says that, “the temple’s not going to help me become a Buddha. Only by looking within myself can I do that.” Although both Buddhist men and women affirm the solitary and interior-directed nature of awakening one’s Buddha nature, the temple seems far more critical to women’s quests for authentic selfhood. The temple is an important space to establish independent selfhood for women, and especially for housewives, who are the vast majority of the temple volunteers. To these women the temple offers an alternative spatial identity from the home and the kin-centered self. The lack of leadership positions, and perhaps the predominance of women as temple volunteers, discourages men from participating in the temple. Instead, Buddhist men discover their true selves through interior, solitary practices of examining and disciplining the self. In contrast, Christian men find their true selves through exterior-directed practices of filling leadership roles within the church. Despite their differences, both Christianity and Buddhism offer Taiwanese immigrant men an ontological possibility of true selfhood in contrast to a status-defined self whose value has become tenuous and questionable in American society.

CONCLUSION For these immigrants, becoming American involves reexamining longheld assumptions about who one is in light of new experiences in the United States. This chapter addresses how men and women use religious 10 Traditionally lay Buddhists have understood the Pure Land to be a blissful realm that one enters after this life. The conditions of the Pure Land are conducive toward enlightenment. The more contemporary understanding is that the Pure Land is neither an actual physical realm, nor a realm that exists outside of the human realm, but instead is an aspect of the awakened mind. This suggests that enlightenment is not something that one attains after this life, but that enlightenment can be part of the here and now. In his writings for a Western audience, Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writes “the

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models of authentic selfhood to reconstruct new selves. Gendered immigration experiences profoundly shape how men and women experience and articulate their new, true selves. Conversion narratives, I argue, are ways for men and women to work out the contradictions between traditional gender expectations and the realities of their lives in the United States. Taiwanese immigrant women experience becoming American as a process of carving out greater independence from family. They use Buddhism and Christianity to articulate and exercise a more independent self from the family in contrast to the traditional kin-centered self. For educated Taiwanese men, becoming American means facing career obstacles as a member of an immigrant minority. Men use religion to assert a true self that is independent of career status. Religion profoundly shapes how Taiwanese immigrants become new selves in the United States. In the arms of a religious community, Buddhist women and Christian men and women establish new identities as purposeful selves. This is also true for Buddhist men, but to a lesser extent. The lack of lay leadership positions at the temple, and the Buddhist emphasis on interior practices toward enlightenment, mitigate the significance of the religious community to men. But to Buddhist women, especially housewives, the temple is one of few spaces to establish an identity apart from the family, if only because women have more time to volunteer there. Religions can be emancipatory because they can liberate individuals from old traditions to become new selves, to form new communities, and to pursue new truths. Yet the emancipatory promise of religion is deceptively contradictory, for at the same time that religion can liberate individuals, it can constrain them to a new set of disciplines and moral precepts. Similarly the individual freedom that immigrants in the United States experience demands a requisite mode of moral governance that is itself constricting. How religious disciplines come to bear on the realities of immigrant life is the subject to which I turn next. Pure Land is available right here and now. The Kingdom of God is a seed in us” (1998, 192).

5 Cultivating American Saints RELIGIOUS DISCIPLINES OF THE SELF

The religious life of the saints, as distinguished from the natural life, was—the most important point—no longer lived outside the world in monastic communities, but within the world and its institutions. . . . Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life in the world, but neither of nor for this world. —Max Weber, from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 154 To me, religion is a discipline—a way to control myself. —Mr. Lu, Christian convert And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God? —Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, 299.

MR. TANG, A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSMAN, claims that if he had not come to the United States he would have “wined, dined, and partied and probably died of liver disease in Taiwan.” The contrast with his current Buddhist lifestyle in the United States is remarkable. For the past ten years, Mr. Tang has followed a strict vegetarian diet and spends nearly two hours a day devoted to Buddhist practice where he bows to the image of the Buddha, chants Omitopho,1 studies the sutras, and meditates. He volunteers one afternoon a week at Dharma Light Temple, directing traffic, sweeping the grounds, and answering phones. 1 Omitopho is the Chinese translation of Amitahba Buddha’s name, which means “infinite light.” Traditionally, Buddhists believe that by chanting Amitahba Buddha’s name they will be reborn in the Pure Land, a realm conducive toward achieving enlightenment.

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When I ask Mr. Tang why he did not become Buddhist in Taiwan, he tells me that “there’s something different about the society there.” Taiwan, he explains, is far more crowded and life is more social. Family members and neighbors drop by unannounced and are always inviting you to do things or asking you for help. You have no time for religious practice in Taiwan because you are too distracted. In the United States, there is more space and privacy. Here, he says, you have the freedom to practice. Mr. Tang’s story illustrates a curious contradiction that I observed in the experiences of both Buddhist and Christian Taiwanese immigrants. Like Mr. Tang, many claim that they have more freedom in the United States than they did in Taiwan (Peng 2000). Yet despite this freedom, they live lives of religious discipline—stricter than the way they lived in the ostensibly less free environment of Taiwan. This contradiction, I believe, illustrates the conflicting feelings that immigrants have toward the “freedom” they experience in the United States. As we saw in the previous chapter, immigrants are relieved to unburden themselves of some onerous traditions of their homeland. But doing so also produces moral anxiety, for some of those very same traditions and obligations are sources of meaning, support, belonging, and governance. In earlier chapters, I discussed how Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity reconstruct traditions and structures of community, identity, and selfhood in the United States. In this chapter I discuss how Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity offer immigrants new ethics of moral governance. Buddhism and Christianity, I claim, provide certain “salvation ethics” that organize the lives of religious converts. Religious practices are techniques of moral self-discipline that replace the governing structures of Confucian tradition, community, and family that have been weakened in the “morally disordering” experience of immigration. Despite their very different conceptions of salvation, Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity both offer modern moral disciplines of the self that manage the individual interior—desires, thoughts, motives, and emotions. These two religions, however, may cultivate different practices and sensibilities of moral obligation that shape the communities at Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church. IMMIGRATION AS MORALLY DISORDERING Immigration is a morally bewildering experience because it uproots individuals from the moral communities that sustain and constrain them. Hence, immigrants describe themselves as having more freedom from moral obligations, but also more loneliness and independence. Furthermore, Taiwanese immigrants remark on how American values of individ-

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ualism clash with their own Confucian values. Immigration to the United States challenges moral governance by removing: (1) the moral influence of the extended family; (2) normative Confucian values; and (3) public sources of governance. Immigration can be morally challenging for Taiwanese immigrants because it removes the everyday influence of the extended family, the moral locus of Taiwanese society. My respondents had already seen the relative weakening of the extended family in Taiwan when they left, from the 1970s to the 1990s. They had lived through a time when rapid urbanization and modernization was transforming many of Taiwan’s social, political, and economic institutions, a transformation that continues today. Like other industrialized societies, most Taiwanese households have shifted from traditional, patrilocal extended family households to nuclear family households (Marsh 1996; Thornton and Lin 1994). But a significant proportion of Taiwanese still live in extended family households. According to a 1995 survey, 34.1 percent of Taiwanese households belong to extended families (Brinton 2001). Taiwanese who reached their sixties in 1998 were only somewhat less likely to live with their children than their counterparts in 1978 (Mason and Lee 2004). Yet with Taiwan’s modernization in the last three decades, the family persists as a locus of social, economic, and moral activity in a way that it has not for Western industrial countries, or such East Asian counterparts as Japan or South Korea, and China (e.g., Brinton 2001; Lee 2004; Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994; Thornton and Lin 1994; Whyte 2004).2 Nuclear family households have not isolated family members. Patrilineal extended kin tend to live in the same city (Farris 2004; Weinstein et al. 1994). Families living in separate households may keep sharing labor and income so that they function as one household (Yu 2001a). And studies suggest that younger generations of Taiwanese who do not live with their parents actually do more for their parents, such as visiting them and giving them money, than earlier generations did for theirs (Marsh 2002; Weinstein et al. 1994). The family also remains a significant locus of economic activity in the Taiwanese economy. Some argue that the success of the modern Taiwanese economy rests on its kin-based economic networks (Lee 2004). What some call “mom and pop capitalism” is a feature of the Taiwanese econ2 Part of the reason that kinship continues to be a significant basis for social organization is that a long history of authoritarian political control, first under Japanese colonial rule and then the Kuomingtang, restricted the development of civil society until 1987, after the lifting of martial law (Chen 2001). Since the 1990s, participation in non-kin voluntary organizations has noticeably increased. The majority of my respondents had left Taiwan, or were leaving Taiwan during this transition to democracy.

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omy that distinguishes it from the economic organization of the other “mini dragons.” Between 1961–91, 98 to 99 percent of Taiwanese businesses had fewer than ten employees (Lu 2001). And an estimated one in eight adults in Taiwan is the boss of his or her own small company (Hamilton 1998). The vast majority of Taiwanese businesses are family-based, composed of extended family members and a few nonfamilial employees (Brinton, Lee, and Parish 2001; Hsiung 1996; Lee 2004; Yu 2001b). Taiwan’s restrictive banking policies have only bolstered the importance of the family by forcing most Taiwanese to rely on kinship and friendship networks rather than banks for loans (Hamilton 1998). This economic interdependence within extended families materially sustains a Confucian morality of filial piety in Taiwan. Intergenerationally, parents continue to rely on the financial support of their children (Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994; Sun and Liu 1994). According to a 1986 survey, a time when half of my respondents had left Taiwan, 42 percent of all couples give money to the husband’s parents regularly and 85 percent occasionally (Weinstein et al. 1994). In turn, parents continue to play a significant role in the lives of their adult children. For example, Taiwanese parents depend primarily on grandparents for child care relative to other Confucian countries (Yu 2001a). Parents have a strong voice choosing who their children marry. In 1986, over half of urban Taiwanese women decided on their marriage partners in collaboration with their parents. And 17.9 percent claimed their parents made the decision for them (Sun and Liu 1994). Parents also have a strong voice in making decisions about immigration. A few of the respondents claimed that the decision to come to the United States was their parents’, and not their own. Very few immigrants, however, come to the United States with their extended families intact. Instead, most immigrate as individuals or nuclear families, and have few or no extended family nearby. The absence of the extended family, and the diminished social and economic interdependence of the family significantly alters the moral environment of immigrant life. The case of Mrs. Li illustrates how immigration weakens the moral influence of the extended family in the everyday lives of Taiwanese immigrants. Before immigrating to the United States with her husband and children in 1986, Mrs. Li lived in Tai-chung, a large city in central Taiwan. Like most urban Taiwanese, she lived in a nuclear household with her husband’s extended family within walking distance of her home. Her husband and his brothers owned a printing business where she worked. She was also the primary caretaker for her elderly father-in-law, who lived close by. Between caring for him, attending to the family’s printing business, and taking care of her own household, she had little free time to pursue anything else.

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In Taiwan, Mrs. Li explained that she and the members of her husband’s family were tied together through their economic dependence on the family business. Her job in the family was to be her father-in-law’s caretaker. He was demanding and ill-tempered and she often preferred not to cook for him. But she had no choice. How could she face the rest of the family if she refused to cook for him while they were busy working at the business? They depended on her to care for the father just as much as she depended on them for her own livelihood. In 1986, Mrs. Li and her family immigrated to the United States at the behest of her father-in-law. Like other Taiwanese, he reasoned that some members of the family should hold foreign passports in the event of an invasion from China. Her sister-in-law, her only family in Southern California, sponsored the visa for her family to immigrate. For the first year, they depended heavily on her sister-in-law’s family. They lived with them for the first two months until they found a place of their own. She helped both Mrs. Li and her husband find jobs through her connections in the Taiwanese community. She helped enroll her children in the local school and find an English tutor. In the United States, Mrs. Li’s life has changed drastically. Her kinship responsibilities have decreased noticeably without the extended family. Her sister-in-law lives forty-five minutes away and has a limited presence in her life, especially now that the Li’s are more settled, and she is preoccupied with managing her own husband’s medical practice and raising two children. Now they see each other about once a month. But even these visits have slowed since her sister-in-law’s family has become involved in a Taiwanese church. Instead of working in a family business, her husband now works for a printing company that belongs to another Taiwanese immigrant. Eventually he wants to start a business manufacturing bath products with some friends. To Mrs. Li, the absence of the extended family grants her freedom in many respects. She now has more control over her time. Beyond her parttime job at a Taiwanese store, and taking care of the family needs, she now has time to “improve” herself through English classes, aerobics classes, and Buddhism. She practices daily and volunteers at the temple one afternoon a week. Away from the extended family, she even has the freedom to experience certain emotions. It is only after migrating to the United States that Mrs. Li discovered her repressed anger toward her father-in-law, who she now realizes was “controlling” and “manipulative.” As the economic interdependence of the family declines, so, too, do the incentives for maintaining certain Confucian traditions. In the United States, government-subsidized retirement homes, and elderly benefits re-

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duce the necessity and desirability of extended family households.3 Indeed, Taiwanese immigrants surprised me by their knowledge of the elderly benefits of the American welfare state. Having an alternative source of support from their children transforms traditional Confucian relationships between elderly parents and their offspring. For example, one Sunday morning at Grace Church I overheard a conversation between two elderly women. One of them complained about how slovenly and useless her son-in-law was, spending hours lounging before the television, unshaven and in his undershirt. But instead of criticizing him for his lack of respect toward her she said, “Thank God I don’t have to live with them!” The other nodded in agreement. In Taiwan, extended family households have also declined as more families can afford nuclear households (Marsh 1996). The dissolution of the family as the locus of economic activity, coupled with the growth in independent sources of wealth, emancipate members of the family from certain moral obligations to one another. Like other Asian, African, and Latino immigrants, Taiwanese often remark on the dissonance between what they perceive as a selfish American individualism and their own collective moral traditions.4 The clash of American and Taiwanese moral values is most evident in immigrants’ frustrations with child-rearing in the United States, a plight they share with immigrants from other Confucian cultures (Kibria 1993; Yang 1999a; Zhou and Bankston 1998). Children in the United States, they claim, are “wild,” “disobedient,” and “disrespectful.” At least in Taiwan, older cousins and other family members provided concrete models for filial piety. But here, they claim, their children are surrounded by a normative culture of American individualism. Taiwanese immigrants frequently bemoan that as parents they no longer hold the unquestionable authority over their children that their parents did over them in Taiwan. As one respondent told me, “In Taiwan if your parents say it, you do it. But here the kids ask why and they talk back to you.” Immigrant parents fear that their own children will become too “American” and act with free license, 3

The Taiwanese government started to devote an increasing amount of its budget to social welfare programs, particularly in the 1990s (Chan and Yang 2001; Hsiao 2001). In 2002, Taiwan launched a pension system for the elderly, granting USD $86 to qualified persons over sixty-five. 4 American individualism is certainly no stranger in Taiwan’s urbane and modern society, thanks to the global spread of American culture and capitalism. Indeed, Taiwanese immigrants frequently complain about the moral impoverishment of modern Taiwan in no less baleful terms than those describing American society. But still, Confucian values championing filial piety and collectivism over individualism continue to be the normative standards that are reinforced in schools, civil society, and state-sponsored campaigns in Taiwan (Jordan 1998). And no matter how “morally decrepit” Taiwanese society has become, there remains the firmly shared belief that the family is the moral locus of society.

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as if there is no authority above their individual selves. As a father of two teenage children explained to me, “Freedom built this country and freedom will destroy it.” Like many Taiwanese immigrants, he cited nursing homes as an example of American freedom gone awry. Because of too much freedom, he claims, Americans forget their moral obligations to parents and “leave them to die” in nursing homes. And several respondents genuinely worried that this might be their fate unless they raised their children to do otherwise. American individualism challenges immigrant moral sensibilities in other ways beyond childrearing. For example, women claimed that they started to question traditional moral obligations to in-laws and husbands once they observed the “independence” and “freedom” of American women. Christians reexamine the moral meaning of maintaining traditions such as venerating ancestors in an American society where religion is a “personal choice.” Finally, differences in residential structures contribute to a greater sense of freedom in the United States over Taiwan. Many respondents found life in Taiwan restrictive because of its dense residential living conditions. Most respondents lived in multiunit complexes in shared residential and commercial areas. Dense living quarters created a life that was far more public than they now have in the United States. Neighbors and family members could drop by to visit at any minute. One could hardly set foot outside of the house without seeing an acquaintance. Nosy neighbors and neighborhood gossip monitored people and kept them in check. Furthermore, the consequences of gossip in Taiwan were far more costly. Gossip would reflect poorly not only on the individual, but on the entire family. As one respondent complained, one always had to be on one’s best behavior in Taiwan. In the United States these informal structures of governance are much weaker particularly for members of the middle class. The paucity of public life in the United States is striking in comparison to a place like Taiwan. As a predominantly educated middle-class group, Taiwanese immigrants settle into American life like other middle-class suburbanites who live in single-family homes. And like most Americans, the more affluent they are, the more “freedom” they can purchase by sheltering themselves behind security alarms and gates. Whereas local outdoor markets and food stalls draw neighbors out of their homes on foot into public space in Taiwan, Americans drive in their cars to enclosed supermarkets and restaurants miles away from their homes to shop and dine among strangers. While Taiwanese immigrants live in suburbs with a significant concentration of Chinese, these Southern California “ethnoburbs” are still multiethnic neighborhoods. Neighbors do not all speak the same language. For

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example, one respondent told me that one of his neighbors is from Vietnam, the other from Korea, and the one across the street is white American. They each belong to their separate ethnic organizations and patronize their separate ethnic stores. They wave to one another. That is about as far as their neighborly interactions go. Certainly one of the privileges of the extreme privatization of American middle-class suburban life is freedom from the watchful public eye. For example, one woman, who is forty-two and happily single, told me that if she were in Taiwan she would certainly be married by now. Not because there are more marriage options in Taiwan, but because of pressure from her family and friends: she simply would not be able to “get away with” being single there. But free license is not always an ideal situation. She tells me later that she is relieved that she does not have children here since they would be “wild.” Her own ambivalence toward freedom raises a question: who or what is the source of governance in the United States?

