As cultural anthropologists increasingly focus on the advantages of multisited, event-based, and problem-focused ethnography, I find it refreshing to encounter a text that refuses to give up on the more traditional strengths of the field. That is, one endeavoring to understand how immigrants negotiate becoming American by way of that whole set of mediated concerns anthropologists call “culture”: kinship, economics, politics, gender, sexualities, labors, ethics, religion, ritual, and even dress. Doing what Louisa Schein has called “itinerant ethnography”—not living in the community but visiting the field episodically, focusing on institutions and interviews with families—Aihwa Ong is able to collect an amazing amount of data, illustrative and compelling in their ability to shed light on these immigrants’ experiences. Buddha Is Hiding offers a rich and thorough example of the best that a more contemporary approach to ethnography can offer while feeling methodologically old, solid, and familiar.

How does an immigrant community navigate the cultural demands of an amorphous world like California (or the United States) in ways that are both strikingly similar to other ethnic immigrant groups and unique, given the particular histories, racialized social environments, and religious and ethical orientations they have brought with them or that they encounter? This question is the central concern of Buddha Is Hiding, argued in and through a metanarrative concern with “citizenship.” “Citizenship,” Ong writes, is “less a legal category than a set of self-constituting practices in different settings of power.” And “power” for Ong, following Michel Foucault, is a “social technology that derived unity not from a process of homogenization or totalization, but from transversality—from passing through individuals, inducing both being-made and self-making” (p. 276). For Ong, this means accessing the processes by which immigrants are asked to create and re-create their identities by way of the nation-state. As one might expect given the extensive corpus of Ong’s previous research, her concerns lean toward political economy, but her portrayals offer much more than that. For Ong’s Cambodian informants, becoming American means, first, remembering the past—how life under Pol Pot induced certain possibilities for engagement between parents and children, for labor and agriculture, for relations to the state that were violent and yet organized, desperate and yet hopeful. These self-making practices also constituted a kind of governmentality—a way of being Cambodian in a former land and from the past—that Ong makes available to readers through living memories of immigrants (as well as a thorough reading of the anthropology and history of Cambodia and immigrants’ experiences of war and refugee life). Ong is able to track these pasts as emergent in problems of the present. Cambodians find that their ethical, generational, domestic, and even sexual identities are placed under a different kind of scrutiny as they become immigrants who are asked to be different in the United States, who are forced to enter treacherous territories on the margins of mainstream white culture to be some kind of “American” or, as Homi Bhabha said of the colonial predicament, “almost the same but not quite, almost the same but not white.” Through vivid accounts from men, women, young persons, social workers, and monks, readers get a sense of the uniqueness of these immigrants’ efforts to accomplish this. Stated more bluntly by one particularly insightful young Cambodian man, “To be American is not an easy thing” (p. 219).

The most obvious difficulties faced by Cambodian refugees in the United States have to do with intergenerational conflicts, shifting gender norms and opportunities, problems of economic marginalization, and problems of racial discrimination—all of which are mediated by state interventions in making these immigrants into “good citizens.” The interplay of what anthropologists once called “structures,” whether economic, political, biomedical, or religious, are made visible as Foucauldian sites of power—as encounters with social workers, health advisors, legal counselors, employers, religious leaders, job markets that have no place for them, gang members who promise ethnic and financial security, and the Mormon church, which actively converts them.

One of the strengths of Ong’s analysis is its ability to provide a sense of the particularities of Cambodian experiences and a kind of “Cambodian culture” without rendering the community itself uniform and essential. These immigrants work through whole clusters of opportunities to actualize themselves in new ways, through assemblages, in Ong’s words, of ethical possibilities. In an institution-based ethnographic approach, these ethical mediations reveal much about how nation-states function to create and re-create subjectivity in immigrants. So, becoming Mormon means for some of these immigrants entirely shedding their understanding of Buddhism, whereas for others it means creatively reading one religion into the other, Buddhism into Mormonism or other Christianities and vice versa. Similarly, the involvement of social workers in family life results for some in new opportunities for restructuring domestic gender and generational dynamics, whereas for others, it becomes a means of reinforcing traditional relations of hierarchy and community. Economic marginalization results, for some, in poverty, welfare, and the endless scramble for wage, or piecemeal, labor and the consequent tolls it takes on traditional family structure, independence, health, and sense of well-being, whereas for others, it enables a flourishing of kin-based reciprocal and culturally embedded practices of entrepreneurialism. That gang membership is as much a part of the immigrant experience as is the rise to riches and financial patronage by way of ownership of doughnut franchises shows a thoroughness in empirical work but also a way of diverting suggestions that culture is never really processual and iterative in Ong’s approach but, rather, given as a set of ethical possibilities that now increasingly define the experience of “being” Cambodian American.

Buddha Is Hiding provides a refreshing set of insights about not only the Asian immigrant experience in the United States but also about how to read these experiences in relation to literatures on migration, diaspora, cultural studies, ethnic studies, globalization, and history. Ong is a master at tackling the scholarly materials available for making sense of her ethnographic subject while not overburdening her illustrations with overly theorized, ethicized, and policyized frameworks. Her contribution is in providing insights from the ground up—from the experiences of real people in real, sometimes tragic and other times wildly successful, immigrant experiences—before turning to her larger theoretical contributions. Namely, to suggest that, as researchers, we can benefit from rethinking our ideas about citizenship as an active process of self-actualization in and through engagements with official social institutions, economies, markets, and religions and from viewing it instead in terms of ethical possibilities—as ways of making ethical sense of relations with one another, with one’s community, with a state that offers conditional support as a reward for good citizenship, with markets that would otherwise neglect and oppress immigrants. Thus, Ong’s title, Buddha Is Hiding suggests not a disappearance of traditional values embedded in that cluster of Buddhist cultural norms that still can be seen and felt at critical junctures of family life but, rather, a reframing of these values in ways that enable them to reflect on past norms while embracing new ones. These concerns become stunningly apparent in people like Joe, a 17-year-old Cambodian American gang member who, Ong writes, was attired in “a large torn T-shirt, earrings, low-slung baggy khakis, and heavy shoes—sweeping debris in his uncle’s doughnut shop. Joe had a silver Cambodian earring in one hear and a Buddha amulet on a gold chain, and with his spiky, colored hair and insouciant look, he could have posed for a Benetton ‘cross-cultural’ commercial” (p. 240) One wonders whether the hoped-for return of a Buddha who has not disappeared but is merely “hiding” on the part of the more nostalgic monks or elderly Cambodian Americans will ever be actualized in youth like Joe or in his compatriots who have converted entirely to Mormonism. But for Joe, that question is irrelevant because, as Ong suggests, the Buddha dangling on the end of his gold chain is for Ong one of the most important signs that he is able to stylize himself as an individualized, urban, masculine youthful consumer who is “distinctive, stylish, subversive and definitely not white” (p. 240). Hiding or just barely visible in other ways, this Buddha speaks worlds to the value of good ethnographic research and the ways it can show subtlety of interactions of power, culture, and ethics in the immigrant experience.