The Angsty Buddhist: “Avatar” & Telling Our Own Stories

This is the fourth and last essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.

I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender because everyone I knew seemed to be binging it to soothe their pandemic-related anxieties. By the first episode, I was hooked. Instead of wallowing in my own thoughts, I got caught up in the story of Aang traveling through the four nations so that he could master the elements in time to defeat the evil Fire Nation. I loved Appa, Aang’s sky bison, who reminded me of a giant flying mop dog. When people asked how my day was going, I sent them screenshots of Appa eating hay.

I knew that the show’s creators and most of the voice actors were white, but I didn’t think about it much. I’d read a couple articles online about how the show drew from Inuit and Asian cultures in a respectful way. I really can’t speak on the way any other culture was represented, but I couldn’t find anything egregious about the ways Chinese culture was used (also I’m fourth-generation U.S.-born, so what do I know?). Some of the accents certain characters had, like the tour guides in Ba Sing Se, bugged me — If they’re speaking their native language, then why would they have accents like that? — but no one was running around bucktoothed making “ching chong” noises. I can’t have standards that are too high, right?

I read in one essay that the show’s creators had been getting into yoga and wanted to do something “Asian influenced.” This was followed quickly with assurances that they had carefully researched the cultures they had based the show on and had approached them with a great deal of respect. I know that was supposed to put me at ease, but I couldn’t help but think of the white boys I’d met while studying abroad in Beijing, how they were meticulous in their language study, knew a lot about Chinese history, and still didn’t have any sense of the privilege their whiteness and U.S. passports gave them. Knowing that being into yoga had partially inspired the show made me rethink the way Aang was portrayed as a nonviolent, vegetarian monk and the tropes about Asian spiritualities these choices played into. What kind of fantasies about finding enlightenment in the East went into imagining Aang’s character, whether or not these fantasies were conscious or not?

Still, I enjoyed the show. It was fun, and I liked the fact that it was Asian-ish. Even though there wasn’t much culturally in Avatar that I related to — the parts of the Avatar world based on imperial China was, for obvious reasons, nothing like the hipster neighborhood in LA where I grew up — there was something empowering about characters who looked sort of like me being heroes who save the world. Besides anime, where many of the characters look white, I almost never encountered TV shows with Asian heroes as a kid.

There was something empowering about characters who looked sort of like me being heroes who save the world.

“Should I watch it?” my friend Shubo asked over video chat. “A lot of people I know grew up watching it. It’s like an Asian American cultural touchpoint, right?”

Shubo was one of my first close Chinese American friends and someone from whom I’ve learned so much about what it means to defy assimilation. We met our freshman year of college and bonded over cooking lap cheong in the rice cooker my mom had gifted me when I left for school. Unlike me, Shubo grew up around lots of white people, the rich conservative kind, and I’ve always admired how she insists on being Chinese. For her, eating Chinese food and listening to Chinese music were not just about hanging onto culture in the liberal, diversity-training sense but were more a refusal to give herself up..

Talking to Shubo about Avatar, I suddenly felt self-conscious. “Oh yeah it’s really fun,” I said. “Except, like, it was written by two white men.”

“What? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, two white men. Sometimes, they name things in Mandarin and it’s kind of hilarious. Like…” As I spoke, it dawned on me how much these parts of the show had bothered me. “Like there are these two fish who are spirits and they’re named ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ ‘twee’ and ‘la’.”

“Oh.”

“Like, y’know, ‘tuī’ and ‘lā’.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“Also, they swim around in a yin and yang shape.”

“Oh god.”

“Yeah, actually maybe you won’t really like this show?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Part of me wishes I were more like Shubo, firm and insistent in who I am, but I’m still an Avatar fan. My partner and I recently discussed buying an expensive Appa-shaped rug on Etsy for our new apartment. Like many other people who don’t see themselves reflected in mainstream narratives, I am good at picking out the pieces that seem like they kind-of-maybe fit and making it work.

I’m sure someone who is better at describing the difference between “appreciation” and “appropriation” could beat me in an argument about whether or not Avatar is “respectful,” which is code for whether or not it is racist. I don’t think this matters much. I think the show is racist, and also I like it. That doesn’t make the racism okay, but that’s where we are.

I think it’s more interesting that Avatar was such an important show to lots of Asian Americans growing up. I use the term “Asian American” cautiously and only when there isn’t a more specific term to use. Most of the friends who I’ve talked to about Avatar are East Asian but not all. This might have more to do with who I am friends with than anything else. These friends all mentioned liking the fact that the show seemed Asian, that there was something empowering about watching a show that elevated cultures they’d been told were inferior to white ones. There wasn’t much else that provided the same sense of recognition. I still don’t think there’s much now, besides things like Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh Off the Boat, which I mostly feel embarrassed to be associated with. It makes sense that Avatar felt special.