RELIGION AND MODERN MORAL INDIVIDUALISM The immigrant moral dilemma is perhaps an accelerated and intensified version of the moral challenges of modernization and urbanization that modern people in general have experienced, including Taiwanese. Writing on the crisis of modern morality in early twentieth-century France, Emile Durkheim, labeled it the “malady of infiniteness,” where men and women “no longer feel those moral forces that restrain him and limit his horizon . . . because they no longer carry their normal measure of authority” ([1902–1906] 1961, 43). The moral power of the collectivity, or what he refers to as “moral forces,” declines in modernity as factors such as increased mobility and the division of labor lead to the atomization of individuals. In modernity, Durkheim suggested, the disciplinary source of morality shifts from external social regulation to internal self-regulation ([1914] 1973, [1902–1906] 1961).5 And as society becomes more complexly organized, morality operates less as habit than a deliberate selfdisciplinary practice. The moral individualism of middle-class America is one variant of the modern morality that Durkheim describes. Individual freedom is one of 5 Durkheim writes, “For in some measure the conventional restraints are no longer effective—barriers which in societies differently organized rigorously restrict people’s desires and ambitions—there remains only moral discipline to provide the necessary regulatory influence.” ([1902–1906] 1961, 49)

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the most cherished values of middle-class Americans.6 According to Robert Bellah and his coauthors (1985), the popular discourse of freedom in American society expresses a “freedom from the demands of others,” including moral demands (24).7 In contrast to a collectivist orientation in Confucian moral tradition, middle-class Americans tend to frame morality as emanating from the individual rather than the collective (Bellah et al. 1985).8 The notion of personal freedom through individual rights and choice dominates the discourse of American economic, legal, political, and social institutions (Glendon 1991). But the founding fathers of the United States had no intention of licensing appetitive self-indulgence. The solution to America’s dilemma of maintaining both personal freedom and public order is not the imposition of external constraints such as the state, but rather the discipline and mastery of the individual self by the individual self. In short, freedom must be accompanied by the practice of selfrestraint. Morality, in a free society, is a matter of disciplining one’s desire. One develops the moral self through self-control and inner restraint— learning how to have the right desires and tempering the wrong ones.9 Where would this source of moral discipline come from? Religion, proclaimed Alexis de Tocqueville, the early twentieth-century French observer of American society. He reasoned that a democratic country like the United States, with its weak traditions and a weak state, could only maintain order through strong religious organizations and the internalization of religious moral practices. Social theorists like Michel Foucault (1979, 1990, 1997), Max Weber (1978, 1991), and Emile Durkheim 6

Tocqueville attributes democratic individualism to the development of a middle class: “As social equality spreads there are more and more people who, although neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs. Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands” (2000, 508). 7 This notion of freedom in America as freedom from, rather than freedom to, arises from the utilitarian and expressive individualist strands in American tradition, in the sense that the social good naturally emerges when everyone pursues his or her own individual interests. Other American traditions, such as the biblical and republican strands of thought, present a different interpretation, the “freedom to” do what is right and just (Bellah et al., 1985: 28–35). 8 Bellah and his coauthors argue that “the language of the self-reliant individual is the first language of American moral life,” and that “the languages of tradition and commitment in community of memory are ‘second languages’ that most Americans know as well, and which they use when the language of the radically separate self does not seem adequate” (ibid., 154). 9 This is not to say that self-discipline is not a virtue in the Confucian tradition—indeed it is. However, to the masses, Confucian ethics places far more emphasis on cultivating morality through positive group solidarity and obligation than through the exercise of negative self-restraint.

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([1902–1906] 1961, [1914] 1993) have also suggested that religion provides practices of self-discipline that are fundamental to the emergence of the modern Western self.10 By no means is the moral significance of religion limited to the modern West. Indeed, Taiwanese are also wrestling with the moral consequences of rapid modernization and urbanization in contemporary Taiwan. They, too, have had to reconfigure a morality based increasingly on models of internal moral choice rather than external duty (Clart 2003). Taiwanese pietistic religious movements like Iguan Dao and modern Chinese Buddhism offer a renewed and modern morality to a society adjusting to the challenges of modernization (Weller 2000). Many of my respondents left Taiwan jut when these religious movements were blossoming and only became exposed to them in the United States. For immigrants, the conditions creating moral anomie are only accelerated and intensified with the extreme distance from kin and community and the unfamiliarity of American culture. Hence, most Taiwanese-American Buddhists rediscover Buddhism in the United States, and not in Taiwan. Buddhism has a different and perhaps more compelling attraction to Taiwanese in the United States than it does to those in Taiwan. As Max Weber points out, the pursuit of otherworldly salvation involves ethical systems of self-regulation that may have significant ramifications for the rationalization of everyday life. His most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argues that the pursuit of salvation formed a disciplinary ethic that governed the everyday lives of Protestants.11 Weber, however, is less optimistic about the possibilities 10 Weber, Durkheim, and Foucault all argue that modernity would be accompanied by an intensified degree of individual self-discipline. Foucault and Durkheim agree that civilization requires the restraint of the body through localized and decentralized practice of regulation, such as the cultivation of the self-disciplined individual. Foucault, unlike Durkhiem, however, sees no redeeming qualities in this development. Quite similar to Weber in fact, Foucault regards this process of rationalization and calculation as leading to an unhealthy suppression of desire, the wellspring of art, imagination, and creativity. 11 Buddhism, Weber argued, failed to form a rational ethic for the masses in East Asian societies because the disciplinary practices of Buddhism were largely reserved for an elite cadre of monks while the masses relied on the services of the monastics for salvation. Weber concluded, “Any beginnings of a systematic ethical rationalization of conduct of the laity was out of the question” (1958a, 268). Indeed, until the mid- to late twentieth-century, Buddhism in Taiwan was largely reserved for ritual practices for the dead and had little bearing on everyday conduct. For Weber, lay Buddhism for the masses was far too ensconced in magic, and the disciplinary practices of monasticism Buddhism too inaccessible, to have any practical effect in the common person’s life. To Weber, Confucianism rather than Buddhism, provided the ethical foundation of Chinese society. Reforms in Chinese Buddhism in the last fifty years give us reason to rethink the potential that Buddhism has to offer a disciplinary ethic to the laity (Chandler 2004; Ch’en 1964; Jones 1996, 1999, 2003). With the increased literacy and modernization in Asia, Buddhism

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for Buddhism to discipline the masses. Reforms in Chinese Buddhism in the last fifty years give reason to think again. And, as we saw in Chapter 1, Buddhism may indeed offer a disciplinary ethic to the laity. In these next sections, I show how modern Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity transform Taiwanese moral understandings and inculcate new techniques for governing the individual will. Religious piety, I argue, replaces Confucian filial piety as the source of moral tradition for these Taiwanese Americans. SALVATION AS A DISCIPLINARY ETHIC Buddhism and Christianity offer their Taiwanese adherents regimens of salvation that redefine and expand moral actions from the Confucian fulfillment of collective obligations to the governance and transformation of the individual interior. Fundamental to the salvation projects of Buddhism and Christianity is the understanding that the human condition is lacking and must be transformed. I use “salvation” as a sociological concept in reference to Max Weber’s typology of “salvation religions.” Buddhism and Christianity fit Weber’s typology, as both offer humanity techniques of salvation from its fundamentally flawed state. In this light, religious practices are not merely devotions to deities, or recompense for moral offense, but systematic practices to transform human habit and being.12 In Western cultures, the Christian concept of original sin, or the idea that humanity is fundamentally flawed, is commonplace. But to Taiwanese, this concept is quite foreign. Taiwanese immigrants had a very difficult time accepting the Christian doctrine of original sin. One respondent told me that she resisted converting to Christianity for years because she could not accept that she was “sinful.” She said, “I have never done anything wrong. I treat my parents, my husband, and children well. How can you say that I’m sinful?” According to her Taiwanese worldview, she had itself has also undergone “modernization” by broadening the accessibility of Buddhist texts and practices to the lay public. Modern Chinese Buddhism now emphasizes enlightenment through Buddhist practice in the lay person’s everyday life rather than through reliance on rituals performed by monastics. 12 Each individual, of course, interprets her practices differently. In many instances, religious practices are neither perceived nor function as self-transformative disciplines. The point, however, is that salvation religions possess transformative potential on a social and individual level, in part because of their world-rejecting orientations, in addition to their degree of ideological and organizational rationalization. As Weber and numerous scholars have elaborated, certain conditions are necessary to activate this transformative potential. The emphasis on religious practice as a self-transformative discipline is evident in the modern Chinese Buddhist and evangelical Christian teachings Taiwanese Americans follow. But certainly, not all of the faithful are transformed.

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fulfilled her traditional obligations as a woman and had committed no wrongdoings. To Taiwanese, sin (tsui), or moral offense, describes discrete criminal acts, particularly the failure to fulfill obligations, rather than a state, much less a condition that one inherits at birth. Commenting on the foreignness of sin to Confucianism, Max Weber wrote, “the cardinal virtue and goal in self-perfection meant ceremonial and ritualist propriety in all circumstances of life. . . . He who complied with the commandments, fashioned for the man of average ability, was free of sin . . . an educated Chinese would simply refuse to be continually burdened with ‘sin’ ” (1951, 228). Confucianism has a this-worldly orientation that seeks to perfect the human condition through mastering socially prescribed roles. By contrast, salvation religions seek to save humanity from its fundamentally flawed condition. Christianity and Buddhism introduce to Taiwanese the concept of human fallenness and the need for salvation, not from discrete acts of offense, but from a fundamental state of imperfection. This theme was continually emphasized at my fieldsites and among my respondents. In Buddhism, humanity is only one plane13 of existence in samsara, the cycle of birth and death. Unenlightened sentient beings are deeply entangled in the cycle of repeated birth and death because they still possess defilements, particularly greed, hatred, and delusion. My respondents describe the human tendencies of greed, delusion, and desire as “habits” (vashana) that had been engrained in them for thousands of years as a result of the cycle of rebirth. “We’re born as human beings because we aren’t enlightened,” said Mrs. Cheng. “We are still so attached to what we see and what we feel—passions and sufferings, pains. . . . We are not Buddhas, habitual thinking keeps on influencing us.” Another Buddhist described these tendencies as “human nature”: “I think Buddhism is hard to practice because eventually you put the theory into behavior. I think many people struggle, maybe in Christianity, too. You know the teaching of God, you know the teaching of Buddha, but how do you apply it in your daily life? It’s easier to say ‘sacrifice, serve others’ but it’s always very difficult because our habitual tendency has been with us for centuries, I should say kalpas.14 It’s so rooted, and it’s so difficult because it’s human nature.” According to these respondents, they must transcend their deeply engrained human habits to acheive enlightenment. 13 The “Six Planes/States of Existence” or “Six Paths” refers to the states of rebirth: animals, ghosts, titans, hells, humanity, and celestial states. Human beings, as opposed to lower forms of existence, have the particular advantage of being exposed to the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, which offers a more expedient pathway to enlightenment. 14 Kalpa refers to eternity, or an inconceivably long period of time.

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Evangelical Christians believe that humanity is plagued by original sin (Smith 1998). Because of their disobedient nature, humans fall short of God’s perfection. To support this claim, Christian respondents frequently refer to the biblical passage Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And this will be true no matter how hard they try. This idea confounded converts’ former understandings of sin. For example, consider Mrs. Huang’s observations on her old approach toward sin: “I didn’t really understand sin before I became Christian. I thought that I had never done anything wrong. I didn’t know that sin includes even things such as being born human, or not being truthful. I didn’t think that way. I just thought sin includes robbery or cheating people or doing something seriously bad. I thought that I didn’t have any sin.” By defining sin or defilement as a human condition, rather than a category of human action, Chinese Buddhist and evangelical Christian teachings redirect the object of moral reform from human actions to the human interior. Buddhism argues that the fundamental source of evil behavior is the defiled consciousness, or ignorance, that mistakes the empirical for reality. Ignorance feeds human desire, greed, and anger. Buddhism introduces a new realm for moral scrutiny now that thoughts and desires can be considered “defiled” or “wrong.” Humans need to be saved from false thoughts and desires from within. Buddhist practice is the constant purification of the interior so that one can, in the words of one Buddhist respondent, “transcend it from evil to good.” Like Buddhism, the Christian understanding of sin challenges individuals to scrutinize not only their behaviors, but also their interior states, thoughts, and emotions for religious perfection. As one respondent told me, “Now I know that I have sin. I know what sin is. Even jealousy is sin. Before I didn’t know this.” Christ demands total obedience, not only in one’s actions, but in one’s heart and mind as well. The emphasis on the righteous interior is most evident in the biblical passage Matthew 5:28 where Christ claims, “but I say to you, that everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.”15 Before conversion, Christian respondents considered themselves blameless so long as they did not act out the emotions of jealousy, pride, violence against, and lust for another. After converting, they considered it sinful merely to have such emotions. In my study, Christians, like Buddhists, consequently become more watchful of their interior states after conversion: “Before you might not do bad things but you had the 15 When asked if he had ever been unfaithful in his marriage, the former President Jimmy Carter, undeniably speaking from his evangelical Christian tradition, admitted that although never having committed adultery he has at one time harbored lust in his heart.

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thoughts, and that was okay. Now it’s not even okay to have the thoughts. That’s sin, don’t do that! God is watching you and you know that’s a sin. Before you knew it was bad but you thought, ‘who cares, no one’s controlling me.’ But now you know you have Jesus in your heart and you say, ‘no, try not to think like that.’ Before you were just thinking anything you want.” Buddhist and Christian teachings at Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church shift the focus of moral action from fulfilling worldly obligations, to regulating one’s interior thoughts, desires, and emotions. When the world is itself an “illusion,” according to Buddhism, or “fallen,” according to Christianity, one cannot achieve salvation merely through fulfilling one’s social obligations. Salvation can only be achieved through transcending humanity. Religious practices are therefore not merely devotions directed toward deities or ancestors, as they were in traditional Taiwanese religion, but systematic, disciplinary practices to transform the sinful or ignorant self. The Buddhists seek to be liberated from their humanity, by yoking their mental and emotional habits to cultivate a state of emptiness—a consciousness of selflessness and the interconnectedness of all sentient beings. The teachings at Dharma Light Temple and other Taiwanese Buddhist organizations challenge people to expand their moral obligations beyond the particular boundaries of kinship, nation, or ethnicity to the universal cosmos of sentient beings. Grace Church teaches Christians to make Christ the lord of their lives through the constant submission of their thoughts and desires to the will of Christ. This shift produces a change in their moral universe. Christians must obey God before any human person or community. Salvation becomes an all-consuming project for the serious Buddhists and Christians in my study, an ethic that guides their every thought, desire and action. Convicted of a fundamental flaw, humanity cannot find salvation through piecemeal acts of atonement (Geertz 1973). Rather, the salvation ethic consumes the everyday consciousness of the common person and is no longer confined to sacred times and spaces. In both modern Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity, the emphasis of religious practices is on the layperson’s unmediated access to salvation. In Buddhism, every individual is an unrealized Buddha. In Christianity, every individual can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. To Christians and Buddhists, every action, every moment, every thought, and every desire can be consecrated. For Buddhists, each moment and each action becomes an opportunity to practice. For evangelical Christians, all thoughts, desires and actions must be submitted to the will of God. Transcending the human condition is no easy task. Buddhists and Christians undertake a ceaseless discipline to control the unruly human heart and mind.

