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Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions-of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry-affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.

Cambodian Americans --- Refugees --- Citizenship --- Birthright citizenship --- Citizenship (International law) --- National citizenship --- Nationality (Citizenship) --- Political science --- Public law --- Allegiance --- Civics --- Domicile --- Political rights --- Displaced persons --- Persons --- Aliens --- Deportees --- Exiles --- Cambodians --- Ethnology --- Social conditions. --- Ethnic identity. --- Civil rights --- Social aspects --- Law and legislation --- Oakland (Calif.) --- City of Oakland (Calif.) --- Ethnic relations. --- Américains d'origine cambodgienne --- Réfugiés --- Social conditions --- Ethnic identity --- Conditions sociales --- Identité ethnique --- Family. --- Cambodians. --- Adaptation. --- Refugees. --- Américains d'origine cambodgienne --- Réfugiés --- Citoyenneté --- Droits --- Conditions sociales. --- Identité collective. --- american citizenship. --- american culture. --- american dream. --- american institutions. --- anthropology. --- asia scholars. --- buddhism. --- buddhists. --- california. --- cambodian americans. --- cambodian refugees. --- citizenship experience. --- cultural anthropologists. --- demographic studies. --- ethnic tensions. --- fieldwork. --- globalization. --- minority citizens. --- modern history. --- new america. --- nonfiction study. --- oakland. --- pol pot regime. --- race and class. --- regional history. --- san francisco. --- social sciences. --- southeast asia. --- textbooks. --- welfare. --- Citoyenneté --- Identité collective.