Full Transcript for Introducing Cha-Tea Circle!

conversation with Julian Saporiti, a musician historian whose celebrated No-No Boy Project creates folk songs as a way of telling Asian American history. In this conversation, we explored how Buddhism shaped and interacted with his work of music and his storytelling, and his subversive stylistic storytelling approaches, such as songs that discomfort listeners by juxtaposing critique of American empire with catchy rhythmic melodies. Now I want to hear from Chenxing. Chenxing: Thanks, Chanhee. My episode is about a project called Listening to the Buddhists in our Backyard, or L2BB for short. L2BB began with a Twitter message in 2021 from a stranger who became a dear friend. Together, Andy and I worked with high school students to develop a project that centers deep listening, local engagement, and community building. In my episode, I trace the educational and spiritual journey that L2BB took us on as we visited a dozen Buddhist temples around the Merrimack Valley, which is north of Boston. I weave my narration with soundscapes from three years of temple visits, as well as snippets from student presentations and excerpts from an interview with Dr. Tham Tran, the Director of Buddhist Youth Education at Chua Tuong Van, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Lowell, Massachusetts. And I'll pass it to Xianfeng. Xianfeng: Thank you, Chenxing. Well, for my episode, I interviewed Karen Tan, who's a refugee from Vietnam. She helped build a Chinese Buddhist temple in Quincy, Massachusetts in the 1990s. In the interview, Karen shared the story of building up the temple, and the experience of first-generation immigrants in the 80s and 90s in Boston. Elaine: Thank you for sharing Xianfeng and Chanhee and Chenxing. I’ve listened to all your episodes. We’ve all listened to each other's episodes and Chanhee foregrounded some beautiful themes that we're going to cover in this introductory episode. These are just recurring themes that we noticed, and I think that there are many more recurring themes and rich topics and threads throughout our podcasts. So we want to encourage you as our listeners, maybe some of you are teachers, teachers and students, to maybe engage in a similar exercise in your own respective communities. But we'll start with the four big themes that we noticed, and I’ll pass on to Xianfeng to begin. Xianfeng: Thank you, Elaine! Yes, the first theme that came up for me is the sense of home and belonging. In our interview, Karen mentioned how building up this Buddhist temple, this community, created a sense of home for the immigrants and the refugees, even though they came from different Asian countries. And that was interesting to me because they’re from different parts of Asia. And we have different languages, different regions have different climates and then different cultural aspects. But then she’s still mentioned how, among them, there was a shared sense of home. And that was the sense of belonging. And I’m sure that for those who participated more, who contributed more in the building up process of that temple enjoyed the belonging differently from those who joined much later or contributed to a lesser degree. Nonetheless this community shelters their sense of home. I also hear this recurring theme in Julian’s and Helena’s interview, and the L2BB students also mentioned even in just one visit, they felt belonging in the temple them visit. So I think that’s an interesting theme that came up in several of our conversations. Chenxing: Yes, absolutely. I mentioned Chua Tuong Van, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Lowell, Massachusetts. We visited with multiple cohorts of high school students, and as our relationship with the temple deepened, we brought graduate students, teachers, and administrators as well. Pretty much without exception, every person who stepped foot in Chua Tuong Van said, I feel so at home here even though I’ve never been here before. And most of the people weren’t even Buddhist. Tham Tran, the founder and director of the temple’s youth group and an extraordinary educator, has very deliberately cultivated a place of belonging at the temple. This touches on a theme that we’ll discuss a bit later in this episode around pedagogy. As teachers and students, how do we cultivate a sense of belonging? How do we create spaces of refuge? I appreciate you bringing up this topic, Xianfeng, because it speaks to this broader question that we all face, of where do we feel at home? Or for that matter, where don’t we feel at home? Chanhee, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, since your interviewees talked about the unsettling sense of not being at home at many stages of life, and in the many places they’ve lived in both Asia and the US. Chanhee: Yeah, um, as I recall conversations with my interviewees, I think of how home can be an interesting space where your feelings of belonging may only exist temporarily, a space that requires a level of distance. And perhaps for some people, home is a place from which they want to run away. I’m thinking about Helena's journey to America as an example. When she immigrated to the