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BUDDHIST PRACTICE: CULTIVATING THE BUDDHA WITHIN With his gentle and peaceful manner, Mr. Tsai embodies the ideal of Buddhist repose. He claims, however, that he was a very different person before becoming a practicing Buddhist: an impatient man with a propensity for strong emotions and rash behavior that often interfered with his capacity to be an effective manager at work and a sympathetic father at home. The transformation did not happen overnight. It took fifteen years of Buddhist practice to “work against” the “habits” of “greed, anger, and ignorance” that he had developed through his previous lifetimes. Mr. Tsai’s religious practice is not for the faint-hearted. He practices three to four hours each day. For two hours every morning, Mr. Tsai assumes the lotus position and meditates on the floor of a bedroom he has converted into his home shrine. With his eyes half-open, and his palms stretched out on his lap, he reflects the peaceful calm of the Buddha. Before this, he bows three times, first to his teacher, the Buddha, second to the Dharma Master Ling Chi, and third to the Buddha nature within himself. In the evening, Mr. Tsai spends time studying the sutras and chanting “Omitopho.” Once a week he goes to the temple to listen to the dharma teaching, but beyond this he avoids other ceremonies and rituals because he finds the crowds and noise too distracting and not conducive to his spiritual progress. After chanting, he transfers the merits16 that he accumulates from his practice to his ancestors and to his living mother, whose health has been deteriorating. Mr. Tsai claims that his Buddhist practice is quite different from the traditional religion that he grew up with in Taiwan. There his religious activities involved worshipping his ancestors and occasionally praying to gods when he needed their supernatural intervention. Now his religious practice is about improving himself. He explains, “I do my daily practice, not because I need the Buddha or bodhisattva to give me help so that I can make more money or that I can be more healthy and live a longer life. I practice because I realize that I need to improve myself.” Mr. Tsai’s recognition that he needs to improve himself comes from the knowledge that he has accumulated several lifetimes of bad habits that have imprisoned him into the cycle of samsara. Habits are hard to break; especially those that have accumulated over several lifetimes. This point was illustrated when a monk told the following story in a sutra study class. A scorpion wanted to cross a river and so he asked a turtle for a 16 The practice of transferring merit refers to the sharing of one’s merits or blessings with another. Typically Chinese Buddhists transfer their merits to the deceased, in the hopes that their merits will counterbalance or overshadow bad karma and prevent calamities.

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ride. The turtle at first refused, fearful that the scorpion would sting him. The scorpion replied that he would certainly not sting him since they would both end up drowning. With the scorpion’s assurances, the turtle agreed to shuttle him across. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the turtle. As they were both drowning, the turtle asked the scorpion why he had stung him and the scorpion replied that he could not help it, it was in his nature. The monk’s point was that humans are like the scorpion. We instinctively act out of bad habits even though they are self-destructive. Mr. Tsai seeks salvation from himself—his own ingrained habits of greed, anger, and ignorance. His own desire and delusion feed his attachment to this illusory world and prevent him from recognizing his Buddhanature. Rather than direct his religious practices toward the gods and his ancestors who can grant him favors and protection, as traditional Taiwanese religion would counsel, he focuses his religious practices on himself. He is the object of his own religious practice, because only he can save himself. And at the core of this transformation is practice: a process of disciplining his mind, heart, and body to cultivate his Buddha nature. The example of Mr. Tsai illustrates how Buddhists use religious practices in their daily lives. Mr. Tsai’s case highlights three themes about practice that emerged in my interviews with Buddhists: (1) practice as a general orientation toward life; (2) practice as controlling the interior; and (3) practice as self-power. Practice as a General Orientation toward Life Buddhists repeatedly emphasize that Buddhism differs from religions that worship a deity who saves and protects humans. In Buddhism, they claim, only you can save yourself. Hence, Buddhists refer to their religious actions as “practices” rather than as worship or devotion. They regard the Buddha as a supreme teacher, not a deity. He passed on the knowledge and techniques for salvation, or enlightenment. “Practicing” is the act of incorporating these Buddhist techniques and knowledge into one’s life. For the serious Buddhist, “practicing” becomes an ethic that shapes every facet of his life. Before modern reforms in the last fifty years, Chinese Buddhism for the masses was largely a medium praying for the dead and was mediated by priests and monks. Traditional Chinese Buddhism was a two-tiered system: the religious elites, or monastics, were the true practitioners of Buddhism, while the masses relied on their religious services. Whereas monastics worked toward enlightenment in this lifetime, laypersons hoped only for favorable rebirth in the next incarnation. As hired “professional intermediaries,” monks performed funeral rituals transferring merits to the

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dead, thus enhancing the deceased’s karmic destiny in the next life. As Weber put it, “Only these [Buddhist monastics] were full members of the religious community; all others remained religious laymen of inferior value; objects, not subjects, of religiosity” (1951, 269). Since Weber’s time, Chinese Buddhism has democratized salvation by emphasizing lay religious practice in everyday life. In effect, modern Chinese Buddhism introduced the disciplinary practices of the monastery into the everyday world. Similar to Martin Luther’s monumental attempt to create “the priesthood of all believers” during the Reformation, modern Chinese Buddhism has elevated the lay devotee and removed the religious middle-man. Modern Chinese Buddhism suggests that the possibility of enlightenment, once limited to monastics, is available to all. While there is still a sense of hierarchy between the monastic and the layperson, the divide is less extreme. People no longer depend for salvation on the rituals that monastics perform. Every person, through her own practice can attain enlightenment in the here and now. The burden of enlightenment rests upon oneself, the practitioner: each person an unawakened Buddha. One nun reminded devotees in a dharma class that, according to the Ksitigarbha Sutra, the dead receive only minimal merit from the living. More importantly we should cultivate merit in our own lifetime and not depend upon the merit transferred by family members and monastics after we are dead to counterbalance our bad karma. Although the ritual of transferring merit continues to be an important part of Buddhist practice, it is now only one aspect of Buddhist practice. Literature, sermons, and teachings in modern Chinese Humanistic Buddhism emphasize that the more significant goal of practice is to cultivate merit by cultivating virtues in this life. For through the virtues of compassion, mindfulness, and selfcontrol, one emancipates oneself from the sense of a separate and independent self. No longer oriented toward the after-life, modern Buddhists seek salvation in this life. Explaining her conversion to Buddhism, one respondent told me, “I’m not doing this for my next life. I don’t care about my next life. I care about this life!” Practicing forms a general orientation to life. Every moment and every place is an opportunity to awaken one’s Buddha nature through practice. One respondent who recites Omitopho when she gets up in the morning and before meals claims that “actually we can recite his name the whole time, when we’re walking or sitting down.” No longer mediated by monastics and no longer confined within the monastery, any action and any thought can become a form of “practice.” For example, when I ask Mrs. Liu what she means by “practice,” she says, “Any way that helps you gain spiritual advancement. I would call that spiritual practice. Either by painting or writing or listening to music or meditation or taking a walk, I would call that spiritual practice.” Although she still uses some traditional

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Buddhist practices, Mrs. Liu also creates her own: “I don’t meditate regularly, only whenever I feel like it, like maybe once or twice a week. What I do on a regular basis is reading and writing. I use writing as my spiritual practice, as a way to look at myself objectively without judging. I keep a spiritual journal. I try to record my life from different perspectives and I try to use my creative process like writing as way to express my spirituality. That’s my practice.” Beyond structured activities like journal writing, “practice” becomes a general ethic that guides one’s life in every moment. Practicing involves developing a heightened awareness of one’s ability at every moment to govern one’s thoughts and, as Mrs. Wu claims, to “hold down your heart.” Consider her description of practicing Buddhism in an everyday activity, like cooking: Whatever I do I try to concentrate on it fully. That’s what I call Buddhism. I used to not pay attention because of my habitual personality. I’m a very active person, hyperactive in a way. I’ve been reading a lot of books on how to be focused on the present moment and how to be present. Because of my readings and the Venerable’s classes, I’ve come to realize that how you are present is by focusing on something and holding down your heart, making sure that you have the power of not being influenced. And I’m trying to do it in the kitchen right now when I’m slicing things. Before, I didn’t know that I could practice this way. Sitting meditation is only one way to hold down your heart and thoughts. I don’t really have time to sit down and meditate. You don’t want to meditate that much because the final goal of meditation is that the focus and awareness becomes a part of you, so that whatever you do you are really focused on it. So I try to apply it to my kitchen cooking. When I’m cutting I try to be totally mindful of my cutting—that’s what I’ve been practically practicing.

Practice as Mindfulness: Controlling Every Thought and Desire In Buddhism, ignorance is the source of all suffering. We are ignorant because we are tricked by our senses into mistaking the world of appearances for the world of reality. In our ignorance we take the empirical self to be real and permanent, and we harbor desires and attachments to satiate and protect this self. This only leads to suffering because we and the world around us are impermanent, in constant flux. Thus, the first step to enlightenment is controlling and correcting the mind. Enlightenment is recognizing one’s emptiness, or the illusion of the separate and permanent self. By identifying the consciousness as problematic, the mind becomes an object to be examined and rectified.

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Buddhists describe their practices as cultivating mindfulness, an attentiveness to one’s thoughts, desires, and actions. Rather than letting the habit of ignorance control them, mindfulness is the practice of disciplining and transforming their mind and heart so that they can be emancipated from ignorance, desires, and attachments. As one Buddhist respondent told me, the purpose of her practice is: “to constantly practice and practice and you have to perceive what you’re thinking. You have to catch that thought before it gets bad. You can transcend it from evil to good.” One of the most common techniques that Buddhist respondents use to control their minds is meditation. To them, meditation empties the mind of distractions and frees it to focus, thereby cultivating concentration and mindful awareness in everyday life. For example, consider the comments of Mrs. Cheng, a practicing Buddhist of ten years: Meditation is really important because it is a practice that helps you to control every moment’s thoughts. You are bringing yourself to a calm state so you can be conscious of your mind. Once you do this you can let bad emotions, thoughts and desires go without being attached to it before you do something that you will be sorry for. In Chinese we say, ding li (resisting attraction), it’s the power to not be able to be changed. It’s the power to not be influenced by habits that have been in our lives for kalpas. For example, in sitting meditation, you gradually build up the ability not to be moved by outer elements. If you can build up that ability you gradually build a new habit, so that when you are dealing with reality you are not going to be bothered by its incompleteness—by the fact that sometimes you’re going to be too happy and sometimes you’re going to be too sad that things don’t go your way. So I think to achieve the Buddha’s wisdom we need to meditate. He did the same process as us. He meditated to build up the fundamental of ding li, the ability not to be influenced by other elements. Then you’ll be in control of yourself and the uncertainties in your life, because through meditation you are conscious of every moment’s thoughts and you’re in control.

As Mrs. Cheng says, meditation helps her control her mind and develop mindfulness in everyday life. The end goal of mindfulness is not simply a consciousness of one’s thoughts, but a certain kind of consciousness. The practice of mindfulness cultivates an awareness of the impermanence of life so that, according to Mrs. Cheng, “you can let bad emotions, thoughts and desires go without being attached to them.” Buddhists frequently claim that they have more control over their emotions as a result of their religious practice. All emotions, even joy and happiness, have the potential to cloud the mind and compromise one’s capacity for self-control. For example, one respondent told me: “There’s a Buddhist saying, ‘your anger will burn the forest of merit,’ which means that when you’re really angry, your mind is fully occupied with anger.

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You’re not seeing things with clarity. As a Buddhist you want to calm yourself down with mindfulness and meditation. Then you can look at things more clearly and have better judgment. This is why it’s good to be emotionless.” Another respondent explained that emotions are a consequence of our ignorance: “Even if your life doesn’t go the way that you want, it’s not going to be forever because everything is impermanent. The happy and sad moments are not going to be permanent. A person cannot be sad forever, nor can he be happy forever. As the Diamond Sutra points out, all phenomena are just there and they won’t last forever so they should be perceived as illusions and dreams and bubbles . . . this is the truth about the universe. We take things too seriously. That’s why we are sad and happy.” Some Buddhists told me that they no longer watch movies, read novels, or read the newspaper because they make them too emotional. For example, Mrs. Chung, who used to enjoy novels immensely, no longer reads anything except Buddhist texts. She explains: “In Buddhism we want to control our moods and emotions. We don’t want to be emotional. We see everything very peacefully. I don’t want to become sad because the novel is sad. That means that I cannot control my mind. I’m letting my mood control me. Instead I want to be able to control my mood.” If the word “control” sounds extreme and severe, there is good reason for Buddhists to use it. Many of the Buddhists describe the human mind as having the habit of wandering and being deluded by the sensory world. Working against these ingrained habits indeed requires an extreme amount of monitoring and discipline. Controlling the mind, however, is not an end in itself but merely the means toward an end goal of possessing a certain kind of mind, the Buddha mind, where one is acutely aware of one’s emptiness and impermanence. This change in consciousness, then, leads toward a change in emotions and behavior. For example, consider how Mrs. Liu’s consciousness of impermanence helped her to handle a difficult situation at the temple: Recently I encountered a problem at the temple. People are criticizing me for being very arrogant because of the way that I act and speak. My way of doing things is too Americanized for them so I’ve been criticized severely. It has been very difficult for me as I’ve told you that I have this tendency to please people. In my Buddhist practice I know that it’s no use to please everybody. The point is that you need to understand your own intentions. In my practice I know that nothing will stay the same. The nature of everything is emptiness. So I’d just like to give myself more time to watch the situation more carefully and to examine myself and my intentions and look at how I respond to each situation. Do I act out of fear or out of wisdom or out

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of love for people? This is a really precious opportunity for me to practice Buddhism. So instead of wanting to have somebody solve the problem and go out and clear the rumors I give myself a space without doing anything. I just look at the situation and try to see things clearly. That’s my practice right now.

Notice that Mrs. Liu focuses her self-examination on her intentions, not her actions. She sees her behaviors as the consequences of her desires. As other Buddhists have told me, Buddhism is not a religion of do’s and don’ts. Instead, the religion provides Mrs. Liu with a set of standards to evaluate the root of her behavior—her intentions. As she indicates, the same action may be motivated by different emotions. However, an intention of fear and an intention of love hold different consequences for her spiritual development: out of fear she acts to protect the illusory self; out of love she transcends the false, empirical self. For this reason, she must scrutinize her heart’s desires. The Disenchantment of Buddhist Ritual: Practice as Self-Power At the core of modern Chinese Buddhism is the belief that only you can save yourself. This doctrine of radical self-sufficiency disenchants sacred symbols and rituals of magical qualities, making them instead techniques of self-transformation. No longer considered devotions, supplications, or sacrifices to external deities, religious practices and rituals become inward focused disciplines for augmenting the “self-power” to save the self. For example, most Taiwanese bow to images of the Buddha and various bodhisattvas to worship. Practicing Buddhists, however, claim to bow to venerate their own Buddhahood rather than to worship the Buddha. The Buddha is a symbol of their own Buddha nature, their own “self-power,” to transcend the self. Religious symbols are ultimately symbols of their own transcendence. For example, one respondent says that she used to pray to Kuan Yin Bodhisattva for various favors. Now when she bows to an image of Kuan Yin she does not pray. She says, “She is still my favorite bodhisattva, but when I bow to her I remind myself that I myself possess compassion and that everything I do is a way of showing compassion. That’s the major reason that I bow.” Mr. Tsai told me that in the act of bowing, when you realize you are not venerating deities but your own Buddha nature, you are on your way to enlightenment. At a lay sutra study meeting, one of the devotees commented that the most effective way of purifying yourself is not through ceremonial rituals but through changing your thinking. Transforming one’s own self-consciousness is the object of religious practice, not currying the favor of a deity.

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My Buddhist respondents now regard practices such as donating money or volunteering at the temple as ways to cultivate virtues in this life rather than merit for the next life. Consider Mrs. Liu’s observations on donating money to the temple as a way to push the boundaries of the self: It’s a very traditional way of thinking that by donating money to the temple or volunteering your next life will be better, or even that good things will happen to you in this life. But for me, donating money is a way of stretching my sense of self. It’s only through giving out that you know your ability to give. It’s only through sustaining yourself with so few things that you know that you don’t need that much. You just keep stretching out and you know your limits and you keep pushing it and eventually when the boundaries vanish you realize that there is no self.