I also wonder how it affected the Asian American people who grew up watching Avatar to feel so connected to a white fantasy, well-researched though it might be. If stories are both reflections of and guideposts for our lives, then what does it mean for these stories to have been created by white men? Maybe the important question isn’t whether or not the creators of Avatar were “respectful” but why two white men were allowed to create and profit off of an “Asian-influenced” show in the first place? Especially when that would have been impossible for an Asian or Asian American person to do at the time, probably even now. What stories have we lost because they couldn’t find a platform? I think that’s the most fucked up part.

Maybe the important question isn’t whether or not the creators of Avatar were “respectful” but why two white men were allowed to create and profit off of an “Asian-influenced” show in the first place?

I think Asian American stories are difficult to narrate because our histories have been erased and the stories we’ve been given to understand ourselves are inadequate. When COVID gave rise to increased xenophobia against people perceived as East Asian, there were bizarre articles in the white liberal media that talked about racism being a new experience for Asian Americans. There were also calls for solidarity from some East Asian people that failed to acknowledge the ways we have failed to be in solidarity with other communities. In the second example, most of this is about people owning up to their privileges, but I think that for some, this would be easier if they had more access to our histories.

We also don’t have enough stories that allow us to understand the smaller, lighter parts of our lives. Like the time in high school my friend and I went to a Thai restaurant. The waiter warned her that the noodle dish she wanted was spicy, and my friend laughed. “I can handle spicy. I’m Korean.” She pointed at me. “They might not be able to, though. They’re Chinese.” The food ended up being way too hot for my friend, and she spent the entire meal fanning her mouth and drinking water. I was fine because I didn’t order anything spicy.

I want more stories like this — the kind where race and culture are not just about trauma but about the in-jokes that exist within and between different Asian American communities. These are the kinds of stories that cannot be learned from academic research, and even if they could, it would be offensive if anyone else tried to tell them.

The best stories, even ones for children, reflect the world that we live in and provide lessons for how to live our lives. What if instead of watching Avatar, there had been not just one show but many shows created by people with a variety of “Asian American” experiences? How would that have allowed us to articulate our own stories, both the larger political narratives and the funny moments? Could this have been a small part of how we imagined a different future?

In college, I wrote short stories about lesbian preteens growing up in the Japanese American Buddhist Church. I was starting to figure out that I wasn’t exactly straight and writing these stories were part of how I processed this. When I think about these stories, though, I’m struck by the fact that they were nothing like my life. The girls in these stories were beginning to recognize their attraction to other girls, usually in some sort of suburban middle school locker room setting. The narrator always had an illicit relationship with another girl in the Buddhist Church that she had to hide from the community. When I workshopped these stories, my mostly white classmates highlighted things like the descriptions of altars or the time we made mandalas at summer camp. This is fascinating, they said. I want more details.

I realize now that I was recreating narratives of queerness, Asian American-ness, and Buddhism that I had absorbed from mainstream culture. I don’t identify as a lesbian, mostly because I’m not a woman and fall somewhere along the lines of bi/pan/fluid/generally queer. But back then, I didn’t know what nonbinary meant and everything I heard about queerness involved realizing that you were attracted to the “same sex” at a young age, so that’s what I wrote. I’d also heard that coming out was hard and that Asian communities are more homophobic than white ones, so I wrote that into my stories, too. I remember feeling guilty about this because I knew I was lucky that the community I’d grown up in wasn’t really homophobic, more like the cishet equivalent of white liberals. I wasn’t sure how to write about that, though. I wasn’t even sure if it was a legitimate story to tell at all.

I knew I was lucky that the community I’d grown up in wasn’t really homophobic, more like the cishet equivalent of white liberals. I wasn’t sure how to write about that, though. I wasn’t even sure if it was a legitimate story to tell at all.

This essay series is about Buddhism, but mostly, it’s been my attempt to tell parts of my own story that I haven’t known how to explain, the parts of myself that are obscured by stereotype, erasure, and fantasy. I think that this is an important thing for all of us to do, so that white men who are into yoga don’t get the final say in imagining our realities.