States, a Christian church became a home for her and her family. And then this home became a place she left behind. And later, her homeland and her Korean Christian family became a space that constantly reminded her of her disconnection and loss. So, acknowledging that home doesn't always exist in a nostalgic and positive way, I want to encourage us to engage differently with this concept of home and belonging. Also, as Julian said in his interview, perhaps immigrants and refugees aren't ever totally settled, which means this feeling of being unsettled will never be resolved. Then my question would be, can anyone have a home while feeling unsettled? If so, what does home mean to them? It also makes me think about then the possibility of feeling at home while not being a settler in this Indigenous land. Elaine: Yeah, I guess I can add to that. In my interviews, a

big theme that came up was how the lack of home or sense of belonging led to creating a different kind of community. In the case of Abbas, for instance, he had the whole section of his interview talking about his upbringing. And really loving being a Muslim, but then not finding the right preexisting Muslim groups where he felt like he could express in particular his artistic and creative side. And then this led organically to forming the entire arts collective digital platform MIPSTERZ, which became a kind of digital home for a lot of people to connect. And it allowed for someone like Reyhab who had a dream of—she wanted to create this portrait series featuring Muslim women as their alter egos and then whatever kind of superhero garb that they could imagine. And when this idea came to her, she knew of MIPSTERZ and she just opened her laptop and started emailing MIPSTERZ to see what they could do and how they could collaborate. And I thought that was a really beautiful example of art making as home. And also a digital space as a possibility for home and just my own anecdote, it made me reflect on how in the loneliest years of the pandemic, I formed the Buddhist community at Stanford with a few friends—that was very much a digital space where people were located in different places. And we did engage in some creative activities in the arts and creating some audio plays, and that I think was my greatest sense of belonging, rather than maybe just like a temple space that I walk into, it was creating in a community with people who are like minded, who also want to create, and who also have an affinity for the arts and looking for a sense of communal belonging. The last thing I’ll add is in David's interview, it’s interesting and it made me very sad as well. Maybe you guys too, but not feeling a sense of belonging in the way Asian American stories are told right now. We reference, actually, Julian referenced Ali Wong’s standup comedy as well, the fancy Asian-jungle Asian binary. And Julian was like, well, we don’t hear about jungle Asians, which is, maybe, what I want to hear about. I mean, I think he's saying it facetiously, but there’s a good point there. And then David was saying, well, beyond this binary of the fancy Asian, which he sees is the honor roll Asian, and then the jungle Asian, like there are a lot of other Asians like him. Like myself, I think, like all of us, perhaps, but who are not represented at all in these stories. And so there's a sense of maybe a deep disappointment in not finding home in an umbrella term where you're seeking that form of belonging. And in David’s journey, talking about recovery, you know, when he was entering certain recovery spaces, there's also a way he was marked as Asian. Immediately, instead of being like, welcome to this space, we're all in recovery. And that created some cognitive dissonance and some distance with the community as well. And I guess that led David to creating Burning Pride, which is great! But in all these cases, in my interviewees, it was not feeling home led to creating something else. Xianfeng: Yeah. Elaine. Thank you so much for bringing up David's reflection, because that's what caught me when he says that Asian American identity label makes him actually feel not belonging, feel being excluded. And that struck me on how Karen doesn't identify with the Asian American identity as well when I tried to put the hat on her. And she says, “I'm a Chinese. But on the other hand, I'm also living in America. I'm an American citizen.” But there’s a way that she tries to avoid the label “Asian American.” I think there's something to it. And I know this is a question that we have been grappling with among ourselves. Chenxing: I appreciate that when you listen to all of the episodes in this series, you come away with so many different ways of grappling or reckoning with this term “Asian American.” Julian, for example, distances himself from it because it can flatten or erase cultural specificity, but there’s also times where he finds it expedient: for instance, he’s happy to teach courses on Asian America, even though the category can feel impossibly broad and unwieldy. I think that bringing a spiritual lens to this conversation helps us challenge and expand our relationship to this term “Asian American.” Speaking