Buddhist interpretations of sutras and mantras illustrate the transition from an orientation toward salvation through rituals to salvation through self-discipline. In traditional religion, people believe that sutras and mantras hold magical powers to ward off evil spirits. Now practicing Buddhists regard chanting sutras and mantras as a method to control and calm one’s own mind. For example, one respondent said, “People say that it’s the sutra that has power, but it’s your mind.” Although traditionally Buddhists chant Amitahba Buddha’s name for the purpose of being reborn in the Pure Land, respondents claimed that the purpose of chanting Amitahba Buddha’s name is to clarify and focus one’s mind. The internalization of sacred symbols is also reflected in a new understanding of ghosts and demons. Evil spirits are no longer beings outside of oneself that need to be placated, but negative aspects of one’s own mind and heart. Several of the respondents relayed to me incidents of having encountered ghosts and demons. A devout practitioner, Mr. Lee, told me that he started going to the temple after his mother started to have nightmares of her ancestors’ ghosts. His father had recently committed suicide, and his mother, who was not a practicing Buddhist, believed that the spirits were haunting her because they held her responsible for his death. The suicide was a result of her failures in her duties to him as a wife. The ancestors were now haunting her for recompense. When Mr. Lee brought his mother to the temple, they donated money and in return the monks chanted, transferring merits to the unhappy ancestors. Furthermore, the monastics taught Mr. Lee’s mother a mantra that they assured would keep the ghosts away. When I asked Mr. Lee whether the mantra had successfully exorcised the spirits, he answered yes. His mother, who was not a practicing Buddhist, believed that the mantra’s power chases the ghosts away, but he knew better. The mantra, he explained, is a technique to help his mother

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strengthen her mind to resist the ghosts, which are actually negative aspects of her mind. The power to exorcise the ghosts lies in herself, and not in the supernatural character of the mantra. Like other Buddhist practices, it aims at training the mind to resist its own evil thoughts, rather than to placate external spirits. In another example, Ms. Hou shared a story about her friend, Sandy, who became possessed by a spirit that planted suicidal thoughts in her head. Ms. Hou brought Sandy to the temple, where the monastics instructed her to chant a mantra. Ms. Hou explained that chanting the mantra would help to strengthen her friend’s mind so that she could overcome the suicidal thoughts and desires. Similarly, when I asked a monastic about the blessed prayer beads that she gives to the ill, she answered that less sophisticated devotees believe that prayer beads themselves possess the power to cure their illness. In reality, it is the practice of chanting with the rosary that facilitates healing by strengthening the individual’s mind. In other words, chanting is efficacious because it empowers people to regain control over their thoughts and emotions, not because the mantra or rosary possesses supernatural power of its own. The Buddhist salvation ethic produces an exceptional degree of internal self-governance in serious practitioners. Because it is one’s own desires and delusions that prevent one’s enlightenment, Buddhist practices focus on “controlling one’s thoughts” and “holding down one’s heart” in order to transcend the defiled self. Buddhism does not offer a neat morally ordered world, nor a definitive set of moral guidelines to Taiwanese immigrants navigating the moral challenges of immigration and modernity. Rather, in a world where moral sensibilities and structures are understood to be shifting, modern Chinese Buddhism grounds people with techniques of moral self-examination, self-control, self-transformation, and, ultimately, self-transcendence. Using different practices and symbols, Christians seek the same end as Buddhists: to transform the worldly self. I turn to this subject next. SUBMITTING THE SELF: MAKING JESUS THE LORD OF ONE’S LIFE “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a way of life!” Mr. Lu exclaims in the living room of his new two-story suburban tract home. Instead of an ancestral altar, a plaque that reads, “Christ is the Lord of this house” in Chinese and English, is displayed on the living room wall. One of the church leaders at Grace Church, Mr. Lu is respected for his fervent faith and service to the community. He converted to Christianity eight years ago after a friend introduced him to Grace Church. A former atheist,

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Mr. Lu was highly critical of religion because it did not conform to his sensibilities as a scientist. As a child he accompanied his parents and grandparents to the temple and participated in the family traditions of ancestral veneration. He remembers with disgust how his grandmother made him drink the ashes from incense to cure his stomach flu. “That’s just superstition, there’s no scientific proof,” he observes in retrospect. Recalling the temple rituals, he says, “We just randomly worshipped anything that was there. We didn’t know who or what we were worshipping. We just prayed to anything to make sure that we were healthy and wealthy.” In Taiwan he was never exposed to any religious teachings or text. When monks chanted sutras, he claims they seemed a jumble of meaningless sounds. Mr. Lu’s experience of Christianity is far different from his experience of religion in Taiwan. In light of his experience of religion in Taiwan, it is no wonder that he should proclaim that Christianity is not a religion, but a way of life. “Being Christian,” he says, “is about practicing what you believe.” Having accepted Jesus as his lord and savior eight years ago at a church retreat, his life is about making Jesus the lord of his life. He distinguishes between “true Christians” and “Sunday Christians.” The latter attend church on Sundays, but forget about Jesus the rest of the week. This is no different, he claims, from the instrumental way most Taiwanese practice religion—they go to the temple to pray to become rich. To Mr. Lu, being a Christian means making Christ the center of his life not only on Sundays, but every day and every moment. He says in his own words, “it is a discipline, it’s a way to control myself.” So seriously does he take the decision to become Christian that when his teenage son wanted to get baptized Mr. Lu forbade it, reasoning that at that age, his son could not yet understand the depth of the commitment. The God that Mr. Lu worships is not a “deaf and mute statue” in a temple far away, but an all-powerful, omnipresent being who demands sovereignty in every aspect of his life. This is why evangelical Christians describe the act of conversion as “making Jesus your personal lord and savior.” In this light, religious practices are techniques of self-submission to God. To contrast Christianity with a traditional Taiwanese religious orientation, one Bible study leader at Grace Church cleverly stated, “instead of trying to control God, we should think of ways that God can control us.” Submission to God is a general ethical orientation that pervades the entirety of life for devout evangelical Christians. Submitting every moment, and every desire, thought, and action to God’s sovereignty and control is a commonly articulated theme at Grace Church and in evangelical culture. In a sermon, Pastor Chang urged his congregation, “The kingdom of God is right here, now, in your heart. . . . Ask God to come and

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be king inside you. Let him be the king in your heart, family, church, and work. Before you do or say anything, ask your king, God.” Grace Church members think of themselves as God’s subjects, obedient to God. For example, one man justified his decision to move to Southern California by claiming, “God wanted me to do this.” Christian and Buddhist salvation ethics are notably different in that Christians cultivate a radical dependency on God for salvation, whereas Buddhist practices cultivate self-sufficiency. Buddhist and Christian practices, however, are similar because they offer techniques of moral selfexamination and regulation. I will discuss how Christians do this through sanctifying the heart, warding away evil spirits, and submitting themselves to God in prayer and the study of scripture. Sanctifying the Heart If Christ is to be the lord of one’s life, he cannot merely be the king of one’s words and deeds; he must be the king of one’s entire being, especially one’s interior—the heart and mind. To evangelical Christians, the root of all sins is putting oneself before Christ. One of Grace Church’s publications describes a sinful heart as being full of pride and self-centeredness. Sinful actions arise out of a general attitude toward life that denies Christ’s sovereignty: “If God is God, His rightful place is at the very center of all existence, so that all of life revolves around Him. Our sinfulness consists in that God is not given this place. Life for us does not revolve around God. It revolves around ourselves.” Christ preached a repentance of not only word and deed, but most importantly a repentance of the heart. The Pharisees are held up as an instructive example: people who followed the word of the law to the last iota but remained recalcitrant in their hearts. On the other hand, the models for Christian discipleship in the Gospels are figures such as the prostitute Mary Magdalene, and the tax collector Zaccheus, sinners who repented and transformed as followers of Christ. As I discussed, evangelical Christianity introduces a discourse of sin that awakens Taiwanese converts to a new awareness of their interior lives. Thoughts, emotions, and desires can be wrong and in need of reform. Monitoring and reshaping one’s desires, will, and actions in accordance with the will of God become a constant preoccupation, since no thought, word or deed escapes the eyes of the all-knowing Christian God. While God’s ever-present gaze upon the human soul can be a source of great comfort, it can also be a source of anxiety, one that drives Christians to be constantly attentive to their inner state. For example, Mr. Lee told me, “I feel like God is watching me constantly. Whatever I do, day in and

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day out, he is watching me.” On several occasions in Bible studies, sermons, and Sunday schools, Christians remarked that even if humans did not notice a person sinning, God most certainly did. This notion of the omnipresent and omniscient God was perhaps most useful for parents who warned their children that they could not get away with bad behavior since “God is watching.”

Sin as Loss of Control Christians must also be attentive to their interior states because of their vulnerability to spiritually dark forces. Respondents spoke about encountering forces of evil and often used military imagery to describe their struggle with Satanic or evil forces. In one sermon a guest pastor told the congregation, “Satan has declared war against you and your family. Satan is not a gentleman. He will attack you when you are least prepared. We are already under spiritual attack.” He then quoted the Bible, citing evidence of this invisible evil realm: “Put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:11–12). In traditional Taiwanese religion, evil spirits extort favors out of humans by threatening them with misfortunes like illness, bankruptcy, and possession. But in the Christian cosmology, the evil spirits flex their powers by tempting humans, destabilizing their capacity for self-control, and thus impairing their ability to do the moral thing. In other words, devils and demons make humans sin by compromising their wills. Christians must therefore always watch themselves, for temptations abound. Several of the Christian respondents reported having experiences with evil spirits, describing these as moments when they lost control of themselves. Why do some people do wrong when they know what is right, I asked one man. “It’s like it says in the Bible,” he answered, “sometimes we know the right thing but we do the wrong thing because we can’t control ourselves. It’s the devil tempting.” When the congregation discovered that a well-respected member was having an extramarital affair, members at Grace Church explained that Satan was responsible for the man’s loss of self-control. Deacon Chu told me about an incident when he and some other Christians at the church encountered evil spirits. Some guys and I were working on a video for the Thanksgiving talent show at church. We needed an editing machine to cut some of the video that we

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shot, but we didn’t have the money. Or rather, we didn’t want to spend the money for just this one job. So we talked about going to Circuit City or Good Guys to buy it and then return it after we were done. Now I know that’s wrong. But we got into talking about that and we started to really think that was a good idea because then we could get the job done quickly. But of course we forgot about the principle behind buying it and returning it. So it was really late at night and we started talking about how we disliked some people in the fellowship, how we were disappointed with the fellowship and so on. As we kept on talking we got more and more negative. I started feeling like what we were doing was wrong but I didn’t stop because I wanted to talk about it. But because you’re letting yourself go freely you start saying a lot of nasty things, you know, things you don’t have to say but you do because it makes you feel good. We started realizing that what we were doing was wrong so we started praying. As we prayed together we held hands. Then we started shaking for no reason. It wasn’t cold or anything, but we just started shaking. This is the first time that I’ve ever encountered anything like evil spirits. The way I see it, first we tried to come up with lies, and then we started targeting people we didn’t like. And we knew it was ungodly and that God didn’t want us doing that but we went ahead with our feelings anyway. When we realized it was wrong we started praying. And that’s how we overcame it. But it was challenging from the inside, that’s why we got goosebumps and started shaking really hard. I can still remember feeling my brother hold onto my hands and sitting in a circle with my friends. When we started shaking we just prayed harder and harder. I mean, I’m an easy-going guy. I’m not a fanatic as far as praying goes, but that was an extraordinary experience. Chen: How did you know to stop saying bad things about people? Deacon Chu: There’s a voice inside of me saying, “this is wrong.” Well we actually talked about it and asked, “is this good? To use and return it?” But at the time we were getting really tired working on the project. It was already 2 a.m. So we just kept working on it but there’s a voice inside us saying, “this is wrong, you shouldn’t do this.” But we didn’t listen because we were so focused on what we wanted to accomplish. I think the devil uses this as a chance to attack you—to make you start saying things about people—by letting yourself go out of control with one mistake in the beginning.

In this account, Deacon Chu describes his experience with evil spirits as the loss of control. Although he and his friends recognized that their actions were wrong, they could not stop themselves. Deacon Chu offers two explanations for why he and his friends became prime targets for the devil in this case. In the first place, fatigue from a long night’s work crumbled their defenses against their negative thoughts and desires. Second, they were too preoccupied with their own goals to hear God’s voice: “we didn’t listen because we were so focused on what we wanted to accom-

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plish.” They put themselves first before God. As Deacon Chu explains, this becomes an opportunity for the devil to attack by “letting yourself go out of control.” Note the similarity to how Buddhists explain evil spirits. For both Buddhists and Christians, evil spirits act upon the individual will, making people lose control of their thoughts and actions. Consider the Buddhist woman Ms. Hou, whose friend Sandy was possessed by suicidal thoughts. Ms. Hou explained these as evil spirits running rampant because of Sandy’s inability to temper and ward off negative thoughts. In traditional religion, evil spirits are like spiritual gangsters who extort human beings. However, in evangelical Christianity and Buddhism evil spirits spread malevolence by attacking the human will—by tempting humans. Sin comes from within. Rather than a failure to fulfill one’s duty, as offense is framed in Confucian moral tradition, sin is the failure to control the self— one’s thoughts and desires. Because the individual is subject to attacks from spiritually evil forces, the faithful must keep a close watch over their hearts. Prayer—Submitting Thoughts and Desires to God It is not easy to “make Christ the lord of one’s life.” It demands vigilance, faith, and, above all, practice. Like the Buddhist respondents who are working against the habits of a lifetime, Christians are working against their self-centered sinful natures. On top of that, they are constantly tempted by invisible evil forces. For Buddhists and Christians alike, the quest for religious salvation is not a natural endeavor, but requires the transformation of the individual through religious discipline. Having defined the social world as antithetical to the kingdom of God, Christians no longer seek moral perfection through the external observance of custom and filial obligations, the axis of Confucian moral tradition. Rather than adapting to the world, they seek to transcend it. Evangelical Christians’ source of guidance comes from God and not the self. In their eyes, the purpose of religious practice is to harness the self and transform it into the godly self such that God’s desires become one’s own desires and God’s thoughts become one’s own thoughts. I return to Deacon Chu’s late-night meeting as an example of religious practice as discipline. What stopped him and his friends from sliding further down the slippery slope of sin was that they started to pray. In his words, they “overcame” the temptation to sin by turning their thoughts toward God, in effect reinstating God’s sovereignty, which had been dethroned by their own ambitions. Prayer is a daily religious practice for all of the Christians I interviewed. Most had regular times for prayer, such as before meals and before going

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to bed. These prayers could be collective or individual, silent or spoken. Because most Christians at Grace Church treat prayer as a conversation with God, their prayers tended to be spontaneous and informal, except for the Lord’s Prayer, which members recited at some Sunday services. Christians claim that the purpose of their prayer is not self-gain, but self-transformation. For example, people will frequently pray: “help us to apply the Bible lesson to our lives,” “help us to do your will,” or “help us to live like Jesus.” Through the practice of prayer Christians remind themselves of God’s lordship in their lives and their dependence upon God. Prayer is not merely conversation with God, but an act of submission to God. And as prayer becomes habit, so, too, does the act of submitting oneself to God. Most Christians claim that rather than limiting prayer to specific times, they silently pray throughout the day. On the one hand, Christians use the language of God’s sovereignty and human submission to describe their relationship with Christ. Yet they also use the more egalitarian language of friendship and describe God or Jesus as a personal confidante. As such, God is less of a distant king than a close and caring friend. Christians regard prayer as “conversation” or “discussion” with a close friend, albeit a friend who is the lord of the universe. Rather than describe prayer as “submitting,” many describe prayer as “sharing” with a friend. And there is nothing that one can keep from a best friend liked Jesus. Christians told me that they talk to God all the time, sharing their troubles and joys and their needs and desires. Christians turn to prayer for guidance from trivial to important things. But unlike sharing with a friend, sharing with God is different. Because of who God is, implicit in “sharing” is “submitting.” Consider the following passage regarding “bad” thoughts from a popular book among Grace members: “Don’t resent it. Welcome each thought as an opportunity to test our faith. Learn to turn thoughts into discussions with God. The real temptation is not the wrong thought, but the desire to determine which thoughts we will share with God; the desire to think independently from God.” To share one’s thoughts with God means to open one’s thoughts to God’s guidance and will. Talking with God is not a benign exchange of thoughts with an equal. Conversation with God is ultimately about control, bringing one’s life under God’s control. As a “friend,” God is hardly an overbearing tyrant who exercises absolute authority over humanity. Notice that according to the passage just quoted, the root problem of sin is not the wrong thought, but the wrong desire. The wrong thought is merely a manifestation of the wrong desire. Ultimately making Christ the lord of one’s life means making him lord of one’s desires. God is not satisfied with merely a conversion in one’s behavior. One must have a