I still like Avatar and will occasionally put on an episode when I’m stressed. When the show came out, it was one of the few representations of something vaguely Asian on TV, which is ridiculous, but I think that’s still important. This isn’t because I think we owe anything to the show’s creators. To me, they’re like other white people who profit off of BIPOC cultures without regard for the actual people these cultures come from. But I think Avatar is important because for all of show’s problems, it allows people usually excluded from our narratives to see themselves as heroes and protagonists. What I’m interested in is not Avatar itself but what we do with the sense of agency it gives, how it allows us to critique the structures that exist and envision our own worlds.

In the end, I’m more excited about the stories Asian American people tell about ourselves: the books and poems and histories that are buried but still there if you look, the artists that are creating work today, the conversations with friends about dating apps and the food we ate as kids — funny and sad and angry and joyful stories that all contradict each other as they unfold.

The Angsty Buddhist: Chronic Pain & Trying Not To Be A White Yoga Lady

This is the third essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.

I usually think of 23 as when my body started to rebel, but it could have been earlier. Before that, there was the drive between San Francisco and LA where I felt like my entire body was being contorted by the seatbelt. There was the way I couldn’t understand how other people carried shoulder bags — didn’t that make them feel lopsided? There was the way I flinched when other people tried to touch me. My mom always said I was tense, even when I was a little kid. She’d squeeze my shoulders, and they’d be like cement. When I tell people about this, I laugh. Isn’t it funny that I’ve never been able to relax?

But 23 was when my body and its tension became the center of my life — how I scheduled my day, chose what I wore, and spent most of my critical thinking skills trying to figure out how to manage. More than my angst about gender, what propelled me towards men’s clothing was that the pants have pockets and it hurt too much to carry a purse.

I also thought I was making it all up and didn’t mention it to my friends, even ones that I saw almost every day. You’re just doing this for attention, I told myself, even though I wasn’t getting any attention because I refused to talk about it. The couple of times, I did bring it up vaguely, people dismissed me by saying I probably spent too much time on the computer, which I’m sure I do, but not more than anyone else my age.

In the midst of this, or maybe because of it, I started going to meditation sessions at an acquaintance’s Zen Center. The Zen Center practiced a type of Buddhism that a Korean monk had started in Providence, Rhode Island because he thought Brown students would be the most receptive to his teachings (And they have money, I thought). This type of Zen gained popularity in the U.S. and Europe before making its way back to Asia. At the time, I was living in Hong Kong, and even though I didn’t connect with this version of Buddhism and chafed at the fact that many of its leaders were white men, I reserved my biggest judgments because there were many people I met there whom it seemed to be helping.

What surprised me was how much meditation soothed my chronic pain. Afterwards, I walked back to the minibus feeling light, reveling in the fact that I was not thinking about the knots in my back, at least for the moment. I started researching mindfulness after that, trying to see if there were other things I could do to manage my pain. Yoga was something that always came up.

I started doing those white lady yoga videos everyday. Sometimes, when the teacher would start chanting or say “namaste: at the end, I would groan performatively or mutter “fuck you”

I felt conflicted about this. I didn’t want to be like a white yoga lady whose life centered around cultural appropriation. As someone who grew up with Buddhism and feels pretty pissy about white Buddhism, it felt hypocritical to try yoga. In the end, though, my own self-interest won out, and I found a short yoga video on YouTube. The teacher was a white lady who liked to talked a lot about self-love. I followed her instructions about when to inhale and exhale grudgingly.

Afterwards, my muscles did feel looser, and I could go a few hours without really thinking about my body. I started doing those white lady yoga videos everyday. Sometimes, when the teacher would start chanting or say “namaste” at the end, I would groan performatively or mutter “fuck you,” which made me feel a little less embarrassed about how much this was helping me.

Two of the most common questions I get when I tell people about my chronic pain are “Have you seen a doctor?” and “Have you tried yoga?” I hate both of these questions.

I have seen a doctor, many times. Because I’m privileged to have insurance, I feel bad complaining about the care I’ve received. Whenever my doctor doctor finishes examining my spine or the x-ray comes back clear, I feel like a fraud. “You should just take more breaks when you’re working,” she says, misgendering me often during our conversations because I’m too wimpy to tell her my pronouns and the intake sheet only offers two options for gender. When I say that I do take breaks, something that always makes me nervous because I don’t want my boss to think I’m slacking off, my doctor says, “Are you stressed? It’s probably stress. Try getting a standing desk.”

Being asked if I’ve seen a doctor annoys me because I feel like the people asking think that I’m being lazy or silly for being in pain — just go see a doctor, as if this will fix everything. When people ask if I’ve tried yoga (or meditation or acupuncture), it’s usually because they don’t know what else to say. I think it freaks people out to have to sit with someone’s pain and not be able to do anything. It freaks me out, too. That doesn’t make the questions about yoga any less irritating.

