[#2] SECOND SPRING: Chenxing Han
An Interview with the author of "Be The Refuge" and "one long listening", and organizer of the May We Gather national memorials for Asian American Buddhist ancestors
I'm happy to introduce you today to Chenxing Han, who authored an amazing work of research and memoir in 2021 called Be The Refuge: Raising The Voices of Asian American Buddhists.
Over the past two years, Be The Refuge has played a critical role in elevating the experiences and voices of the invisibilized majority of Buddhists in America who are of Asian descent. (As many as 70% of American Buddhists are Asian, mostly attending Asian-dominant temples.)
Chenxing has been a tireless advocate, addressing the harmful myths and appropriation that are a part the erasure of Asian people and culture from the American Buddhist landscape. But her work is also beautiful and personal. In the case of Be The Refuge, her astute observations and research are interwoven with loving vignettes from her interviews with 89 Asian American Buddhists, many of whom (like me) also became friends.
Chenxing has a new memoir out now about her explorations of identity, friendship, and grieving as an Asian American Buddhist chaplain working on an oncology unit. It's called one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care and I hope, after reading our interview below, you'll go buy it and find other ways to support her invaluable work.
What was your early experience, your childhood experience, of spirituality or faith like?
I grew up in an environment that was a little bit cautious at best and maybe allergic to organized religion. That said, I think I was just interested in questions of meaning and spirituality, life and death from a young age.
I remember being an immigrant in this country in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. I was an only child so there was a lot of time to reflect. There was a lot of quiet in my life, as well as just moments of aloneness, so I found myself grappling with bigger questions of loss and grief.
That sounds very heavy for a child, but part of that I think is triggered by an immigrant experience. At the age of four, I left China and lost—in a way—family, language, a culture, and an entire environment. Some of the questions that generated were curiosities around this new country and its new language, and its new social relationships in particular.
From a young age, I had these questions around race, because I would observe racial dynamics, being in a predominantly Black inner city school and just noticing what was going on there. All that became tied up in questions of spirituality and meaning in that it seemed people's lives were not always valued equally.
You're triggering a lot of memories of my own childhood as an only immigrant child in the United States. Definitely there is something to all of the time alone. I don't think even explicitly knowing life and death, grief and loss, those issues did come up in a childlike way.
What about how you found Buddhism, specifically, and what your path to and then within Buddhism has been?
I write about that in my book, Be The Refuge, a little bit. I took a gap year between high school and college. I started in Australia, then spent the bulk of the time in Asia, both in Shanghai where I was teaching English and then I took this trip through China and Hong Kong, as well as Thailand, Nepal and Tibet. I encountered Buddhism in various forms throughout.
I read Siddhartha In high school and I knew even then that I was interested in Buddhism, but wasn't quite sure how to put that into practice or manifest that connection. It was really seeing Buddhist art and architecture, and especially just people—the way that they tended to the temples and related to these spaces, whether that was making offerings or chanting or conducting rituals. That really left an impression and made me really interested in Buddhism.
I still feel very much like a baby Buddhist on the path. But I feel so held by so many wonderful teachers, so many wonderful friends, very much held in this web of interrelationship.
Buddhism invites us to think differently about the self, instead of a very Western or individuated kind of self. And it's invited me into playing and experimenting with what it looks like to be a very relational self. That's something that I really enjoy. I think it's a very creative and expansive and kind of lifegiving position to take. So that's something I just play around with. And something that I was playing a lot with in my forthcoming memoir, one long listening.
I may be misremembering, but I feel like you've described yourself sometimes as being more culturally Buddhist.
You know, I think all Buddhism is cultural Buddhism. What I talk about in Be The Refuge is, "What does it mean to have a culturally engaged Buddhism?" There are certain forms of Buddhism that pretend they have no culture, which I would say is a kind of cultural disengagement.
I think that my relationship to Buddhism has been—probably as it has been through history—brought forth by other people inviting me in. Especially as someone who was not raised Buddhist, that's been such a gift. I often envy those who were raised in a Buddhist household in America insofar as they were born into networks of relationships that gave them a Buddhist sensibility or ethos, even if they might not, today, identify as Buddhist.
“I think all Buddhism is cultural Buddhism. What I talk about in Be The Refuge is, "What does it mean to have a culturally engaged Buddhism?" There are certain forms of Buddhism that pretend they have no culture, which I would say is a kind of cultural disengagement.”
Could you talk a little bit about how your book, Be The Refuge, came about?
After I graduated from college, my grandmother was dying and I spent the last few months of her life with her. That was a very liminal time where I was exploring things like hospice and also Buddhist chaplaincy at the Sati Center and the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. That happened to count for credit at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, the oldest Buddhist seminary in the United States, incorporated in 1969 (but really with roots in 1949 as the Berkeley Study Center).
It was so humbling to go there because I realized, while Jodo Shin Buddhism has been in this country since the 19th century, well over 100 years, I really hadn't encountered Jodo Shin and hadn't heard so much about them. This started to make me think about the erasure and invisibility of Asian American Buddhists.
It was 2012 and I had to come up with a master's thesis topic for the Buddhist studies program, and I was also doing a certificate in Buddhist chaplaincy. Then, the Pew Forum report came out that said, although only about 1% of Americans are Buddhist, two thirds of those are of Asian heritage. That was a correction to these incorrect statistics that the Pew Forum put out in 2008, which are still, unfortunately, cited, that suggested White converts were the majority of American Buddhists. The big difference between those two studies was that the second one engaged a lot more Asian languages.