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conversion in one’s heart. For this reason, obedience to God can never be coerced. Obedience and submission must be acts of the will. One must, in the end, want God’s control. In this light, prayer is the expression of one’s desire for God’s control. Thus, it is not uncommon for Christians to pray for God to move their desire. For example, they will frequently pray, “touch our hearts, Lord” or “move our hearts, Lord.” Sunday services always begin with congregational singing, or “singspiration.” As Pastor Chang told me, the songs open one’s heart to God’s teaching. Christians can resist or disagree with God if they wish. Consider the following description of one woman’s conversation, or rather “argument,” with God and how she struggles to resist God’s will: “Sometimes God will ask me to do something and I’ll argue with God. I frequently argue with God and ask, ‘must I really do this?’ And after I do what he says I’ll say, ‘See I did it. You can’t ask anything more from me.’ I’ll argue with God again and but then I’ll be touched again by him and I’ll do it and I’ll learn a lot.” She claims that she resists and argues with God during prayer. What makes her change, however, is that she is “touched” by God. It is not the force of duty or obligation that makes her obey God, but the force of her own desire. Here are the roots of the feelings of liberation that many Taiwanese immigrants remembered of their conversions: Christian doctrine and practice construe desire, rebellion, and obedience as coming from within each person’s heart. Scripture—Being Armed with the Sword “Why do good Christians go astray?” the speaker rhetorically asked the congregation at Grace Church’s summer retreat. “Because they have an unsteady and weak foundation in the Word of God,” he answered. The proof was there for all to see in Ephesians 6:17: “And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.” Members of the congregation diligently followed along with him, finding the passage in their own well-worn “swords.” Some underlined the passage, others wrote it down in the “sermon notes,” section of the retreat program. To evangelical Christians, the Bible is God’s word, the ultimate authority and moral guide. Although evangelicals at Grace do not necessarily read the Bible literally, it is always the first source they consult for guidance on spiritual or practical problems. For example, when arguing that women have authority to preach, one speaker pointed to the story in Acts 18 and Romans 16 of Priscilla, a woman leader in the early Christian

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church, as biblical evidence.17 In a particularly comical exchange during a family Bible study of a passage in the gospel of John, where Jesus turns water into wine, one child argued that he should also be able to drink wine because Jesus drank wine. Grace Church encourages members to set aside time every day for “personal devotions,” time spent praying and reading scripture. In order to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Christians need to spend time “getting to know” Jesus by studying the Bible and talking to him in prayer. The church distributes devotional guides and Christian literature to facilitate members’ personal devotions. With an entry for each day of the year, these typically include passages from the Bible and reflection questions. The reflection questions ask readers to examine their own lives in relation to the scriptural lesson and apply the lesson to their lives. Christians read scriptures as an instructional guide to living, and they measure their own lives against the teachings in the Bible. This is why Mr. Lu says that “Christianity is a way of life.” In striving to live out God’s will, he believes Christians rely on prayer and scripture for guidance. Grace members are perhaps less diligent in studying the Bible than the pastor would like them to be. Most of them studied scriptures at weekly church gatherings like Bible studies, Sunday school, and Sunday services. But few read the Bible on a daily basis alone. Many admitted, ashamed, that they no longer read the Bible every day the way they did when they first converted. But even if Grace Church members do not read the Bible every day, they are constantly exposed to it. They read Christian literature regularly, including the monthly church newsletter, which includes biblical teachings. Instead of reading the Bible for their personal devotions, many listen to sermons on tape on their way to work or while doing household chores. In members’ homes, Bible verses decorate wall hangings, clocks, tapestries, aprons, towels, and welcome mats. I have also seen members wearing tee shirts, jackets, and ties imprinted with Bible verses. To the outsider these scriptural references may seem excessive. However, to these Christians who strive to live “in the world but not of the world,” the Bible is a “sword,” a weapon to defend themselves against ungodly temptations and evils. In an American society with too much freedom, they believe the Bible becomes the source for moral direction and moral authority. As immigrants are separated from traditional sources of moral authority, the Bible now steps in. The Bible sets a standard for Christians to measure their behavior against. For example, one respondent said, “We have the Bible and it’s 17

Grace Church recognizes women as pastors and leaders in the church.

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all in there. I feel like there’s a standard or criterion out there and I can personally evaluate my behavior according to it. The Bible gives you something that you can compare yourself against. It tells me if what I’m doing is right or wrong.” Christians do not read the Bible as some remote text, but as a practical guide for application in daily life. Implicit in the process of reading the Bible is the practice of self-examination. Christians are supposed to use the Bible as a mirror to examine their own lives for areas of weakness and sin, and then to apply its teaching to change their lives. A popular devotional among Grace members instructs Christians to check their thoughts and behavior against the Bible in the following way: 1. Expose each thought to God’s word; 2. Claim the specific principles and promises of God’s word; and 3. Express your response to each wrong thought with specific scripture. One man told me, “I try to read the Bible by understanding it and through it I can try to follow it and try to change myself.” For him, as for many others, the Bible is a guide for self-transformation. Reading and reciting scriptures, members said, are also effective methods to resist temptations and control one’s thoughts and desires. In Sunday school classes, members memorize Bible verses. The Sunday school instructor told the students to quote the scriptures when they felt temptations or negative thoughts arising. In interviews, several told me that when they started to feel negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, or impatience, they would pray and read the Bible to calm themselves down and prevent themselves from acting out of these feelings. One respondent displays a framed tapestry reading, “As for my house and me, we serve the Lord,” at the entrance of her house as a reminder that God controls her. The Bible’s status as a source of moral direction is particularly useful for immigrant parents, who feel their authority being challenged in American society. Immigrant parents quickly learn that the disciplinary tactics they used in Taiwan do not work on children here (Chen 2006). Immigrants frequently complain that children in the United States lack respect for elders and that they are disobedient in comparison to children in Taiwan. All agree that the old tactics of simply telling their children “no” are not effective. No longer the absolute authority, Christian immigrant parents rely upon the authority of the Bible to justify their teachings. It solves the problem of raising children in a society with “too much liberty”: Actually we have a lot more liberty here [in the United States]. We have a lot

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more human rights compared to Taiwan. So we have these advantages here. But on the other hand, because of too much liberty some of the behaviors they don’t allow in Taiwan happen here and are very popular. So parents start to worry about kids going in the wrong direction. Like if they get addicted to drugs or become a punk, or they become sexually involved. What can you do? I’ve already talked to a lot of parents, and some who have children who are older than mine. They say you just cannot control your children because of all the liberties and human rights. Even your son, you must treat him like a friend. You cannot control his behavior. You can suggest but what can you do? The best that you can do is give them the right religion. Teach them the Bible. Maybe they’ll argue against you but they can’t argue against God.

The biblical teaching to obey one’s parents is a favorite among immigrant parents because it reinstates the authority that they feel that they have lost in the United States.18 Immigrant Christians go to the Bible for guidance in a society of overwhelming options, choices, and freedoms. For example, one man who was deciding whether or not to move from Los Angeles first prayed, then went to the Bible and randomly opened it to a passage that told him to stay. He explained that this was God’s will because his family and business have since prospered, and he has also brought several friends to Christ. Because the Bible does not provide specific solutions to many of the mundane questions that immigrants and others ask (such as, “Should I enroll my child in private school?” or “Should I change jobs?” or “Should I run for church deacon?”), praying and consulting scriptures provide procedures for making decisions, rather than specific answers. One man described how he and his wife arrive at joint decisions on difficult issues: “I’ll insist that things must be done my way and she wants it to be done another way. Maybe my way is not right, but I’ll still insist that my way is right and she’s wrong. Before we didn’t put it on the table and discuss which way is right. But after our baptism we consult the Bible and pray and the Holy Spirit guides us. This is really important. That’s how I’ve changed a lot.” When I asked Christians how they know what is right, they usually gave one of two answers: because it is in the Bible and because it feels right. In the absence of biblical proof, an individual’s personal conviction ultimately determines what is God’s will. But discerning God’s will is always a tricky thing. How does one know whether that “feeling” is simply one’s own self-interest or truly the will of God? The practices of discernment, prayer, and consulting scripture give Christians confidence in 18 At the same time, immigrants have told me how their children have quoted scripture back to them to justify their disobedience.

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their convictions, and that in fact they are guided by the Holy Spirit. The acts of praying and consulting the Bible symbolize the individual’s desire for God’s guidance in their lives. In the act of “submitting” their decisions to God, they build the confidence that their desires are God-willed. For example, a speaker publicaly shared his own story about deciding whether to marry his girlfriend at the time. After several weeks of prayer and studying scriptures, he was convinced that God did not want him to marry this woman. As he immersed himself in seeking God’s will, it became apparent to him that his relationship with his girlfriend was not enhancing his relationship with God, and in fact at times was harming it. Spending the time in prayer and with scripture reminded him of his priority to make Christ the lord of his life. If marrying this woman made him happy but detracted from his relationship with God, their marriage could surely not be God’s will. God did not speak to him through a sign or through an explicit Bible verse. As he told it, God spoke to him through his desires, through “convicting” his heart. The practices of prayer and studying scripture helped him to order his desires reminding him that his ultimate desire was to follow God. In the act of submitting themselves to God, Christian immigrants practice techniques of moral self-governance. Christians check their behaviors, thoughts, and intentions through the practices of prayer and consulting scripture. The authority of the Bible gives Christians clear guidelines to navigate through morally uncertain times. By submitting every facet of their lives to Christ, evangelical Christians are saved from their sinful natures.

MORALITY, SELF, AND COMMUNITY If the salvation ethic has such far-reaching effects on moral self-disciplines, how does it shape the formation of Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church as moral communities? Religious practices ultimately have relational or collective ends. The purpose of Buddhist self-disciplinary practices is to realize the emptiness or absence of self and, concomitantly, the self’s cosmic interconnectedness with all sentient beings. And among evangelical Christians, disciplinary submission is ultimately an expression of love of God and others, as exemplified in the golden rules “Love the lord your God with your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The different ways Buddhists and evangelical Christians in my study practice the social dimensions of morality creates distinct kinds of community. Religious conversion reconfigures the individual’s moral universe. Buddhism and Christianity can universalize moral obligations to include

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those outside of particularistic groupings based on kinship, ethnicity, or nationhood, in part by devaluing such groupings as the basis of identification and obligation. Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church, however, cultivated different kinds of moral communities and networks. Buddhist teachings and practices at Dharma Light cultivated a sense of obligation to everybody, but then nobody in particular. At Dharma Light Temple, Buddhism universalizes moral obligations but at the cost of weakened ingroup moral bonds. In the case of Grace Church, evangelical Christianity universalizes, but then reparticularizes the moral universe, as it redirects moral obligations to the particular community of the church. Dharma Light Temple and other Chinese Buddhist organizations frequently encourage their members to practice universal compassion, especially a compassion that extends beyond the family. The Buddhist doctrine of “interdependent arising” teaches that all phenomena arise in complete dependence with other phenomena. Everything is related and nothing exists independently of other things. When Buddhists aspire to emptiness, it is not a void, as the name may suggest, but a consciousness of the interconnectedness of all sentient beings that can be achieved only when one recognizes the “emptiness” or illusion of a separate self/selfnature. Buddhism universalizes the moral responsibility of the individual Buddhist beyond the “empty” categories of kin, ethnicity, and nation.19 Instead, Buddhists realize their interdependence and therefore responsibility to all sentient beings. For example, a pamphlet distributed at a local Taiwanese Buddhist temple instructs devotees: “When helping others, we should think about benefiting the entire society or even the world instead of limiting our love to just the ones we love. Expanding the boundaries of our care for others makes our lives more meaningful, full of freedom and happiness.” Buddhist practices of self-discipline are not ends in themselves, but the means or techniques of cultivating the Buddha-mind—consciousness of codependent existence with all sentient beings. Buddhists demonstrate their moral interdependence to all beings through the practice of compas19 In particular, Chinese Buddhism frequently expresses that a universal compassion is one that extends beyond the family. A temple publication shared the following story as an example of universal compassion. After attaining enlightenment, the Buddha returned to his hometown and saw his wife, whom he had left several years ago for his spiritual quest. He said to her, “Yasaodhara, I have to ask for your forgiveness for what I did to you. Though my leaving home to cultivate was not fair to you, I am most true to all sentient beings.” In a similar spirit, the Dharma master Cheng Yen, Taiwan’s most-respected Buddhist leader and founder of Tzu Chi/Buddhist Compassion Relief Foundation, demonstrates the universalizing tendency of Buddhism when she claims that social compassion is the extension of love for one’s family to all society and living creatures (from Ten Thousand Lotus Blossoms of the Heart).

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sion, perhaps the highest of Buddhist virtues. Compassion is an exercise in self-lessness, for it forces individuals to forget about the self, and is a reminder of the interconnectedness to all beings. A common Buddhist saying is “cultivate our kindness without conditions, and ground our compassion on oneness.” Concretely Buddhist respondents practiced compassion through everyday acts of kindness. In a Dharma Light Temple publication, the abbott encouraged readers to practice compassion through simple acts. “When you meet someone on the road, give the person a nod or a smile,” he wrote. “This is giving. Even simple gestures like saying ‘good morning,’ or ‘how are you?’ are giving.” One respondent told me she practiced compassion by being patient with her daughter’s temper tantrums. Another told me that she practices compassion by chanting Omitopho whenever she sees a dead animal on the road. After chanting sutras, Buddhists customarily transfer whatever merit their actions have gained to all sentient beings. Buddhists also practice compassion through Buddhist-organized charity programs. Many Taiwanese Buddhist organizations devote a great deal of their moral energies to “social compassion” or public charity, far more than their evangelical coethnics (Chen 2002). In the last thirty years, Buddhist charitable organizations have exploded onto the Taiwanese religious scene (Weller 2000). The most prominent of these, the Taiwanese Buddhist charitable organization Tzu Chi is a model for a Buddhism that is actively engaged in the world through disaster relief, health care services, and environmental conservation. Many Taiwanese Buddhist organizations have followed suit and now channel their resources toward social compassion. For example, Dharma Light Temple has declared that one of its main purposes is to serve the public, and emphasizes social service charity work. However, Dharma Light Temple and other Taiwanese Buddhist organizations who engage in social compassion are notably large and wealthy organizations that are not necessarily representative of the variety of immigrant Buddhist temples in the United States. Small Chinese Buddhist temples in Southern California do not sponsor such social compassion projects to the larger community, nor do other small immigrant Buddhist temples (Cadge 2005; Guest 2003; Kwon 2003; Suh 2004). Dharma Light Temple casts a wide moral net and tends to direct its moral energies to everyone, but no one in particular. This conceptualization enlarges the universe of moral obligation to all sentient beings, but at the cost of creating a concrete and tangible moral community at the temple. For example, Dharma Light sponsors several charitable programs such as an antidrug campaign, international disaster relief efforts, and prison visitations to “improve the conditions of our communities.” Their definition of “community” is highly inclusive and broadly defined. The

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antidrug campaign is not directed toward middle-class Taiwanese immigrants and their children. Disaster relief has been aimed at anonymous victims of natural disasters, such as those ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Thus, Dharma Light’s moral practices of compassion are diffused and externalized, cultivating interconnectedness with an anonymous sea of sentient beings, rather than a bounded group of people. Furthermore, the sense of temple community is much more loose and fluid than at Grace Church. Much as they did in Taiwan, members go to temple irregularly and often attend multiple temples. (Admittedly, this may be particular to Taiwanese in Southern California, who have an unusual range of Chinese Buddhist options.) Members speak of feeling indebted to the monastics, but not to other members of the temple. Christianity, too, calls the moral individual to selfless actions of love. Christianity claims that all persons share in a common humanity as created beings of God. However, rather than directing their moral energies to “all sentient beings” as Buddhists do, Taiwanese American Christians at Grace Church direct them toward their “brothers and sisters in Christ” within their church community. In comparison to Dharma Light Temple, Grace Church is far less engaged in serving the community outside the church walls. Instead, the church tries to instill in its members a strong sense of moral responsibility, obligation, and accountability to the church community. As we saw in chapter 2, evangelical Christians use a vocabulary of kinship to describe their relations with others in the church. Members describe the church as family and the church explicitly cultivates familial relations among the members. For example, members address each other as “sister so-and-so” and “brother so-and-so.” Unlike at Dharma Light Temple, where volunteers wear uniforms that distinguish them from other devotees, at Grace Church everyone is considered a volunteer, indistinguishable from one another. Studies of other evangelical Christians suggest that they also tend to think of church as family and direct their moral energies to those within the church rather than those outside of the church (Menjivar 2003; Putnam 2000; Smith 1998). The following examples from a pastoral prayer illustrate how moral obligation underlies the culture of the church. During his lengthy prayer that opened a Sunday service, the pastor prayed for a family in the church whose daughter died in a recent drunk driving accident. He prayed that God would forgive the church, because its failure to reach out to this young woman led to her destructive use of alcohol. The pastor also thanked God for a $50,000 donation that a random non-Christian gave to the church building campaign. The pastor used this generous donation to exhort the congregation. If a non-Christian could be so generous to the church, surely Christians should be even more giving. The pastor used