I find it interesting, though, that many of the miracle cures that people offer up when there isn’t a clear diagnosis are from “the East.” It feels connected to the ways we are always trying to find healing in the Other.

I find it interesting, though, that many of the miracle cures that people offer up when there isn’t a clear diagnosis are from “the East.” It feels connected to the ways we are always trying to find healing in the Other. So much of the way we characterize Eastern medicine in this country, regardless of what culture or spirituality it comes from, is as something spiritual and holistic, collapsing the divide between body and mind. Probably this is sometimes true and someone will whitesplain why this is so in the comments. But I think a lot of this is orientalism — Asia is too big of a place, with so many different and conflicting peoples and cultures, to make sweeping generalizations like that.

I think that these ideas do not tell us anything about what defines “Eastern” cultures and does tell us more, at least subconsciously, about what we’re lacking. What do we do with pain that is ongoing? What is the connection between emotions and the physical body? How do we talk about this in a way that is not gaslighting and dismissive of the often very physical causes of pain? I don’t know, and I see how it seems so easy to look to the Other — the Buddhist nun, the Hindu goddess, that incense burner on sale at Ross — and ask them to hold that for us.

“Healing” is a buzzword in queer and trans spaces. This makes sense, given how much there is to heal from. The first people I felt comfortable talking to about chronic pain were other trans Asian Americans. They seemed to understand, without explanation, the way that the body is shaped by everything it has experienced, its traumas and its joys.

I hear a lot of people talking about ancestors a lot, about lineage and intergenerational healing. I’ve been told I should try to reclaim my ancestral healing practices, and this is something I would like to do. When I try to learn about Chinese things, it feels performed. I wonder if me learning qigong is any better than yoga, and the other day while my partner and I were trying to learn how to make an herbal soup, we were more amused by the fact that one of the herbs was called “Semen Euryales” than anything else.

Sometimes, these practices helps relieve the pain in my body, and sometimes they also help quiet my anxieties. Other times, they don’t do anything at all. It always seems like a bit of a crapshoot. But even when I don’t feel the immediate effects of these practices or if I’m not doing them “correctly,” there’s something healing about learning practices that were taken away from me and my family because of the violence of white supremacy and assimilation. For me, this makes learning Chinese healing practices feel different than doing white lady yoga, at least just a little.

Once, in a BIPOC writing group that I am part of and love, we had a guest host, who led us through some exercises that we’re definitely culturally appropriated from yoga, before instructing us to free write. The host didn’t mention the cultures that these practices came from or from whom he had learned them. I don’t think he was South Asian, but I could be wrong. I reluctantly did his breathing exercises and felt the muscles in my neck ease.

There was one point where he led everyone in chanting “Om.” When this started, one person left the Zoom call. I am assuming that this person was South Asian because of their name, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe they just left because they had something else to do. Maybe I was just projecting how uncomfortable I was feeling. I should private message one of the hosts and tell them this is a little weird, I thought but didn’t.

At the end of the session, many people thanked the guest host, including me. I was grateful that he’d taken the time to be at our group. I was thinking about how so many BIPOC spaces are held together by people giving their labor for free. Other people liked the exercises. This is the first time I’ve been able to be in my body, someone said, and I felt guilty for being judgy because BIPOC folks are so often cut off from the resources they need to heal. Why would I want to take this away from anyone?

Still, I think it’s important to connect to our own ancestral practices, even if this process is imperfect. I don’t want to become a white yoga lady.

During a recent pain flare, I tried taking a new medication, but all it did was make me drowsy. I tried to meditate but after a few minutes got frustrated and crawled back into bed. I went through my normal procession of unhelpful thoughts, you’re faking this, you’re lazy, get up, but this time, it seemed like it was more out of habit than anything else. Instead of spiraling, I let the thoughts pass. Instead of trying to get up, I let myself cry until I fell asleep.

I think a lot about my own body, whose pain I often try to aggressively breathe and stretch away. What would it mean to stop trying to find a way around this?

I think a lot about how disability justice activists critique the idea of cure. That it is ableist to treat cure as the end goal, that the disabled body is not something to be fixed. I think a lot about my own body, whose pain I often try to aggressively breathe and stretch away. What would it mean to stop trying to find a way around this? This is not to say that I enjoy being in pain. I want to be in less pain — but not in a way that only makes me better at capitalism or that allows me to dissociate from the histories and traumas that caused me to be in pain in the first place.