personally, I often feel a sense of constriction when defining “Asian American” solely in political terms, even as I respect and celebrate the activists of the 60s who coined this term, and to whom we are all indebted. I mean, they laid the groundwork that made this very podcast possible! But it wasn’t until I started thinking about Asian American Buddhism that I began to appreciate the opportunities for connection and creativity as a group of people who have been doubly minoritized by race and religion. I think this relates to Elaine’s two interviews on Dreaming with Muslim Creatives. For me, identifying as an Asian American Buddhist pays homage to the ways that I have been deeply influenced by Cambodian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Laotian, Thai, Sri Lankan, and many other Buddhists and temples communities in the US. And in the unique context of having so many diasporic Asian Buddhist traditions in this country, I feel a sense of freedom and possibility in this category of Asian American Buddhist. Chanhee, I remember you saying that in hearing Julian talk about the ways he doesn’t relate to Asian American identity, you felt a kind of liberation. Can you say more about that? Chanhee: I guess when I said I feel liberation as a response to Julian’s comment, I said it because I also felt what he said about the limitations of the term Asian American. As you, Chenxing, just mentioned, I also see a lot of possibilities for how we can imagine the concept of Asian Americans through the lens of spiritualities. However, for me, the limitations somehow felt more weighted. I think I had this conversation with Elaine a lot, and

Julian also highlighted in his interview. When we say “Asian American,” it is true that many people first picture East Asian face. Just as the white face became the default of American, the East Asian face becomes the default of Asian. So thinking about East Asian hegemony in the field of Asian American studies and limited Asian American representation more broadly, it is hard not to think about the limitations first, at least for me. And as I’m currently writing about historical Asian immigrant individuals, I keep thinking about what the term “Asian American” means to those who constantly navigated their lives in-between their homeland and hostland, and those whose identity was bounded by nationality before, but now by regional or racial categories. Particularly, considering all the historical complexities among Asian countries and current political tensions, what could this term really offer to them? I don't know–I wonder if Elaine wants to add more as we had a lot of conversations about it. Elaine: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of conversations. I really appreciated hearing about Julian’s journey actually, where he was like all gung ho in undergraduate of like, I want to meet other Asian Americans. I want to explore this term fully! And then, you know, after going through all of that, he still came away thinking like, well, I don't quite identify with this and this isn’t really doing it for me. So I appreciated hearing kind of the journey where he did try to embrace something and to learn about it. And then he came to realize, yeah, it's maybe not how I would choose to identify and there are issues with it. Like I was thinking, why does Reyhab, you know, when she introduced herself, she says South Asian instead of Asian. Right? So that does point to what Julian is saying that when we say the word Asian, what comes to mind is East Asian. The fact that you do have to specify South Asian or Southeast Asian or brown or something like that, then it does show that somehow in the popular imagination, Asian has become a stand-in for East Asian. The other thing I was thinking about was in Abbas's interview, Abbas was saying, you know, when people ask him about himself and what he identifies as, he'll say American, right? And then he says, but you'll see the discomfort in, and I’m using Abbas's words, only white people’s faces. What does it mean if he says he’s American, which shows again, the hidden assumption of what is American a standard for, and maybe that's why the term Asian American arose, but then it also is still like Abbas was talking about, these old racist remnants that exist in these identity markers. And I think the fact that when we say American, or different people who look a certain way, say that they're American, that they're met with suspicion, it highlights that why these alternative labels exist. And that can be very frustrating. I could see in Karen’s case—Yeah, sure, you’re born in Vietnam, or you want to acknowledge your Chinese roots,