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both of these examples to appeal to the moral responsibility of the church members to the church. His strong message urging members to commit more to the exclusive community of the church contrasts with Buddhist messages that smiling to strangers and donating to distant victims of natural disasters are ways to cultivate moral virtue. The moral environment of the church is created by institutionalized spaces of shared intimacy, such as small faith sharing groups, prayer chains, and home visitations. In these spaces, people are expected to share their personal struggles, creating networks of accountability. For example, when church members visited the home of an elderly couple, they asked the couple what they needed prayer for. The wife tearfully revealed that her son (not a church member) rarely visited and she felt very lonely. No one in the home visitation group was close to this woman, and yet she shared a very personal struggle with them. In the context of a structured faith sharing activity she became disarmingly open with mere acquaintances, albeit acquaintances she calls brother and sister. Members of the temple also make “home visits,” but these are to people in nursing homes and prisons, not members of their temple. Buddhists also have smaller sutra study or meditation groups where lay members may meet in homes. However, these meetings do not have structured moments for deep sharing. Furthermore, Buddhists have told me that these meetings are for study and practice, not socializing. Chinese Christian churches also reach out beyond the church community, but they demonstrate their moral responsibility to society through evangelization, by bringing others into their fold (Chen 2002; Yang 1999a; Zhang 2006). For example, Grace Church regularly sponsors mission trips to nearby Mexico and to the motherland Taiwan. The church also encourages its members to evangelize to unsaved friends and family members by inviting them to church. While conversion to Christianity can be universalizing because it transcends particular identities and obligations based on kinship, in the case of Grace Church, it reparticularizes by redirecting moral energies into the exclusive community of the church. This creates dense and tightly-bound networks of reciprocity, which are conducive toward community-building. In the case of Dharma Light Temple, Buddhism’s moral vision to benefit all sentient beings is truly universalizing, as it cultivates a sense of moral responsibility to everyone. Yet because the temple encourages Buddhists to direct their compassion to all beings, their moral actions do not result in strong communities of reciprocity within the temple. Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church are not representative of all Buddhist and Christian traditions and communities, but they offer instructive examples of how salvation ethics influence the formation of moral communities. Dharma Light Temple is distinctive because of its

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financial resources and large sangha. Like other large and wealthy Chinese Buddhist organizations, it has the resources to practice a widespread social compassion. As I have discussed, few smaller temples have either the finances or sangha to sustain such projects. Small temples may also be able to cultivate a stronger sense of moral community than Dharma Light Temple. This seems to be the case in small Thai American temples (Cadge 2005; Numrich 1996). However, my Buddhist respondents, many of whom belonged to small temples in addition to Dharma Light Temple, insisted that the temple was not a significant source of friendship. It is possible that because of the abundance of Taiwanese/ Chinese social, religious, and recreational outlets in the Southern California area, Taiwanese American Buddhists are less likely to rely on one temple as their source of ethnic community, as others who live among fewer Chinese. Grace Church’s community is shaped by a larger evangelical Christian tradition that emphasizes personal reform and social transformation through personal evangelism (Smith 1998). Based on the findings of other scholars (Abel 2006; Wang and Yang 2006; Yang 1999a; Zhang 2006), the exclusive moral community and evangelistic mission of Grace Church is representative of Chinese American churches.

CONCLUSION At the outset of this chapter I posed a seeming paradox among religious Taiwanese immigrants. Why would Mr. Tang, who claims to have so much freedom in the United States, live a life of such regimented religious discipline, whereas in Taiwan, a land of less freedom, he lived a life of such dissolute laxness? Religious practices, I argue, are techniques of moral self-discipline that replace the governing structures of Confucian tradition, community, and family that have been weakened in the morally disordering experience of immigration to the United States. In the absence of former sources of moral governance, religion creates morally disciplined selves. Religious practices in modern Chinese Buddhism and evangelical Christianity are techniques to transform the self, not actions to manipulate the favor of deities, as in popular Taiwanese religion. In locating the source of human sin or defilement within the heart and mind, Buddhism and Christianity concentrate on monitoring and regulating the individual interior. In both religions, salvation forms an untiring and ceaseless ethic to discipline every human thought, desire, and action.

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While creating modern disciplined selves, Chinese Buddhist and evangelical Christian salvation ethics may lead to different moral communities. In the case of Dharma Light Temple, the Buddhist emphasis on universal compassion directs moral actions to the cosmic community of all sentient beings. The evangelical Christians at Grace Church direct Christian love to their brothers and sisters in Christ within the exclusive boundaries of the church. In my study, Buddhists possess a diffused sense of community with all, whereas evangelical Christians create exclusive, reciprocated, and tightly knit moral communities.

Conclusion Becoming Americans FROM MIGRANTS TO PILGRIMS

The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. —Bible verse printed on the program celebrating 30th anniversary of Grace Evangelical Church1 With the joint efforts of monastics and devotees to spread the Dharma, let the seeds of Buddhism grow, blossom, and bear fruit in the West. —From Dharma Light Temple’s mission statement

“WAS IMMIGRATING to the United States worth it?” I ask Mr. Hou, the Christian convert whose story opened chapter 2. “Life is harder for me here,” he answers. “I would be better off in Taiwan I think. But here I found God.” Mr. Tang, a Buddhist, agrees. Life is more full and fun in Taiwan with his friends and endless social activities. But, he tells me, he would not have been “awakened” had he not come to the United States. Mr. Hou, Mr. Tang, and the others I have written about in this book, are accidental pilgrims. Like other Taiwanese immigrants, they left home to seek economic and educational opportunities, political security, and a better future for their children in the United States. They immigrated seeking security in this world, but inadvertently became seekers of salvation from this world. They are migrants who became pilgrims along the way. The experience of migration permeates the central themes of Buddhism and Christianity. Migration embodies the Christian theme of resurrection—dying to one life and resurrecting to a new life. Immigrants are all too familiar with the Buddhist truth of impermanence. Everything changes. Nothing is constant. It is no coincidence that religions deliberately induce the experience of migration through the religious practice of pilgrimage. Like migrants, pilgrims leave the comfort and familiarity of home. Pilgrims journey to a sacred place to be transformed. They uproot themselves to be more firmly rooted in the truth. To migrate, or to leave home, is a practice of religious discipline reserved for only the most devout in Buddhist and Christian traditions. In 1

Genesis 12:1.

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Chinese, the expression chu jia, or becoming a monastic, literally means “leaving home.” Monastics leave home and family to enter a monastery, embrace a new family and identity. They transform themselves into new persons. In the Gospels, Christ tells his disciples that they must renounce themselves to follow him.2 To prove his discipleship to Christ, the Apostle Peter declares, “Behold, we have left our homes and followed you” (Luke 18:28). Migration, like monasticism, pilgrimage, or any act of religious renunciation, removes the familiar and comfortable in order to remake anew. This book argues that religion offers new moral vocabularies, institutional structures, and ethical traditions to Taiwanese immigrants, people in the process of becoming Americans. Migration to the United States— the experience of displacement and finding one’s place in a foreign country—draws religious questions to the forefront and opens people to change. Importantly I emphasize religion’s transformative capacity rather than the conservative, or preservationist tendencies that have been emphasized in much of the literature on religion, ethnicity, and immigration. Religion often takes on pronounced significance for immigrants to the United States. The evidence from Grace Church and Dharma Light Temple suggests that this is true of converts to Christianity, as well as to Buddhists, who are rediscovering—and reinventing—their inherited religious tradition in the United States. These religious experiences have profound consequences for how immigrants create new communities, identities, moral traditions, and selfhood in the United States. To conclude, I review the argument I have set forth in this book—that religion helps transform Taiwanese immigrants into Americans—and situate it in the context of the religious experiences of other contemporary immigrants. I then discuss Taiwanese immigrant religious experience in light of larger patterns in American religion. The religious experiences of Taiwanese immigrants illustrate enduring and distinctive themes in American religious experience. Immigrants turn to religion to solve problems of identity, selfhood, community, and morality. And they do so in ways that in general reflect how Americans practice religion.

TAIWANESE IMMIGRANT RELIGION AS IMMIGRANT RELIGION In the midst of transition, religions offer immigrants concrete institutional structures, practices, narratives, and ethics with which they can recon2 “And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

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struct self and community. The case of Taiwanese converting to Christianity illustrates most vividly how religion reconstructs new communities. As one historian of immigrant religion writes, religious revivalism “binds individuals to new communities of belief and action” (Smith, 1978: 1179). Far from their families and former networks of support, Taiwanese immigrants turn to Christianity for a sense of belonging and community. The church’s language of kinship and its practices of intentional intimacy spin a new web around immigrants’ lives, woven from strands of moral obligation and interdependence. Institutional structures like Sunday service, Bible studies, and social events keep immigrants in constant contact. As the community of the church in the United States takes on many of the functions that kin would perform in Taiwan, Christian traditions of meaning-making replace some Taiwanese traditions. Traditions of meaning making, I argue, are grounded in living communities. Taiwanese immigrants are not the only ones reconstructing communities through conversion to evangelical Christianity. With the prominent exceptions of Vietamese and Indians, evangelical Christianity is gaining converts among many immigrant groups, including Koreans (Min 2005), Haitians (Richman 2005), Cambodians (Douglas 2005), Mexicans (Leo´n 1998), and Chinese (Guest 2003; Yang 1999a; Yang and Tamney 2006). For each of these groups, the church is a repository of social capital that immigrants draw on during times of transition. What attracts many immigrant groups to Protestant Christianity is that Protestant churches create ethnic communities of support—what immigrants desire most—and they often do it better than their inherited religions do. For example, Korean American churches tend to be more responsive to the social needs of immigrants than Buddhist temples (Kwon 2003; Suh 2004). Cecilia Menjivar (2003) observes that among Salvadoran immigrants, evangelical Christian churches emphasize tight-knit, intimate congregational relations more than Catholic churches do. Mexican American evangelicals who were once Catholics are drawn to the sense of belonging they find in the Protestant church community (Leo´n 1998). Taiwanese immigrants with no or few family members in the vicinity, those who need community most, are the most responsive to Christianity in the United States. And among immigrants from a Protestant heritage, the church’s capacity to create community seems to intensify religious commitment (Warner 2001). Taiwanese Buddhists seem to mirror the religious experiences of earlier European immigrants who intensify their religious commitments in the United States. Reflecting on immigrant religious zeal in the early twentieth century, Will Herberg writes, “What could be taken for granted at home had zealously to be fought for here” (1960, 19). Herberg and other scholars interpret the intensification of religion in the

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United States as an attempt to preserve, reinvent and resurrect homeland traditions that are threatened in a religiously and ethnically diverse American society. This seems to be the case among many immigrant groups, both historically and presently. But most Taiwanese immigrants had already rejected Taiwanese popular religion before they even left Taiwan. Instead, these educated immigrants had adopted a secular scientific worldview, which was perhaps more conducive to assimilation and upward mobility in American society than Buddhism. They might have regarded Taiwanese religion, including Buddhism, as part of their cultural heritage, but as an embarrassing one that they had no intention of integrating into their modern American lives. In short, what was “taken for granted” was also class-specific, gendered, and often contested at home, and these home-country dynamics shaped what immigrants fought for here. Indeed, working-class Chinese—nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants and more recent Chinese from China, Southeast Asia or Hong Kong—have maintained their popular religion temples and devotions in the United States (Guest 2003; Yang 2002a). Although Buddhism may be a part of their collective Taiwanese cultural heritage, the Buddhism that Taiwanese immigrants practice now is new, and not a religious tradition continued from Taiwan. Modern Chinese Buddhism is viable and attractive to educated, science-trained Taiwanese immigrants because it has become a modern religion, not because it is a way to preserve ethnic tradition, as Herberg and other scholars might claim. There is, however, an ethnic impulse behind Taiwanese immigrants attraction to Buddhism. Taiwanese Buddhists use their religion to differentiate themselves from their Christian coethnics, and not other Christians. Taiwanese immigrants “awaken” to Buddhism when they discover that Buddhism means something different in the Taiwanese American community, where evangelical Christians are a constant, aggressive presence. Their personal, frequent, and oppositional encounters with Christian coethnics, (not the generally more tolerant Euro-Americans), compel them to reconsider the Buddhist religion: what is it and how they relate to it. Individual Buddhists interpret and define their religion in the United States against the oppositional foil of Taiwanese American Christianity. These Western-educated, scientifically oriented Buddhists defend their religious choice on the basis of science and Western values, not ethnic tradition. Indeed, they belive that their Buddhism is more Western, scientific, and modern than Christianity. The example of Taiwanese Buddhists and Christians in Southern California illustrates how immigrants negotiate their new identities within immigrant communities whose religious, ethnic, and class compositions are very different from the homeland. Importantly they define them-

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selves against others within the ethnic community, at least as much as they define themselves against those outside of the ethnic community. For example, historically specific migratory push-pull factors drew United States bound migrants from a predominantly educated, middleclass and urban Taiwanese population. Christians, although still a minority, were disproportionately represented among the early waves of Taiwanese immigrants. Christian networks and institutions were established early and became key institutions within the immigrant community, drawing later immigrants in. Non-Christian Taiwanese immigrants assimilate to, and negotiate their identities within, a Taiwanese American community with a significant evangelical Christian presence—a reality very different from Taiwan. We see parallels to the Taiwanese American case most vividly among Korean Americas. Christians comprise 89 percent of the Korean American population (Lien and Carnes 2004). Similar to the Taiwanese case, Korean Christians are disproportionately represented among the urban and educated who migrate to the United States (Kim et al. 2001). Furthermore, many Korean Americans convert to Protestant Christianity in the United States. Korean American churches are important nodes for social and economic ethnic networks. As a result, Korean American Buddhists feel marginalized within the ethnic community. A large part of their Buddhist self-discourse and self-perception is shaped by their status as the Other against the majority of Korean American Christians (Suh 2004). The new religious pluralism in immigrant communities does not always result in polarization. In contrast to Taiwanese and Korean immigrants (Kwon 2003), Cambodian Americans seamlessly integrate their new evangelical Christian beliefs and practices with their Buddhist Khmer traditions (Douglas 2003, 2005). Thomas J. Douglas, writes, “There is an emerging identity among Cambodians in the United States where being a Buddhist-Christian or Christian-Buddhist is part of the identity of being a Cambodian American” (2003, 174). Among Indian Americans, the numerical and cultural dominance of upper-middle-class and upper-caste Hindus in the United States, makes the Indian American community less religiously diverse than in India (Gupta 2003). NonHindu Indian Americans, Himanee Gupta argues, must cooperate with the Hindu majority to make sense of their own religion and ethnic identities in the United States. Each of these cases shows how shifts within the religious demography of diaspora communities shape the negotiation of religious and ethnic identities. The example of Taiwanese immigrants becoming Christians and Buddhists in the United States illustrates how primal needs and practical concerns animate religious choices. Immigrants make religious decisions in the context of their everyday struggles to find community, belonging, and

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identity in the United States. But we miss something if we focus only on the instrumental aspects of immigrant religion, or treat it as a replacement for what has been lost in migration. Quite often, instrumental motivations pull people into communities of action and belief that end up transforming them in profound and enduring ways. The institutionalized narratives, practices, symbols, and rituals—all pointing to an otherworldly reality—powerfully shape their lives in this world. On a collective level, this is evident in how Grace Church becomes an extended kin group for Christians, and in how Buddhism becomes a meaningful social identity for Buddhists in the United States. On an individual level, otherworldly notions of selfhood and salvation can radically devalue and challenge existing traditions that define, locate, and discipline the self. We see glimpses of this when Taiwanese immigrants use Buddhist and Christian ideas of a socially transcendent authentic self to reconstruct gendered selves in this world. Women and men have different experiences, but for both, the experiences call into question former expectations that now seem unduly burdensome. Women’s experiences of increased autonomy and independence in the United States challenge the traditional kindefined womanly self. They use Buddhist and Christian themes of dualism to reject the traditional kin-centered self, and to craft a new, religiously defined “authentic self.” Men’s struggles with racism, language, and social skills in the workplace challenge their former career-centered selves. Men, too, use religious themes of dualism to reject a career-defined self for a “true self” defined by religion. Otherworldly definitions of selfhood influence how Taiwanese immigrants situate themselves in this world. Both men and women reprioritize their lives around the spiritual quest. Women privilege religious commitments over some kinship duties, often causing tension within the family. Men pour themselves into religious cultivation while downplaying career achievements. Christian men are particularly committed to church service. These transformations are “tempered transformations,” as men and women continue to negotiate worldly and otherworldly commitments in their daily lives. We see this theme of religion remaking the self in other immigrant religious experiences. Suh (2004) finds that Buddhist Korean immigrant women use Buddhist canonical language to reinterpret and transform lives once burdened by suffering and shame. The Christian church offers Korean American (Shin and Park 1988) and Indian men (George 1998) an alternative space to build self-esteem apart from American society where their skills and race are devalued. Similar to the immigrant churches, black churches have historically offered an institutional space and theological narrative for African Americans to construct selves that transcend their marginalization in American society (Best 2005; Higgibotham 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; McRoberts 2003). Religion’s