This is similar to how I think about culture. Even if I am trying to connect to my own cultures and histories, I don’t want to return to an identity that existed before imperialism and diaspora. It would be impossible to erase the ruptures that have already occurred. I’m not sure what the end point of this kind of healing is, or if I should even be thinking about this in terms of end points. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. I still think I need to try.

The Angsty Buddhist: Learning Anger And White Buddhism

This is the second essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.

My college roommate taped a poster of Dalai Lama quotes on the ceiling over her bed so that she could lie down and reflect on them. I didn’t think much of this at a time. She did a lot of things that I thought were odd, like drinking fruit-flavored tea and insisting we end each day by listing three good things that had happened. I was and still am the kind of person who copes by stress eating potato chips and making jokes about death and was kind of annoyed at being forced into gratitude by my roommate every night, but I just went with it.

Despite our differences, A. and I were close for our first year living together, mostly because we went to a school where neither of us felt like we fit in. A. was the child of Ukrainian immigrants, and I was a nonbinary Chinese American weirdo. The school we went to was named after a former owner of the East India Company who made his fortune off of slavery. The students there were wealthier than I had known was possible, the children of CEOs of huge corporations, and Wall Street bankers. One of the kids in our freshman dorm was the son of the third richest man in India. The university used the protection of the student body to justify the heavy policing of the Black and brown communities in the surrounding city. For those of us on financial aid, we were told both directly and indirectly that we should be grateful to the billionaires who had funded our education. Weren’t they generous for deeming us worthy of becoming like them?

I appreciated having A. around because even though both of us were bad at articulating why exactly we felt so uncomfortable in our environment, it was nice to have someone around who also felt awkward trying to make small talk with the children of corporate attorneys. For the most part, we were both absorbed in our own lives. A. threw herself into her pre-med classes and extracurriculars, always running between meetings and study sessions. Because I had grown up middle class, I had more wiggle room to make questionable decisions, like taking an ancient Greek history class and falling in love with a boy who kept miniature busts of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton on his desk. When our schedules overlapped, I liked hanging out with A. Mostly, we sat on our Ikea futon and drank cheap tequila out of mugs we’d stolen from the dining hall while complaining about classes.

A. had grown up Ukranian Catholic and struggled to find religious community during the time we lived together. Every Sunday, she seemed to go to a new church and reported back each week that something had felt off. At the time, I had started sporadically attending meditation sessions held by the campus Buddhist life organization, Indigo Blue. Indigo Blue was run by a white man but one that I actually liked. He was, for the most part, conscious of his privileges as a white man and didn’t presume to know more about Buddhism than any of the students — many of whom were Asian and Asian American. Instead, he opened up the space for people to practice the way they wanted, in keeping with their own cultures and traditions. We didn’t even have to meditate. I appreciated this because I had grown up with a type of Buddhism that didn’t center meditation and I’d felt alienated before in spaces where meditation and Buddhism were equated. Mostly, I spent my time arranging the candles into smiley faces and chattering at anyone who was willing to be distracted. I felt at ease there in a way I didn’t feel anywhere else on campus.

A. attended one of the meditation sessions one night I wasn’t there. Later, she told me, “It just wasn’t what I was looking for.” She seemed mildly offended by this. I remember thinking, So what? What does it matter what you were looking for? It wasn’t made for you.

A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger.

I brushed this off, though. A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger. Wasn’t she going through a lot? I should be less sensitive.

Eventually, A. found a church, sort of. One Sunday, she came back to our room to announce that she had gone to the Black Church at the campus African American Cultural Center. “I know it’s weird,” she said to my perplexed face. “But I really like the preacher.” There were many things I should have said to her then and every Sunday afterwards, when she came back complaining about how people didn’t seem to want her there. “It’s like I’m the white girl,” she said once.

You are the white girl is something I could have said. Maybe you should think about how you being there makes other people feel? What makes you think you’re entitled to be in a Black space? But by that point, our friendship was strained, and I had given up on feeling responsible for her, though in this situation I realize now that I should have tried. I still think about A. sometimes. About how white people turn to cultures and spiritualities that are not their own when they are looking for solace or trying to fill a void in themselves — how they do this carelessly without realizing how violent that can be.

In college, I was obsessed with white Buddhism in a wrathful sort of way. Whenever I heard someone saying something like “Buddhism is a peaceful religion” or “Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion,” I felt myself seething. Then I would tell myself to calm down. What’s wrong with them thinking Buddhism is peaceful? Think about Islamophobia. This is not a big deal. And I thought you didn’t like organized religion, so isn’t it better for it to be a philosophy?

