Buddha Is Hiding (Parts 3 and 4)

• Cambodian-American attempt to reinterpret Khmer-Buddhist values and integrate into Mormonism.
• Boys schooled to believe that they can become gods, girls taught they can become immortal by bearing husbands spirit children throughout eternity.
• Appeal of Mormonism assimilates less-successful peoples to American values of strict morality, hard work, and middle-class success.  Mormonism instills an evangelical drama and a capitalist rationality into the everyday experiences of new and would-be Americans.
• Racial bipolarism is no longer the result of policy but rather an effect of norms about ethno-racial ranking in society at large, in which disadvantaged groups starting out at the bottom are guided toward integration.
• Protestantism offers social discipline and “habits of the heart.”
• Contrary to popular myth, for example, more than half of public welfare recipients nationwide in 1909 were immigrant families, making new arrivals three times more likely than natives to be on the public dole, according to research accumulated by a 1911 commission on immigration.  In Chicago, two-thirds of those receiving public assistance were foreign born.  Today, the weight of newcomers is proportionately far smaller.  According to calculations from the 1990 census, 9% of immigrant households received wlefare payments, compared to 7.4% of households headed by natives, although today’s elaborate welfare system is costly.
• Asian immigrants = quintessential American dreamers seeking rebirth and self-realization in land uncontaminated by memory, tradition, and restraint.
• Poor immigrants consider Asian employers their patrons and protectors from the larger society.  They fear that there are no work opportunities outside the local ethnic networks.
• The black-white continuum in American society = degrees of deserving and undeserving citizenship.
• Asian entrepreneurs strive not so much to be accepted as whites as to participate more fully in the national space by combining nepotism and globalism to produce wealth and power in the decentralized systems of capitalism.  Elite Asian Americans are like homosexuals in that their claims to moral citizenship rest not so much on suffering (thought that continues as they are targeted by hate crimes) but on the revelation of their important and diverse roles in a more complex American nation.