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otherworldly promise often draws the devotion of those who experience the fallenness and the illusions of this world most acutely. In their seminal article on immigrant religion, Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh (2001a) claim that orthodoxy is one of the defining features of contemporary immigrant religion in the United States. Their description of “immigrant orthodoxy” is similar to Marcus Hansen’s (1940) characterization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European immigrant religion as “immigrant Puritanism.” Both orthodoxy and Puritanism suggest the return to a faith that is pure and uncompromised. More often than not, orthodoxy in diaspora requires more personal discipline, rigor, and self-sacrifice than religion in the homeland. Explaining the European immigrant’s propensity toward Puritanism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marcus Hansen explains: “In the Old World a person was likely to lead a respectable life because of the restraints of family and tradition. But in the New World these restraints were gone. No one knew him; life was harder; and the former pleasures were not available. Moral standards had been an outward prop, not an inner support, and now the prop was gone” (1940, 102). Hansen describes what I have called the “morally disordering” experience of migration. Immigrants past and present continue to perceive immigration to the United States as a morally pernicious activity. Letters from nineteenth-century European immigrants implored homeland clergy to come to the United States and restore moral order in their communities (Hansen 1940). Today Catholic churches in Mexico perform purification rituals to cleanse migrants of impurities contracted north of the border (Espinosa 1999). Immigrant parents of all backgrounds worry about the immoral influence of American culture on their children (Chen 2006; Zhou and Bankston 1998; Waters 1999). Americans also understand the moral danger that migration, whether internal or international, poses. The late nineteenth-century moral reform movements were a response to the perceived threat of single men migrating to the cities and escaping “traditional” moral controls (Stansell 1987). Religious discipline is one strategy to contain the moral disorder that trails in the wake of immigration. But religion does not always tighten the reins of existing moral traditions. In the case of Taiwanese immigrants, modern Chinese (or humanistic) Buddhism and evangelical Christianity introduce new means and ends of moral discipline that are very different from Confucian tradition. The otherworldly quest for salvation now defines moral ends—for Buddhists, awakening the Buddha-self; for Christians, submitting to Christ. Their religious practices are techniques of self-transformation based on regimens of discipline and self-control. Their religious ideas of a fallen humanity shift the Confucian focus of

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morality from fulfilling social obligations to transforming the interior self. Religious practices are oriented toward shaping the individual will: developing the right desires and restraining the wrong desires. Buddhist “practice” and Christian “submission” instill religious techniques of moral selfdiscipline that replace the governing structures of Confucian tradition, community, and family, structures that were weakened in the “morally disordering” experience of immigration. These religious practices affirm a modern selfhood based on internal moral restraint. Most scholars regard immigrant religion in the host country as a reinforcement of homeland traditions rather than a source of new habits, even if it is a convert religion. For example, scholars claim that Korean American Protestantism (Kim 1997; Min 2005), Chinese American Protestantism (Yang 1999a), and Buddhism (Lin 1996), and Vietnamese Americans Catholicism (Zhou and Bankston 1998) reinforce Confucian moral values and traditions. My work, instead, highlights how religions challenge and transform certain ethnic traditions among Taiwanese immigrants. Is this unique to Taiwanese American religious experience, or is it common to other groups? The conflicting impulses to hold onto and let go of motherland traditions texture immigrant lived religions. Immigrants, who are constructing new lives in the United States may pull from multiple cultural inspirations and resources. Again, it is well-documented that immigrant religions preserve ethnic traditions (e.g., Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Hurh and Kim 1990; Warner and Wittner 1998). In the United States, religious congregations are simultaneously cultural and ethnic organizations for immigrants. Immigrant religions often take on this new function in the United States to reproduce traditions from the motherland. There, the transmission of cultural and normative traditions was the responsibility of the family and wider society, but here these responsibilities fall under the purview of religion. In the absence of a larger society that shares immigrants’ traditions, the religious congregation becomes the ethnic public sphere. But religion is also a vehicle to challenge ethnic traditions and a resource to construct new ones. For example, Taiwanese immigrants find some Confucian traditions burdensome and ill-suited to their new American lives. Religion can offer powerful incentives to break traditions, and new narratives, practices, and institutional spaces to recreate. The example of women and men who use narratives of the authentic self to reject traditional gendered expectations is illustrative in this regard. New religious priorities often compete with tradition. Some Haitian immigrants convert to evangelical Christianity to escape burdensome transnational kinship obligations. The more individualistic orientation of Protestant

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Christianity resonates with their economic and social realities as immigrants in the United States (Richman 2005). Sometimes religion is a part of ethnicity, but religion also acts independently of and against ethnicity. For example, religious identities are a way to escape the confines of ethnicity. Some Hakka Chinese convert to Protestant Christianity to disassociate themselves from the social stigma associated with the Hakka ethnicity (Constable 1994). Second generation Korean American evangelicals prioritize their religious identities and values over their ethnic ones. They use evangelical Christianity to challenging traditional Korean practices and traditions (Alumkal 2001; Ecklund 2006). How radical and sustainable are these religious transformations? Christian converts in Taiwan do not reject their former religious traditions but add the Christian God to their “personal pantheon” (Jordan 1993). Studies of Cambodian American converts to evangelical Christianity suggest that they comfortably combine Buddhist Khmer and new Christian traditions and loyalties (Douglas 2005). Some of the Buddhists I interviewed claimed that they still engage in popular Taiwanese religious practices like fortune telling and astrology that are discouraged in their new orthodox Buddhism. But as far as I know, the Christian converts in my study no longer practiced ancestral veneration or other traditional Taiwanese practices prohibited by Protestant Christianity. Other scholars of Chinese American (Yang 1999a) and Korean American (Kwon 2003) converts to Protestant Christianity similarly find few traces of ancestral veneration. Converts often do not sustain their initial orthodoxy. Karen Richman (2005) reports that some Haitian immigrant converts to evangelical Christianity may lapse back into voodoo practices while others may convert again to another religion. And some Taiwanese American Buddhists and Korean American Buddhists (Suh 2004) had once been churchgoers. Clearly religious transformations are not always radical or permanent. Class and Religion among Immigrants The class background of middle-class immigrants like the Taiwanese significantly shapes their religious experiences. Demographically Taiwanese represent a new kind of immigration. They are educated, non-Christian professionals who settle in the suburbs (Wuthnow and Hackett 2003). Immigrant religions are heavily influenced by the financial resources of their American and homeland adherents. Earlier generations of working-class Chinese immigrants joined churches affiliated with American denominations. Taiwanese Christian churches are independent from American denominations because they can afford to be. Tai-

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wanese Buddhist organizations draw on Taiwanese capital to expand transnationally and build temples in the diaspora costing millions of dollars. The construction of large temples in Southern California like Hsi Lai Temple or Pao Fa Temple has helped make religious attendance a part of life for thousands of Taiwanese. Second, religions of middle-class immigrants like the Taiwanese have the resources to influence those outside the immigrant community. Because they are composed largely of middle-class people, Taiwanese immigrant congregations focus less on providing social services for its members than other immigrant congregations do (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000). Immigrant religions are “immigrant,” but they are also religions that make transcendant and universal claims. Financial resources are one factor determining how far their influence reaches. Funded by the generous contributions of its members, Dharma Light Temple and Grace Evangelical Church have their own publishing houses, radio shows, and educational institutions to “propagate the dharma” and “spread the good news” outside of the immigrant community in the United States and beyond. Influenced by evangelical models of personal evangelism and church growth, Grace Evangelical Church has planted over fifty Taiwanese churches around the world. Chinese Christians belong to resource-rich Chinese Christian parachurch organizations that spread the Christian gospel internationally. Similarly Dharma Light Temple and other Taiwanese Buddhist organizations propagate the dharma and practice Buddhist compassion on a global scale. In contrast to working-class immigrant religions, which are often preoccupied with surviving in the United States and sending remittances to the home country (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002), middleclass Chinese immigrants belong to religious networks that flex their muscles around the country and the world (Yang 2002b). Third, religion helps mediate how immigrants acculturate to American society. Taiwanese immigrant evangelicals participate in both a Chinese American evangelical subculture and an American evangelical subculture. Their “fluency” in mainstream American evangelicalism, however, depends largely on class. Educated Taiwanese immigrants have the language skills to listen to American evangelical radio stations, watch evangelical television shows, read evangelical books, and attend evangelical services. Mainstream evangelical ideas are particularly powerful in shaping Taiwanese Christian families (Chen 2006). Middle-class Taiwanese Christians are not assimilating into American families, but into evangelical families. The acculturating influence of religion on immigrants is most evident in second-generation Asian American culture (Ecklund 2005; Jeung 2005). Asian Americans have come to dominate the evangelical Christian fellowships at elite universities (Busto 1996). Evangelical Christianity ap-

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pears to be more significant in determining second-generation attitudes toward gender (Alumkal 1999; Yang 2005), ethnicity (Alumkal 2001), race (Jeung 2004) and civic participation (Eckland 2005) than ethnic or mainstream American influences. Minority religions like Buddhism have far fewer institutional and cultural resources to tap into in the United States. Most of the literature and media that Taiwanese Buddhists consume comes from Taiwan and other parts of Asia rather than the United States. Many of the Buddhists at Dharma Light Temple want to practice Chinese Buddhism and do not trust non-Chinese dharma teachers to teach this. It would appear that Buddhists are more removed from mainstream American culture. However, I argue that some minority religions are more deliberate about acculturating precisely because of their religious otherness. Affluent organizations like Dharma Light Temple who wish to spread their foreign faiths in a Christian United States will acculturate faster (Yang and Ebaugh 2001a), although this may not be the case for small temples who wish to remain ethnically exclusive. Even compared with Grace Church and other Chinese churches, Dharma Light takes great pains to look American by displaying its patriotism, supporting local non-Chinese causes, and publically defining itself in Western, modern terms. I have argued that these actions are gestures of “cultural citizenship” that minority immigrant religions like Buddhism make in order to be accepted by mainstream America (Chen 2002). IMMIGRANT RELIGION AS AMERICAN RELIGION One of the central arguments of this book is that immigrants become Americans by becoming religious. More specifically, immigrants use religious institutions, practices, and narratives to reconstruct new communities and selves in the United States. Religion is such a powerful resource for immigrants because of the distinct and particular role that religion plays in American society. The example of Taiwanese immigrant religious experiences reflects how Americans more generally, not just immigrants, use their religion. Taiwanese immigrants turn to religion to solve issues of belonging, identity, and morality because this is how Americans use their religion. Let us look at how Taiwanese immigrant religious experiences illustrate two important tensions in American religion: individual and community, and freedom and constraint. Individual and Community Religion is a vital source of belonging and community in the United States,

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as much for both recent immigrants as for descendents of the Mayflower. Here religions operate as voluntary organizations or communities of likeminded individuals. But most Taiwanese would not naturally think of turning to religion for belonging and community. Like many people from Asia, Taiwanese regard religious sites as places for religious ceremony, not communal belonging. No wonder some Taiwanese immigrants criticize Taiwanese Christian churches for functioning as “social clubs” rather than as sacred places. But this social character is hardly limited to Taiwanese Christian churches. As voluntary institutions, religions have to operate as social clubs in the United States in order to survive. Congregations need programs and activities to maintain and build their membership. This is a fact that traditionally noncongregational religions like Buddhism are quickly learning in the United States. To Americans, religious participation is a good way to meet people (and more importantly perhaps, the “right” people) to cultivate one’s emotional, spiritual, and even material well-being. Through religious associations, Americans meet good business partners, clients, friends, and spouses. At the same time that religion builds community among members from within, it is also an important way that Americans mark difference from those without. In the United States’ pluralistic religious environment, religion is a meaningful source of identity. Recent scholars have pointed to America’s religious pluralism to explain why religion is so much more vibrant in the United States than in other Western industrialized countries (Smith 1998; Warner 1994). In the United States, religion tells individuals who they are and who they are not, who belongs and who does not belong. These religious identities hold significant social stakes. As Max Weber observed about American religion, membership in certain religious congregations “is recognized as an absolute guarantee of the moral qualities of a gentleman, especially of those qualities required in business matters” (1946b, 305). Historically religious minorities like Jews and Catholics have been excluded from important sources of social and economic capital because of their religious status. Today the growing populations of non-Western religious others, such as Buddhists, Hindus, and especially Muslims, have learned that religious affiliation is not to be taken lightly. This fact is most vividly illustrated with Taiwanese American Buddhists who rediscover their religious traditions in the religiously charged context of their own Taiwanese community. Here Buddhists are challenged to rethink what religion means and how to be religious. Religion now becomes a form of social identity for Taiwanese that holds important social ramifications. Other studies of non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States indicate that they, too, experience revitalization, however, in the process of defining themselves against a predominantly Christian United States (Kurien 2002).

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Individuals make new communities by uniting themselves in a common religious quest. By the same token, religious communities make and remake individuals. Middle-class Americans have long used religion to justify and dignify a certain kind of subjectivity—the autonomous self. American social structures, cultural and religious traditions legitimate and sustain an American individualism. The founding fathers of the United States invoked religion to legitimate a society that protected the rights of individuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” against the collective interests of the state. The nation’s foundational documents endowed individuals, rather than families (as the case might be in Confucian cultures), with a particular sacredness. In the minds of our country’s early architects, the United States would be the city set upon a hill that would not only protect, but also celebrate the God-given rights of individuals against a coercive state. The Taiwanese immigrants I studied sought liberation not from a coercive state, but another oppressive social creation—traditional expectations that no longer resonate with their new American realities. Like other Americans, Buddhist and Christian Taiwanese immigrants declare autonomy, individual freedom, and individual worth through religion. Instead of their own Confucian traditions, they turn to the universalistic “tradition-transcending” claims of religion to validate their new American selves. Drawing on the “world-rejecting” themes of Christianity and Buddhism, they, too, declare an unencumbered, authentic self. Ironically religions grant individuals the capacity to transcend their socially ascribed statuses only to assign them to new social identities—religious identities. Religious conversion is a powerful way for Americans to remake themselves because religion is such a vital signifier of social identity in the United States. In the end, the religious person might be a Buddha-self, or a child of God, but what matters in American society is that she is a Buddhist or a Christian. A personal transformation through religion conversion has important social consequences for Americans, in a way that a personal transformation through, say, psychoanalytic therapy does not. How we define our authentic selves profoundly shape the ways we socially situate our empirical selves in the United States. Freedom and Constraint Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville made an observation strikingly similar to that of my friend Mrs. Chou, who I introduced in chapter 1. A foreigner to American culture like Mrs. Chou, Tocqueville also remarked on the extraordinary religiosity of Americans. He attributed it to the democratic character of American government. “Despotism

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may be able to do without faith,” he observed, “but freedom cannot” (2000, 294). He reasoned that because of the political freedom in the United States, social order depended on other sources of moral governance, especially religion: “How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened (294)?” Tocqueville pointed out a great truth in American society: that freedom does not mean a total lack of constraint, but merely the lack of a certain kind of constraint—the external force of the state. The task of disciplining individual freedom would have to fall to other powers, specifically higher powers, channeled through the exercise of internal, rather than external, regulation. Personal freedom was to be balanced by accountability to a higher power in American individualism: the higher self, as represented in traditions of expressive individualism, or God as represented in biblical strands (Bellah et al. 1985). In a sense, Taiwanese Christian converts are following an old American logic when they claim that the liberation that comes from discovering one’s authentic self is not to do whatever one wants to do, but the freedom to do what ought to do. Institutionally religion plays a functional role in a political democracy like the United States, Tocqueville argues. It instills individuals with the moral virtues that are necessary to maintain order in a democratic political system. Institutional religion does not play the same role in a place like Taiwan. Rather, kinship and the reciprocal ties of obligation and indebtedness form the moral basis of society. Morality is framed by the obligations one owes the family in this world rather than in terms of otherworldly salvation. For immigrants, whose kinship networks are stretched, broken, or in flux, Buddhist and Christian teachings that subordinate kinship obligations to salvation can be morally constructive and liberating. Particularly for women, religious conversion is a way to detach themselves from some burdensome kinship obligations. Buddhism and Christianity offer a morality based on a universalistic salvation ethic rather than a particular social collective that may no longer exist for them. The personal freedom that comes from liberating the authentic self, however, constrains religious individuals to a new type of discipline. We see the paradox of American freedom in the lives of these religious Taiwanese immigrants who talk so movingly of their greater freedom, yet live lives of unprecedented control and discipline. It is precisely religion’s capacity to instill this deep interior restraint in individuals that makes personal freedom possible in the United States, Tocqueville argues. D. H. Lawrence captures the spirit of this paradox best: “Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within” (1951: 13).