I have always had a hard time allowing myself to feel anger. I always think that I am being selfish for expecting more of people, and I don’t want to center my own feelings when there are other people we should be focusing on. When it comes to the cultural appropriation of Buddhism, I feel this especially — if people are feeling like whatever version of Buddhism they’re practicing helps them, then why should I care? Aren’t there more important things to be thinking about?

Then around my junior year of college, Indigo Blue was suddenly shut down. Students arrived at the shrine for the nightly chanting session and found a sign on the door that said, “This event has been cancelled.” Later, we found out that all Buddhist life activities had been suspended without a replacement and that this had to do with some internal politicking and office drama. After a couple of weeks, a group of students got the head chaplain, a white woman, to meet with them. At the meeting, she started crying and said, “I didn’t know there were any of you going to those Indigo Blue things. How was I supposed to know?”

Eventually, they hired teachers from a nearby Zen center who came to give dharma talks and hold meditation sessions. These teachers were, like the head of Indigo Blue, all white and mostly men. I only went to one of their events, a dharma talk given by one of the white men. The talk started with meditation, but I didn’t feel like closing my eyes and relaxing in that room. I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger. There were other Asian and Asian American students at the talk who I chatted with after, and they seemed to like it. But I never went back.

I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger.

I hadn’t realized how much Indigo Blue had meant to me until it was gone, and the way it had been replaced by this whitewashed version of Buddhism made it hurt even more. Still, I felt self-conscious about how much this had affected me. Why are you so upset about not being able to go to meditation sessions where you didn’t even meditate?

At the same time, I got obsessed with proving that white Buddhism is bad. I took a bunch of classes on Buddhism and latched onto anything that suggested Buddhism wasn’t really peaceful or rational, that it was an actual religion and not “more of a philosophy.” I was really into Buddhist depictions of hell, which often involved demons dismembering humans, and would show pictures of Buddhist hell to people in the dining hall who annoyed me.

Courtesy of Uncanny Japan

But it was in learning about how imperialism has shaped Western ideas of Buddhism that I finally was able to articulate a lot of the problems I had with white Buddhism. In one of my classes, I learned about how Western ideas of Buddhism originated in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century. Leaders there decided to frame Buddhism as rational, not as ritualistic or spiritual as other religions, so that Sri Lanka would seem civilized and worthy of independence from British colonialism. Many of the cultural aspects were toned down in order to be more accessible to a Western audience, instead highlighting practices that we now associate with mindfulness and meditation. These ideas underlie why I think white people find it so easy to claim Buddhism. The version most know was made to appeal to them.I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.

I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.

I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority. Once in a class on Himalayan cultures, we talked about the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa in Bhutan. Most of my classmates were white, and I got the feeling many of them were in the class because they wanted to go backpacking in Nepal or had gotten into Tibetan Buddhism. It was obvious that thinking about the atrocities a Buddhist country had committed against a Hindu minority made them uncomfortable, and they quickly rushed through the discussion and onto the next reading. It made me think about how people would rather cling to their orientalist fantasies than start thinking about the real violence that their fantasies obscure.

When I complain about white Buddhism, sometimes people ask me about white people who practice Buddhism respectfully. I’m not sure what people mean by “respectfully”, but I think they mean learning the correct practices and not simply buying into Western, commercialized ideas of Buddhism. I think this is important, but it isn’t enough.

Right now, I’m quarantining with family in San Francisco Chinatown. People have varying and sometimes infuriating ideas of what it means to behave respectfully towards other people in a pandemic, especially the white people. The white people are much less likely to wear masks, and they always seem to be jogging or walking their dogs, oblivious to the people around them. In the whiter neighborhoods adjacent to Chinatown, there are fewer people on the sidewalks. I guess that’s an excuse to not think about how your body takes up space. Occasionally, I’ll see a white person jogging mask-less towards one of the busier Chinatown streets, and I’ll wonder why I’m so conditioned to shrink out of their way than scream, “Wear a fucking mask!”

It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism.

Then there is the outdoor dining, the white restaurants that spill out on the sidewalks. I try to avoid the streets with lots of these restaurants because it’s impossible to walk on the sidewalk without passing through a large clump of laughing, mask-less white people. I don’t begrudge the restaurants this. It’s not like they have much of a choice. But most of the restaurants in Chinatown don’t have room for outdoor dining. The sidewalks are too narrow. There are too many people walking around. It makes me think again about who is allowed to take up space and the ways in which people take up space can be a matter of survival.