that’s important to you. But what about for those of us who were born in America, right? Maybe our primary citizenship and all our reference points from childhood and on is America. To not be able to claim that label, to have to always add it with something can feel very frustrating. I know, Chenxing, you wanted to highlight this theme as reckoning with Asian American identity. And I wonder why you wanted to use the word reckoning or what you're drawing from or what it's making you think of now. Chenxing: Well, I was thinking of Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings with its subtitle: “An Asian American Reckoning.” And I think Julian used that word “reckoning” as well, in his interview with Chanhee. I was curious to hear your thoughts on this, Xianfeng, since, like Chanhee, you didn’t spend your childhood in the US as me and Elaine did. How do you relate to the term “Asian American”? Has your relationship to the term changed over time? Xianfeng: I’m really appreciative of our conversation here, that reveals the multiplicity of the term, including the generational difference of people’s relationship with it, the East Asian hegemony as Elaine mentioned. This is such a messy term! And even an ambiguous term for me. Really this has to do with how we reckon with this term as an identity. Mostly, I am approaching it as a political term, referring to nationality, citizenship, et cetera. So a little about myself. I am here in the United States as an international student. I’m on F-1 visa. So I need to renew my visa to re-enter the United States once its five-year validate is expired. I need to maintain good standing in my program so that my I-20, which is a document for international students, supports me to legally stay in the United States for the period of study. When I file my taxes now, I am filing as a “resident for tax purposes,” but this is because I have been living here for more than five years now. I used to file Taxes as an “alien.” Yes, that's a word. I can't vote in America. And, there are many grants and fellowships that I cannot apply to because they're only open to American citizens. In my first year into the PhD program, I attempted to look for a part-time job on campus, and I was told that it's going to be hard because the good jobs are taken by American students because they are eligible for work-study fund, the federal funding so that the university doesn't need to spend the money. So I am reminded of my foreignness all of the time, but somehow I still am made to feel like not so foreign…? So it's hard. But ultimately I don’t identify as Asian-American because my only connection with America is that I'm studying here as a student and somehow this term, Asian American, sound so political in the sense of nation-state governing. And even though I have been here since 2017, my nationality is still Chinese. That's why I'm still identifying myself as Chinese. But once, I was encouraged to tell my story as part of the “Asian American literacy” project. That was jarring for me at first. But the professor told me, since you are in America now, your experience is American experience. Well, that sounds true. Right? So, my storytelling should be part of Asian American storytelling. I couldn’t bring myself to deny this aspect of relating to the term that is not so political, even though it is such a politically charged term. Chenxing, do you have something to add to it? Chenxing: I hope our listeners feel permission to grapple with the term, to feel challenged and unsettled and also to challenge and to unsettle. What does it look like to get comfortable with our discomfort, with our not knowing, with this ever-shifting category? If you’re someone who takes Asian American at face value, what does it look like to pause and wonder about who’s excluded by prevailing definitions of Asian American—or even by your own definition of Asian American. And conversely, for people whose knee-jerk reaction is to reject the label. What are the costs of that rejection? What might it be like to actually engage or redefine or feel empowered to claim that label? How would the stories of Asian America have to change for us to feel a sense of home and belonging? Chanhee: Yeah, I guess what we're trying to say here is that there are multiplicities and multiple stories in this term, and we hope our audience finds some kind of related feelings by listening to our podcast, whether that's comfort or discomfort. Elaine: So for time’s sake, maybe we can move on to the other two themes Chanhee and Chenxing will discuss. Maybe Chanhee, you can start and I think they fit quite well together. Chanhee: Sure. I was thinking about the theme of integrating spirituality and scholarship with art, as many of our interviewees utilize various forms of art, such as music, performance, film, and storytelling. For instance, music could not only bridge individuals to a world that offers ancestral knowledge and healing, for Helena's case, but also be a radical way to tell stories that hold multiple truths and feelings, for Julian. As I listened to all the episodes, I kept thinking about what aspects of art allowed itself to be an important medium to communicate our interviewees scholarship. For example, as Julian and I discussed in the interview, music could help textbook knowledge to be more like embodied knowledge, as music invites the audience to feel the complicated emotion attached to Asian American history. So, as we have two amazing creative writers here, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that. Elaine: First of all, I want to thank Chanhee and Chenxing and Xianfeng for supporting my creative side. That's been a huge part of my life, and I think I drew a lot of inspiration from our interviews with Reyhab, Abbas, David, he's also a filmmaker, he made that amazing documentary film as well, and also No No Boy, Julian, his music, I was listening to it after listening to your interview, Chanhee, and dancing to it. And