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CHOOSING TO MAINTAIN TRADITIONS THROUGH RELIGION The emphasis in this book has been on transformation, specifically, how religion transforms the communities, selves, and moral traditions of Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. This is not to say that there are no continuities in immigrants’ lives after religious conversion, or that by becoming American Taiwanese immigrants wholly reject their own traditions. Many studies of immigrant life in the United States rightly recognize how religion preserves and maintains cultural traditions and values from the homeland (e.g., Kim 1981; Warner 1998; Lin 1996), even among immigrant groups who convert to Christianity in the United States (Yang 1999a). Those in my study made it clear that preserving ethnic culture, values and traditions through a Taiwanese community were the key reasons why they went seeking religion in the United States. Most respondents told me that Dharma Light Temple or Grace Church would hold little attraction if they were not Taiwanese institutions. Many, especially the Christians, argue that religion helps them to better preserve their Taiwanese traditions. But ethnic tradition is transmitted differently in the United States than in Taiwan. Fenggang Yang (1999a) argues that Chinese are attracted to Christianity because of the compatibility between Protestant Christian values and Confucian values of filiality, thrift, and delayed gratification. The Chinese Christian church, which is otherwise foreign to Chinese culture, reproduces these traditional Chinese values in the United States. At both Dharma Light Temple and Grace Church, religious education classes are venues to transmit Confucian values of respecting elders and obeying parents to Taiwanese American children. Confucian values that might have been socialized through everyday social interactions in Taiwan become rearticulated and reformulated as religious teachings in the United States. As we have seen, one of the functions of religion in the United States is children’s moral education. By rearticulating and reformulating Confucian traditions through religious teachings, Taiwanese parents impart traditional Taiwanese values in American ways. Similarly, when Taiwanese immigrants reproduce extended kin relationships in the form of a religious community, they are recreating their own communities but in American ways. How traditions are maintained and reproduced is notably different in the United States than in the homeland. Perhaps immigrants only realize what Taiwanese traditions are when they leave the place where these were commonplace, taken for granted. The presence of difference or threat transforms inherited traditions into conscious choices. This is the case among Taiwanese immigrants who become Buddhist in the process

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of defending traditional Taiwanese funeral practices. Here these traditions are expressions of choice rather than of inheritance and obligation. Immigrants, like other Americans, do not inherit their traditions, they choose them. The religious conversion of Taiwanese immigrants must be understood in light of the place that religion occupies in American society. By becoming religious, Taiwanese immigrants are participating in longstanding American religious traditions of creating communities and governing morality. Through religion, immigrants form communities in American ways. Through religious narratives and ideals, immigrants remake themselves in American ways. Religions can transform societies and individuals, but only in particular contexts. Taiwanese immigrants use religion to address problems of meaning, morality, identity, and belonging in the United States because Americans have given religion this sacred power. By becoming religious, immigrants become Americans.

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APPENDIX Interview Schedule GENERAL BACKGROUND What is your date of birth? What is your marital status? Do you have children? How many? What is your profession now? What jobs did you hold before in the United States and in Taiwan? Where were you educated? BACKGROUND IN TAIWAN Where did you grow up in Taiwan? Tell me about your family in Taiwan. What was your father’s occupation? What do your siblings do? Where do they live?

IMMIGRATION EXPERIENCE Tell me about the circumstances surrounding your migration to the United States. Why did you come to the United States? What were some of the difficulties you faced in migrating to the United States? Who did you turn to for help? What problems do you struggle with now? Is living in the United States different from living in Taiwan? If so, how? TIES TO TAIWAN How often do you return to Taiwan? Do you still have family or friends there? How often do you talk to or e-mail them?

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Do you keep up with what’s going on in Taiwan? How? Do you keep up with Taiwanese politics?

RELIGIOUS CONVERSION Describe your religion in Taiwan. Were you exposed to Christianity, Buddhism, or other religions in Taiwan? How did you become Christian/Buddhist? What were some of the things happening in your life during the time of conversion? Did you have any particular problem or needs then? What were you trying to do about them? What attracted you to Christianity/Buddhism? Why did you convert instead of just staying with the religion you had inherited? How did your friends and family react to your conversion? What’s the main difference between your inherited religious tradition and Christianity/Buddhism? Are you concerned about your afterlife? Was it a consideration in converting? Since becoming Christian/Buddhist, have you changed? What are the main changes? For example, has the conversion affected your daily habits, social circle, morality, politics, or familial roles? Do you agree with all of the Christian/Buddhist teachings? Which beliefs or practices are the most difficult for you to accept? Is Christianity/Buddhism more right than other religions? Why?

RELIGIOUS PRACTICE Tell me about your religious practices, for example, prayer, meditation, scripture reading, and so on. How often do you attend church/temple? Are you involved in any classes/ activities at your church/temple? Do you hold any leadership roles? Do you like attending the temple/church? Do you donate money or your time to your church regularly? What do your friends/family think of your religion? Do you continue to have an ancestral altar? Why/why not? What makes being a Christian/Buddhist different in the United States versus Taiwan? Do you think it is hard to be a Buddhist/Christian in the United States?

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EXPOSURE TO CHRISTIANITY/BUDDHISM Do you have many Christian/Buddhist friends? Where you exposed to Christianity/Buddhism in Taiwan? What do you think of Christianity/Buddhism? Has a Christian/Buddhist ever tried to convert you? What do you think of the Christian belief that there is only one true God? ETHNICITY AND RACE Some people say that people are equal in the United States. Do you feel that you are equal to other people/whites in the United States? Have you ever experienced racism? What language do you speak with your friends? family? What ethnicity is most of your friends? How often do you use English? What religion is most of your friends? When people ask you what you are, what do you say? I.e., Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian, Oriental, American. Do you think of yourself as an American? Do you think you will ever return to living in Taiwan? Why? Why not?

PARENTING What do you worry about as a parent in the United States? Is being a parent in the United States different from being a parent in Taiwan? What do you hope for your child’s future? LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES What characteristics do you need to succeed in Taiwan? In the United States? Do you participate in any organizations in the ethnic community? In the larger American society? Do you vote? What do you do in your leisure time? What newspaper, books, or magazines do you read? What radio stations and radio shows do you listen to? What television shows do you watch?

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INDEX

acculturation, 151, 195–96 Americanization, 5, 36 Amida Society, 34 ancestral veneration, 66, 69, 81–82, 86 authenticity, 2, 103, 108, 141 Bellah, Robert, 113, 154 bi-gration, 23. See transnational and migration brain drain, 20, 132 Buddhism, 101; as American, 103–4; as choice, 108–9; conversion to, 92; as education, 104–6; and gender, 128; as intellectual, 91; perceptions of, 103; and salvation, 114, 168; as self-transformation, 105; and second generation immigrants, 36; and suffering, 90; in Taiwan, 35, 85; among Taiwanese immigrants, 2; types of practiced, 27; and women, 123–26. See also Dharma Light Temple and Humanistic Buddhism Buddhist Temples: multiple affiliations with, 93; in Southern California, 34. See also Dharma Light Temple Chang, Shenglin, 23 change. See transformation Chan, 11, 27, 34, 105, 129, 141; practices of, 7, 28, 88, 162–64 Chen Shui-Ben, 16–17 Chinese. See Taiwanese Chinese Buddhism, 34–35, 83, 101, 155– 56, 161–62, 168, 192; and compassion, 180n; and evangelical Christianity, 159; as modern, 189–90; and reforms, 60, 87n12; Chinese American churches, 31. See also Grace Evangelical Church Christian media, 31 Christianity, 14, 169; conversion to, 39, 43, 53, 61, 76, 183; as choice, 74, 76; and salvation, 114; in Taiwan, 59–60; among Taiwanese immigrants, 2; transnational, 30n13; and women, 120–23. See

also Grace Evangelical Church, evangelical Christianity church, 188. See also Grace Evangelical Church class, 194–96 community, 14, 65, 75, 183, 198. See also immigrant communities Confucian tradition, 4, 12, 122, 148, 151n4, 157, 173; and ethics, 154–55; and family, 123, 150; after immigration, 184; and parenting practices 49; and religious congregations, 200; and womanhood, 115–18. See also filial piety congregational religion, 40 conversion, 3n, 5, 10, 39, 61, 66–68, 72; to Buddhism, 92; to Christianity, 39, 43, 53, 61, 76, 183; and discipline, 158; meanings of, 66; motivations for, 66, 189; narratives of, 15, 67, 111, 136; process of, 65; rates among Taiwanese immigrants, 2; as rationalization, 110n; scripts for, 67; sociological theories of, 40–43 cultivation, 165. See also practices cultural citizenship, 196 cultural reproduction, 49, 200 culture: as religion, 35, 75, 79, 103–4, 189, 196 De Vos, George A., 69 Dharma Drum, 34 Dharma Light Temple, xi, 11, 32–37, 88, 106; activities coordinated by, 33, 36; roles for men, 143. See also Pure Land and Chan dharma propagation. See evangelism Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, 34 Dharma Seal, 34 discrimination, 98 divination, 82, 87 downward mobility, 131–32, 135, 140 Durkheim, E´mile, 8, 42n3, 153–54, 155n10

228

INDEX

education, 19, 21 ethnic fellowship, 6 ethnicity, 100, 109, 189, 195, 200; and religion, 6; and religious institutions, 30 ethnoburb, 23–24, 46, 153, 194 evangelism, 96; by Buddhists, 106, 195; techniques of, 54–57, 101 evangelical Christianity, 3, 41, 69–70, 147, 159, 184, 194; and filial piety, 122; language of, 67, practices of, 73–74; and prosyletization, 54, 59; and rationalization, 110; and Taiwanese tradition, 75 experiences: of female immigrants, 45, 118, 124; of gender, 112, 121, 136, 145; of immigration, 15, 145–47; religious, 187 family, 45, 48, 116, 130, 149; ancestral veneration, 66, 69, 86; and economic activity, 148–50; and religion, 49, 129; transnational, 23, 71, 116 filial piety, 49, 149, 178; and Buddhism 89, Christian reinterpretation of, 73, 122; as central duty, 122; as normative standard, 151n4; versus religious piety, 156; and second generation, 151 Fo Guang Shan, 34 Formosa. See Taiwan fortune telling. See divination freedom, 199 funeral rituals, 88, 161 gender, 15, 131 Grace Evangelical Church, xi, 11, 28–32; activities coordinated by, 32; and American evangelical subculture, 31; as family, 48–50; and female pastors, 176; as financial network, 48; institutional history of, 29; obligations within, 52, 61; as social event, 51–53; as social institution, 30; structures of labor, 58; successes in conversions, 57 Hansen, Marcus Lee, 3, 192 Harding, Susan F., 67 Hefner, Robert W., 42n, 110n Humanistic Buddhism, 34–35, 83, 162, 192. See also Chinese Buddhism

identity, 6; Buddhist, 78, 83. See also ethnicity, religion, and religious identity immigrant communities, 4 immigrant experience, 25, 44, 95, 118, 132–32, 147, 150 immigrant Puritanism, 3 immigrant religion, 5, 28, 188–89, 193; as American, 196; sacrifices, 7 immigrants: economic indicators, 26; new, 13; and marital relationships, 128; and racism, 25, 98, 99, 119; undocumented, 20 immigration, 1, 19; economic impact of, 150; family strategies for, 22–23; and family structures, 149; motivations for, 136; and religion, 187; to the United States, 19 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 13, 19 immigration policy, 13, 19–20, 22 individualism, 107, 151 interreligious encounters, 95–97, 99 James, William, 5 karma, 142 kinship, 48, 69–70, 89, 121–23, 182, 188; religious transformations of, 125; transnational, 71. See also ancestral veneration Kondo, Dorinne K., 112 Kuomingtang, 18, 19 leap frog migration, 24 meditation, 105, 129, 141, 126–64. See also Chan and practices middle class, 12, 19, 24, 132, 152–53, 194–96 migration, 186, 190; experience of, 13; and religious experience, 9 moral governance, 148, 179. See also selfdiscipline morality, 8, 15, 49, 147, 155, 180, 184 narratives, 131; of conversion, 15, 67, 111, 136; of self, 123, 124, 126, 141, 144 Pao Fa Temple, 34 parachute children, 22

INDEX personhood, 8, 15, 115. See also selfhood politics, 16 practices: Buddhist, 78, 93, 167, 160–61; Christian, 61–63, 176; of meditation, 164; of mindfulness, 163–66; as orientation, 161–63; religious, 130, 147, 173– 74, 176; and self-discipline, 163; as selfpower, 166–68 prayer, 173–74 Pure Land, 11, 27, 34, 144n racism, 23, 25, 99, 134; perceptions of, 132 religion, 3, 14, 42, 95, 105; and/as culture, 35, 75, 79, 85, 103–4, 189, 196; effects of, 4; and gender, 15, 115, 120; and immigration, 187; and individualism, 153; and kinship, 125, 182; and Korean American, 190; and moral authority, 8; as personal choice, 73–76, 102, 109; and political democracy, 199; roles of, 4; of salvation, 113, 156, 159; and science, 92, 105–6; and self, 145; and self-discipline, 154, 174; and self-improvement, 160; and social categorization, 80; as social outlet, 37, 51–53; as transformative, 5, 7, 156n12, 191, 194; in the United States, 40, 86 religiosity, 1, 26; among immigrants, 79, 188; and immigrant experience, 3; markers of, 128; styles of, 59; in Taiwan, 83 religious affiliation: among Taiwanese immigrants, 27; in Taiwan, 27 religious experience, 187; and migration, 9, 94 religious identities, 14, 79, 83, 100 religious institutions, 5–6; and ethnicity, 30; as motivating conversion, 53–54, 92; as social support, 45; and volunteers, 7, 58–59, 125, 143, 145, 182 religious piety, 3; and Buddhists, 36, 59 religious practices, 130, 147, 173–74, 176 religious symbols, 11 sacred, 8 sacrifices, 7 salvation, 9–10, 156–57 salvational ethics, 15, 183 salvational religion, 113, 156, 159

229

San Gabriel. See ethnoburb and Southern California scripture, 176 second generation, 36, 49, 195, 200; and filial piety, 49, 151 self-discipline, 154–55, 163, 167–68, 169, 174, 192; and emotions, 165 selfhood, 4, 111, 112–15, 122, 127, 131, 137, 144; dimensions of, 112, 191; and interiority, 192; and transformation, 184. See also authenticity and personhood sin, 157–58; as loss of control, 171; sources of, 173 Smith, Timothy, 10 social outlet, 37, 51–53 social status, 47 socialization, 63 Southern California, 21, 152–53, 184; as ethnoburb, 99, 152; religious institutions in, 27–28, 30, 33, 182, 195; and Taiwanese immigration, 2, 11–12, 23–26, 46, 96 suffering, 163–64. See also Buddhism, salvational religion Suh, Sharon, 98, 125 supernatural, 167–68, 171–73 Swidler, Ann, 9, 65, 94, 103 Taiwan, 17–19; Buddhism in, 35, 85; Christianity in, 59–60; economy of, 149; gender stereotypes, 117–18; history of Christianity in, 29–30; immigration from, 17, 19–20, 21, 22; political history, 17–19; politics in, 16; popular religion, 79–81, 82; religious participation in, 83 Taiwanese, 12; versus Chinese, 13; religious affiliation among, 27; traditional religious practices, 70, 72, 79–80, 189 Taiwanese immigrants: conversion among, 2, 5; economic status of, 26; female, 45, 115–16, 118, 124; introduction to Buddhism, 88–92; rates of religiosity, 86; social outlets for, 46; to Southern California, 23–26, 152–53, 184 Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, 30, 30nn13, 14 Taiwanese tradition, 7, 75, 86, 115, 120, 122, 188; and Confucianism 12, 80. See also culture and traditions

230

INDEX

Taoism, 28, 83–84 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 154, 198–99 traditions, 198, 199 transformation, 14, 156 transnational families, 23, 71, 116 transnational politics, 16 True Buddha School, 34 Tzu Chi, 34

Warner, R. Stephen, 6, 40 Weber, Max, 8, 10, 47n, 63, 68–69, 90, 102–3, 110n Wei Li, 24 womanhood, 130; Confucian ideals of, 115 worship, 55, 63, 81, 93, 166; bai bai, 60, 70, 73, 80, 100, 107; temple, 82

volunteer labor, 58

Zen, 27. See also Chan and meditation