This is similar to how I feel about what it means to practice Buddhism “respectfully.” It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism. Grappling with this is an ongoing process, and it makes me think about the idea of interconnectedness, not in the white hippy way where we hug trees and braid flowers in our hair, but the kind where we refuse to ignore the complex webs of power that we are all oppressed by and complicit in, the ties that bind us all together.

When it comes to Buddhism and cultural appropriation, I still sometimes worry that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that I’m angry for no good reason. But I also think that dismissing my own anger is dismissing the histories that have shaped our ideas of Buddhism in the West — that even if my own anger is only a small blip, it still points to a larger system. Ignoring it is not useful because then I won’t be able to see how I fit in.

I mediate now, not in a religious way but to manage anxiety and chronic pain. Sometimes, the meditation recordings will reference Buddhism, usually when they’re talking about finding calm or learning not to be attached to negative emotions. I’m often invited to “cultivate inner peace,” which I think is funny and kind of irritating. If Buddhism has taught me to cultivate anything, it’s anger, the kind that gives clarity. This isn’t always something that is easy for me to access, but I would never give up the moments I can touch anger, even in exchange for enlightenment or whatever. It is something I will hold onto, earthly and overly attached, as long as I can.

The Angsty Buddhist: Growing Up Kinda-Sorta Buddhist

This is the first essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.

At my Catholic all-girls middle school, I liked to tell people I was Buddhist. It was my feeble attempt at preteen rebellion. When people talked about Jesus, I enjoyed interjecting, “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t believe Jesus was real because I’m Buddhist!”

I didn’t go to a particularly Catholic Catholic school. Many of the students were, like me, the children of gentrifying LA liberals who most likely supported gay marriage but didn’t want their kids going to public middle schools. Our religion class consisted of an old white woman telling us stories about her family and showing us TV movies that she found uplifting. One of our assignments was to draw an angel, and I got an A for copying a picture from a manga.

But it was still more Christianity than I had ever been previously exposed to. Before middle school, I’d only heard a handful of people say they believed in God, and suddenly, the vast majority of my classmates identified as some sort of Christian. At my first prayer service, I was baffled when everyone linked hands and started reciting what I later learned was the Lord’s Prayer. It made me feel out of place and also annoyed that I was expected to know these things. Unlike the Buddhist Church I’d grown up in, there seemed to be an assumption that everyone shared the same beliefs and experiences.

Once, in art class, I told a classmate that I didn’t believe in God because I was a Buddhist. “Oh,” she said, “well, that’s okay. All religions are different ways of worshipping the same God.”

“Buddhists don’t believe in God!” I snapped.

I complained to my mom about this when she picked me up from school. “And then she said, ‘they’re all worshipping the same God! That’s so annoying!’”

“She was just trying to be nice,” my mom said.

“So?”

“Also we’re not Buddhist, just because we spend so much time at the Buddhist Church,” my mom said. “And it’s good for you to learn about Christianity. Most people in this country are some sort of Christian. It’s good to get exposed.”

“Fine,” I said.

I’m still not completely sure how to articulate this, but “all the same God” seemed a lot like the white parents my parents tried to avoid making small talk with, the kind of who liked diversity and holding fundraisers. And even though not all of the kids at my Catholic school were white, there was something about Christianity that reminded me of whiteness, at least in the power it seemed to hold. I was beginning to realize that religion is not just about what an individual person believes, but about culture and race and the larger structures we live in. “I’m Buddhist!” I insisted, by which I really meant, “You don’t know me. Fuck off.”

I went to a preschool at a Japanese American Buddhist Church. My parents chose the school mostly because one of their close friends worked there. Most of the kids my age at the Buddhist Church were fourth-generation Japanese Americans, like I’m fourth-generation Chinese American, and I think that’s one of the reasons why my parents decided to send me there. Most of my Asian American friends, since, have been first and second generation, and though I’m grateful for these friendships, I’m also glad I got to grow up with kids who shared this identity with me.

Mostly, we did normal preschool things like learn the alphabet and pretend to be cats. In elementary school, I joined the church basketball team and went to their summer day camp. The teachers there talked to us about the history of incarceration, and I listened as my classmates talked about how internment had affected their families. As an adult, I learned how Buddhist and Shinto leaders had been targeted during World War II and how Buddhism had sustained people in the camps. After the war, the Buddhist Church was important to supporting community members, many of whom had lost everything. Learning about this has made me think about the role religion and spirituality plays in resistance, how it can strengthen and bond people together.

I was struck by the realization that the pressure I felt so acutely to assimilate, was small compared to what previous generations had faced, what many continue to face.

