The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (15 page)

Uriuda’s poem is a useful signpost of both pleasures and dilemmas. The matsutake hunters drive cars into the mountains; they are enthusiastic Americans even as they retain Japanese sensibilities. Like others who ventured out of Meiji Japan, the immigrants were serious translators, learning other cultures. Beside themselves, they became children—in both American and Japanese ways. Then something changed: World War II.

Since arriving in the United States, Japanese had struggled over bans against citizenship and land ownership. Despite this, they had succeeded at farming—especially with labor-intensive fruits and vegetables, such as cauliflower, which needed to be shaded from light, and berries, which needed hand picking. World War II broke that trajectory, removing them from their farms. Oregon’s Japanese Americans were interned in “War Relocation Camps.” Their citizenship dilemmas were turned inside out.

I first heard Uriuda’s poem sung in Japanese in a classical style during a gathering of Japanese Americans celebrating their matsutake heritage in 2006. The elderly man who sang it had first learned classical singing when he was interned in the camps. Indeed, many “Japanese” hobbies flourished there. But even as it was possible to pursue Japanese hobbies, the camps changed what it meant to be Japanese in the United States. When they came back after the war, most had lost access to their possessions and their farms. (Juliana Hu Pegues notes that the same year Japanese American farmers were sent away to camps, the United States opened the Bracero program to bring in Mexican farm laborers.)
³
They were treated with suspicion. In response, they did their best to become model Americans.

As one man recalled, “We stayed away from everything Japanese-y. If you had a pair of [Japanese] slippers, you left them at the door when you went out.” Japanese daily habits were not for public display. Young people stopped learning Japanese. Total immersion into American culture was expected, without bicultural extensions, and children led the way. Japanese Americans became “200 percent American.”
⁴
At the same time, Japanese arts had flourished in the camps. Traditional poetry and music, in decline before the war, were revived. Camp activities became the basis for postwar clubs. These would be private leisure activities. Japanese culture, matsutake picking included, became increasingly popular, but it formed a segregated addition to the performance of American selves. “Japanese-ness” flourished only as an American-style hobby.

Perhaps you can catch a glimmer of my disconcertment. Japanese American matsutake pickers are quite different from Southeast Asian refugees—and I can’t explain the difference away by “culture” or by “time” spent in the United States, the usual sociological stories of differences among immigrants. Second-generation Southeast Asian Americans are nothing like Japanese American
Nisei
in their performance of citizenship. The difference has to do with historical events—indeterminate encounters, if you will—in which relations between immigrant groups and the demands of citizenship are formed. Japanese Americans were subject to coercive assimilation. The camps taught them that to be an American required serious work in transforming oneself from inside out. Coercive assimilation showed me its contrast: Southeast Asian refugees
have become citizens in a moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. A love for freedom may be enough to join the American crowd.

The contrast hit me in a personal way. My mother came to study in the United States from China just after World War II, when the two countries were allies; after the triumph of communism in China, the U.S. government did not let her go home. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, our family, like other Chinese Americans, was under FBI surveillance as possible enemy aliens. Thus my mother, too, learned a coercive assimilation. She learned to cook hamburgers, meatloaf, and pizza, and when she had children, she refused to allow us to learn Chinese, even though she was still struggling with English. She believed that if we spoke Chinese, our English might show the trace of an accent, revealing us as not quite American. It was unsafe to be bilingual, to carry one’s body in the wrong way, or to eat the wrong foods.

When I was a child, my family used the term “American” to mean white, and we watched Americans carefully as sources of both emulation and cautionary tales. In the 1970s, I joined Asian American student groups whose participants were of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino origin; even our most radical politics took for granted the coerced assimilation each of these groups had experienced. My background thus prepared me for an easy empathy with the Japanese American matsutake pickers I met in Oregon: I felt comfortable with their way of being Asian American. The elders were second-generation immigrants who spoke hardly a word of Japanese, and who were as likely to go out for cheap Chinese food as to prepare traditional Japanese dishes. They were proud of their Japanese heritage—as witnessed in their devotion to matsutake. But that pride was expressed in self-consciously American ways. Even the matsutake dishes we cooked together were cosmopolitan hybrids that violated every Japanese culinary principle.

In contrast, I had been utterly unprepared to discover the Asian American cultures of Open Ticket’s matsutake camps. Mien camps struck me with particular force because they reminded me not of the Asian America I knew but of some combination of my mother’s remembered China and the villages in Borneo where I had done fieldwork. Mien come to the Cascades in multigenerational groups of kin and neighbors with the explicit aim of recuperating village life. They remain committed to differences that mattered in Laos; because Lao sit on the floor, Mien sit on
the low stools my mother still longs for as a reminder of China. They refuse raw vegetables—that’s for Lao—but prepare soups and sautés with chopsticks, as do Chinese. No meatloaf or hamburgers are cooked in Mien mushroom camps. Because so many Southeast Asians are gathered together, deliveries of Asian vegetables from California family garden plots arrive all the time. Every evening, cooked dishes are exchanged with neighbors, and visitors talk over smoking bongs into the night. When I saw one of my Mien hosts squatting in a sarong and shelling overripe yard-long beans or sharpening her machete, I felt transported to the upland villages in Indonesia where I first learned about Southeast Asia. This wasn’t the United States that I knew.

The other Southeast Asian groups in Open Ticket are less dedicated to recreating village life; some are from cities, not villages. Still, they have one thing in common with these Mien: a lack of interest in—even an unfamiliarity with—the kind of American assimilation with which I grew up. I wondered, How did they get away with this? At first, I was awed, and perhaps a little jealous. Later, I recognized that they had been asked to assimilate too, in a different mode. This is where freedom and precarity come back into the story: freedom coordinates wildly diverse expressions of American citizenship, and it provides the only official rudder for precarious living. But this means that between the arrival of Japanese Americans and the coming of Lao and Cambodian Americans something important has changed in the relationship of the state and its citizens.