I'll bracket that conversation about who counts as an American Buddhist for another time. But I think it was the confluence of those things, as well as the Angry Asian Buddhist blog by the late Aaron Lee that brought about Be The Refuge. Aaron was just really the first young adult Asian American Buddhist I heard talking about these issues of race and representation. There was someone out there doing this work, someone saying, "You know, the real way to get to know this community is to go out and talk to them."
I took that to heart and just started interviewing young adults, including you! And 89 people later, I realized, oh, this is a lot of material and this has really outgrown the confines of a master's thesis. And, though it took many more years, that bulk of voices became Be The Refuge.
I know from past conversations that your new memoir, one long listening, had origins out of that same time period. Can you talk a little bit about how one long listening came to be?
So, after I graduated from the Institute of Buddhist Studies, I did a yearlong residency in hospital chaplaincy known as Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE, predominantly on an oncology unit. As part of CPE, you do a lot of writing. And so I was writing and reflecting on the experience, especially as an Asian American and Buddhist, sort of a double minority in the context of that work. And then a year after that, a very dear friend of mine, Amy, passed away from leukemia at the age of 29. Her death sparked another strand in the book. It became a memoir—as the subtitle says, a memoir of grief, friendship and spiritual care.
It was about a nine year process to complete this memoir, as well. There are letters to Amy and stories of the hospital patients, letters to my ancestors and family. It's multilingual, with pieces of Mandarin, Shanghainese, Thai, and Khmer. There are questions about translation and spiritual care—and untranslatability, which I think are also very much relevant when thinking about Buddhism.
There was a time when I thought, if doing chaplaincy had prepared me for nothing else except to be at Amy's bedside during that weekend when she died, that had been the most profound gift and the most profound education. Amy made really beautiful collages. She would sometimes spend years on a collage for a person. In a way, one long listening was my collage of words to her. It was also my love letter to her, and my love letter to the patients, the staff and the family, to grief itself, and to my ancestors.
Amy made really beautiful collages. She would sometimes spend years on a collage for a person. In a way, one long listening was my collage and words to her. It was also my love letter to her, and my love letter to the patients, the staff and the family, to grief itself, and to my ancestors.
I know you're always working on a lot of things at the same time, so can you talk about your current projects? What are you currently working on?
Well, today—the day that we're doing this interview, March 16, 2023—marks the two year anniversary of the Atlanta area shootings. I'm part of a collective called May We Gather that held a national Buddhist memorial for Asian American ancestors on the 49th day after the shootings. Following these Buddhist rhythms of remembrance, on the third year anniversary, exactly a year from today, March 16 2024, we'll be hosting a national Buddhist pilgrimage in Antioch, California. So we've been working on that.
The greatest project to come out of Be The Refuge is called Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard. That project is based out of Phillips Academy Andover, in Andover, Massachusetts. It started when Andy Housiaux, a longtime religion and philosophy teacher there who has been teaching Buddhism for 13 years, reached out to me and said, "You know, I read Be The Refuge and I would like to teach Buddhism differently than I have been—in a way that is more connected to the local communities."
And lo and behold, within a 20 minute radius of Andover, there's easily a dozen temples: Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Chinese. Andy's high school seniors were able to drop all their usual classes and focus for 10 weeks on this one project of Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard. There's a great website that they created, listentolocalbuddhists.org, where all their work over that trimester is recorded. And we're just about to launch year two of L2BB, as we call it. There are other kindred projects around the nation that are doing similar things, and we're in conversation with them.
There's a constant invitation to spiritual friendship, just to realizing how fortunate we are to live in a time and in a country that's incredibly Buddhistically diverse. The plurality of it is kind of mind blowing. And there's so much to be gained by learning from each other about our own shared aspirations—and about our differences as well.
“We're so fortunate to live in a time and in a country that's incredibly Buddhistically diverse. The plurality of it is kind of mind blowing. And there's so much to be gained by learning from each other about our own shared aspirations—and about our differences as well.”
You spend most of your time telling the stories of other Asian American Buddhists, or giving a platform. But what's your experience of being an Asian American Buddhist been?
That experience at first was a bit uncertain or lonely, when it was just reading the Angry Asian Buddhist. It started with some loneliness, and then just curiosity like, I think I'd heard the term Asian American Christian, what did it mean to be an Asian American Buddhist?
The term invites me into thinking about Pan Asian solidarities, which, of course, then just lead to Pan BIPOC, and just pan racial solidarities. And then also pan Buddhist solidarity. So over time, it's become quite joyful, actually.
Do you have a wish or a hope for the Asian American Buddhist community and then do you have a wish or a hope for American Buddhism?
I do. I must if I'm doing this work.
My aspirations? More connection, more discovery, more recovery of histories of lineages. More mutual support. Especially more spaces in real life where people can gather, in addition to those virtual spaces.
And then for American Buddhism, at large, I would love for us to recognize how truly diverse and pluralistic it is, and how much potential that has. I keep hearing this in the American Buddhist community, that there's so much potential here. And actually, we're not reaching it yet.
I think a lot of your work, Cristina really pushes us towards that. How do we really tap into that potential and cultivate it and train it? And I really admire the work you do for that reason, that it's this collective effort. And I think that some of the ways American Buddhism has been represented or misrepresented, and in particular, the erasure of Asian Americans, which is historical and ongoing, it hurts the collective. And I think it's so exciting to be here during a time where there's multiple people who are really allied with this cause and understanding that it's not about upholding Asian Americans as better than other types of Buddhists, but really trying to weave them back into the fabric of American Buddhism.
Another good read. Thank you.