then I went on a spree of listening to all these different songs on YouTube and, dancing and feeling happy. And I think that for me, whether I’m thinking about in terms of me creating art or being, you know, an audience to other people's art. What's so profound is that it creates a space in my imagination and in my body where there isn't that space normally. I feel like in academia and other spaces, even in religious spaces, there are a lot of social codes that you have to follow. There are a lot of things you have to observe. And art has always been a place for me to kind of let my imagination go. And the best art is like when someone else’s art allows me to let go as well or to feel something I haven't been able to feel and process. And I appreciate art that has a sense of humor, but that also deals with dark subjects. And I think this is also the failure of natural language, like what we’re using now, right? I can't really say what I feel adequately through words. It can maybe only be felt through sound, through images, through something between the lines. Where is your sense of agency as someone who maybe doesn't have a lot of power or social capital in the world? I’m speaking on behalf of myself and perhaps other people feel this way. The arts gives you an opportunity to exercise that agency, where other spaces maybe not only don't provide it or they actively deny it from you or tell you that you don't have that power. Of course, a part of me feels very sad saying that because there's a way I want the arts to influence reality as is, and that may not be possible. But, at least it’s a place where we can create something different, and hopefully those creations do change the world. I think that's part of the exercise of Muslim Futurism that I was so inspired by as well to… you have to imagine something first and imagining that is a part of inhabiting that reality, too. Chenxing: I really loved Reyhab’s Alter Ego project for challenging this doctor-lawyer-engineer model minority trifecta that’s associated with Asian Americans. I mean, why don’t we think: time traveler, antihero, artist? I was reflecting on how even in the process of doing this podcast, each of us got to express artistry as we attuned to unheard registers within ourselves and others in this search for meaning and connection. I’m curious to hear Xianfeng and Chanhee’s thoughts on this topic of art and creativity. You know, Xianfeng, when I was listening to Karen's episode, I thought: she’s an artist in her devotion to chanting. I was reminded of the Buddha’s birthday celebration at your temple that we took the L2BB students to. I think that was my first time hearing you chant—I felt this surge of appreciation for you as an artist in that moment. And Chanhee, I so admire your skill in the art of asking questions. You bring such thoughtfulness and care to your interviews, and it comes forth in a way that I experience in the same way that I would savor a beautiful piece of music.

Basically, I agree with Elaine that we need more: more creativity, weirdness, joy—all of these things that art can be, all of the possibilities that art can expand ourselves into. Xianfeng: What a beautiful way of describing our chanting, Chenxing! Thank you so much. And even though I am aware of patriarchy in the Buddhist world, when it comes to chanting as artistic, I attribute to the patriarchs, 祖师大德, who invented this devotional practice. For us, the chantings are devotional practice for us. And for others, it's a service. When I first joined the monastic order, we had to learn the tones and learn how to play all the instruments for different ceremonial occasions. I always appreciate those who formalized all the ritual chanting with different instruments. They are so beautiful, and they’re so brilliant as a way to harmonize everyone present. And I also appreciate those who passed it down through the centuries, so that generations would engrain the trust that it does, what no others can do: winning the peace of mind through praying and devotional practice, to experience comfort, to be consoled at time of grief and anxiety—I’m thinking the passing of loved ones. Today, it even allows people who moved so far away from home to experience home. Chanhee, would you like to add something? Chanhee: Well, I don’t have much to add, but as Chenxing and Elaine mentioned, art can be a fascinating form as it can be beautiful and weird at the same time. It can hold all different characters, emotions, and textures that are often considered to be separated. And I guess our interviewees also try to convey those complicated and entangled stories of their lives through various forms of art, which I really appreciate. Chenxing: I think art can be a vehicle for conveying spirituality and scholarship across boundaries of language and ethnicity. It's closely related to this theme of pedagogical approaches