The pervasive quality of Japanese American assimilation was shaped by the cultural politics of the U.S. welfare state from the New Deal through the late twentieth century. The state was empowered to order people’s lives with attractions as well as coercion. Immigrants were exhorted to join the “melting pot,” to become full Americans by erasing their pasts. Public schools were a venue for making Americans. The affirmative action policies of the 1960s and 1970s not only opened schools but also made it possible for minorities educated in public schools to find professional placements despite their racial exclusion from networks of influence. Japanese Americans were cajoled as well as prodded into the American fold.

It is the erosion of this apparatus of state welfare that most simply helps to explain why the Southeast Asian Americans of Open Ticket
have developed such a different relationship to American citizenship. Since the mid-1980s, when they arrived as refugees, all kinds of state programs have been dismantled. Affirmative action has been criminalized, funds cut for public schools, unions chased out, and standard employment has become a vanishing ideal for anyone, much less entry-level workers. Even if they had managed to become perfect copies of white Americans, there would be few rewards. And the immediate challenges of making a living loom.

In the 1980s, the refugees had few resources and needed public assistance. Yet welfare in the strict sense was being radically downsized. In California, the destination of many Open Ticket Southeast Asians, eighteen months became the limit for state assistance. Many of the Lao and Cambodian Americans in Open Ticket received some language education and job training, but rarely of a sort that actually helped them get a job. They were left to find their own way in American society.
⁵
For those few who had Western-style educations, English, or money, there were options. The rest were in the difficult position of finding traction for the resources and skills they had, such as, for example, surviving a war. The freedom they had endorsed to enter the United States had to be translated into livelihood strategies.

Histories of survival shaped what they could use as livelihood skills. It is a tribute to their resourcefulness that they used them. But this also created differences among the refugees. Consider some of these differences. A Lao buyer from a family of businesswomen in the capital city, Vientiane, explained that she decided to leave because communism was bad for profits. Vientiane is on the Mekong River, across from Thailand, and leaving meant finding a night to swim the river. She could have been shot; she had a young daughter to carry. Still, despite the danger, the experience showed her that she must seize opportunities. The freedom that pushed her toward the United States was the freedom of the market.

In contrast, Hmong pickers were adamant about freedom as anticommunism combined with ethnic autonomy. Older Hmong in Open Ticket had fought for General Vang Pao’s CIA army in Laos. The middle-aged had spent years after the communist victory going back and forth between refugee camps in Thailand and rebel camps in Laos. Both these life trajectories combined jungle survival and ethnopolitical loyalty. These were skills that could be used in the United States for kin
based investments, for which Hmong Americans have become known. Sometimes such commitments need to be revived—by life in the wild.

Everyone I talked to dreamed about livelihood strategies self-consciously tied to their ethnic and political stories. No one in Open Ticket thought immigration meant erasing one’s past to become an American. An ethnic Lao from northeastern Cambodia would like to run trucks between Cambodia and Laos. An ethnic Khmer from Vietnam, whose family crossed the border to defend Cambodia, thought his family’s patriotism made him a good candidate for a military career. While many of these dreams would remain unfulfilled, they told me something about dreaming: these were not the new start we still call “the American dream.”

The more you stare at it, the more the idea that you
should
start over to become an American seems strange. What was this American dream then? Clearly, it was more than an effect of economic policy. Might it have been a version of Christian conversion, American-style, in which the sinner opens up to God and resolves to banish his former sinful life? The American dream requires relinquishing one’s old self, and perhaps this is one form of conversion.

Protestant revivalism has been key to composing the “we” of the American polity since the American Revolution.
⁶
Furthermore, Protestantism guided the twentieth-century project of American secularization—designed to reject illiberal Christianity while promoting unmarked liberal forms. Susan Harding has shown how U.S. public education in the mid-twentieth century was shaped by projects of secularization, in which some versions of Christianity were promoted as examples of “tolerance,” while other versions were parochialized as exotic remnants of earlier times.
⁷
In its secular forms, then, this cosmological politics exceeds Christianity; to be an American, you must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.

In the mid-twentieth century, assimilation was a project of this American Protestant secularism. Immigrants were expected to “convert” by taking on the full array of white American bodily practices and speech habits. Speech was particularly important—the speaking of the “we.” That’s why my mother wouldn’t let me learn Chinese. It would be a sign of the devil, so to speak, peeking out of my American habitus. This is the conversion wave that hit Japanese Americans after World War II.

It did not necessarily mean becoming a Christian. The Japanese Americans I worked with are mainly Buddhists. Indeed, Buddhist “churches” (as some participants call them) help tie the community together. The one I visited is a curious hybrid. The hall for weekly worship has a colorful Buddhist altar in front. But the rest of the room is an exact model of an American Protestant church. There are rows of wooden pews, complete with holders on the seatbacks for hymnals and announcements. The basement has space for Sunday School classes and for fundraising dinners and bake sales. The core congregation is Japanese American, but they are proud to have a white pastor, whose Buddhism augments their American identity. The congregation’s “American” conversion sponsors religious legibility.

Contrast Open Ticket’s Southeast Asian refugees. Thinking through cosmological politics, they were also “converted” to American democracy. They each had a conversion ritual in a Thai refugee camp—the interview that allowed them to enter the United States. At this interview, they were required to endorse “freedom” and to show their anticommunist credentials. Else they would be enemy aliens: outside the fold. To enter the country, a rigorous assertion of freedom was necessary. The refugees might not know much English, but they needed one word: freedom.