to teaching religion and history. I see this in Karen’s interview where she talks about people finding different ways of relating to Buddhism, whether through chanting or meditation or listening to lectures. Julian and Helena talk explicitly about the different ways their music-making and healing practices help them teach more effectively. And Abbas and Reyhab also talk about the educational dimensions to their creative projects. I was curious to hear from my fellow podcasters whether any reflections on that, around learning, teaching, pedagogy? Elaine: I have three overall reflections. One of them is art as spiritual practice—not like spirituality through art, but art making itself as a deep form of spiritual practice. That's something that came up for me. So chanting, one could chant and make art or one could just make art also. And I think that artistic practice is a deep form of contemplation and then intentionality as well and opening up to something new or something that wasn't there before. The second thing I was thinking of was Reyhab talking about … one of Reyhab’s big goals is to integrate arts and academia and part of what makes academia a little stifling is this desire to cut yourself off from emotions and feeling. And so I think artistic practice as our scholarship is a way to connect with feelings a lot more than maybe traditional papers or something like that. Then, Chenxing, from your episode, I think I feel inspired by your work with high school students. Because as PhD students, well, I'm soon to be graduating, but you know, interfacing with undergraduates mostly is a very particular time in life. And I somehow feel like some of the magic has been sucked out of people through the undergraduate experience. And high school might be a time that’s much more ripe for discovery and exploration. And, you know, planting the seeds earlier on for being in community, I think that will help to set people up when they move on to, if they do choose to go to a four year university or something like that, to then form those connections and those communities there. So I was thinking, yeah, it's actually, I haven’t explored this before, but working with a younger generation. would probably be very enlivening for teachers as well in thinking about artistic approaches to pedagogy or site visits and things like that. Xianfeng: Yeah, pedagogy is important also in religious space. Karen mentioned different ways of knowing about Buddhism, about practicing Buddhism. Like you don't always have to like to sit every day to be a Buddhist. And for some people they prefer listening to Dhamma talks to know why they’re to do what they're told to do. Still there are others, I know they just cannot sit in the classroom. They’d rather spend the whole time working in the kitchen. That allows them the opportunity to spend time with the community, to engage with their community in another way. Like one of Chenxing’s students mentioned, he went to the temple, not only for the chanting, but also to chop vegetables. Doing the service work is also practicing Buddhism in a way. Because the practice of serving others is at the same time, how to say, like go of your own ego, putting other’s needs in front of what I want, what I like, what I need. Why the Buddha opened, we say 八万四千法门, the 84,000 Dhamma doors. They are for individuals with various preferences, just so they could be connected to the community, to the practice, and to the teaching. Chanhee: Well, one thing I want to add is that many of our podcast episodes highlight a different way of engaging with the knowledge, whether that is teaching or learning. For example, Chenxing, your audio essay reminds us of the significance of experiencing the site–experiencing the texture of the temple building, the smells of burning lights on the altar, and the feeling of sitting there facing Buddha and other people in the temple. Helena helped us to remember the necessity of experiencing Indigenous and ancestral knowledge–how this can be a form of healing, both for those who suffered under or participated in colonial history. And Julian shared his insights of experiencing seemingly contradictory feelings of historical figures through music. So I think we all need different ways of experiencing knowledge, which will only enrich our lives and generate more productive and meaningful conversations. Elaine: Also, I want to add for our listeners, I think we created these podcasts in hopes that teachers, students alike would listen to this and come up with your own topics of conversations and reflect on these themes. We wholeheartedly invite those conversations and also for you guys to make your own podcasts, soundscapes, and interviews. I think the doing of this is a kind of pedagogy, as Chenxing said, a kind of artistic practice in itself. Chenxing: So, dear listeners, we look forward to listening to your future podcasts! But for now, thanks for listening to this introductory episode of Cha-Tea Circle. We hope you'll check out all of the episodes in the series that we've been discussing. This is Chenxing. Chanhee: This is Chanhee. Xianfeng: This is Xianfeng. Elaine: And this is Elaine. All: Bye, everyone.