From being at the Buddhist Church, I learned that preserving culture and community is an act of resistance, even when things like language are lost, and that religion can be an important part of this. I’m nervous about describing these things — the way we used incense, the sound of the chants, the spam musubi we sold at Obon. I don’t want to exoticize anything, especially since this isn’t my culture, but I think these things are important because they are what brought people together and allowed for resistance. .

My first year of college, I used to hide in my dorm room and watch youtube videos of Obon dancing. Surrounded by white people who wore boat shoes and vacationed at Martha’s Vineyard, I wanted something that reminded me of home. I was struck by the realization that the pressure  I felt so acutely to assimilate, was small compared to what previous generations had faced, what many continue to face. But there were people who had still chosen to remember these Obon dances, to create new ones, and to pass them on to their children. I wonder about the strength it takes to choose this.

There isn’t an equivalent of the Japanese American Buddhist Church for my part of Chinese America. My own family’s experience of spirituality is fragmented, with no larger community that we’re drawn to. My great-grandparents immigrated to San Francisco at the height of the Exclusion Era. In a time of massacres against Chinese communities that was encouraged by government policy, many turned to Christian charities to meet their immediate needs. My grandmother and her siblings attended Catholic school, where the nuns gave them their English names. As a preteen, my grandma was baptized along with some of her classmates. When I asked my grandma if her mother was religious, she said, “Maybe in China she was Buddhist. She didn’t do that here, though.”

In a time of massacres against Chinese communities that was encouraged by government policy, many turned to Christian charities to meet their immediate needs.

My grandma says she’s a Catholic, though I’ve never seen her go to church. Once, I asked her if she believes in God, and she replied, “That’s what Catholics are supposed to believe.” She does get excited, however, when I ask her about the figurines from Chinese mythology she has around her house. She doesn’t remember the stories behind most of them, besides vague things like, “Those ones are sort of like angels.” I’ve tried to google some of them and learned that many of them are deities associated with both Buddhism and Daoism. I usually skim through their stories and then forget them. Despite my best intentions, there’s something vaguely dissatisfying about learning about one’s culture from google.

The rest of my family is spiritual in a similarly haphazard way. My parents have statues of Guanyin and Guan Gong in the living room. “For protection,” they say, though I’m not sure any of us know what exactly we’re being protected from. It’s just comforting to have them there. At funerals, our entire extended family will baisin with incense at the gravesite, and then someone will mention Jesus during a speech.

After the funeral, I always ask my mom afterwards, “Uncle so-and-so is Christian?” These were people I’d grown up with, and I’d never heard them mention it before.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “He hung around Cameron House a lot when he was a kid. It’s a Christian community center in Chinatown.”

I don’t think most people in my family are super Christian, but at times, like funerals, it’s a piece of ritual we know how to grab onto. I sometimes wonder what might have been in its place.

When I was a kid, I used to wish I were Japanese American and Buddhist. Mostly, I wanted something more concrete to identify with and a community I could call my own. More recently, though, I’ve been learning to embrace the ways spirituality and culture have come to me in more fragmented and distorted ways. I think that embracing this is a way of remembering the history that brought my family here. Like the history of incarceration shaped the Japanese American Buddhist Church, the history of exclusion has shaped my family’s fragmented spiritual practice. There is knowledge and a sense of connection to the past that is lost, but there is the satisfaction in knowing that the things we manage to hold onto have been fought for and that there is the opportunity to imagine new ways of being.

I’ve been thinking about this more lately — how the communities that raised me have survived past apocalypses and the role that spirituality and shared culture played in inspiring people to imagine something different. I think about the conversations we had about internment and the stories my relatives told me about being detained at Angel Island, how this affected my understanding of structural racism and white supremacy.

If anything, I’m thinking of the ways spirituality tethered people to each other — in the joy of a shared ritual or holding onto a myth or a belief in secret, remembering that your people hold wisdom deeper than the violence that white supremacy can inflict.

There must have been something that allowed people to survive these moments and imagine something better on the other side. I’m having a hard time articulating this outside of the simplistic ideas about faith and believing in higher purpose — I don’t think that’s what I mean. If anything, I’m thinking of the ways spirituality tethered people to each other — in the joy of a shared ritual or holding onto a myth or a belief in secret, remembering that your people hold wisdom deeper than the violence that white supremacy can inflict.

This is not to say that these communities are perfect. I can think of many ways I and the communities I come from failed in large ways. We didn’t talk enough about anti-Blackness and the ways we were complicit in the violence against Black communities. We didn’t talk about Islamophobia or the privilege that East Asians hold when compared to other communities that fall under the umbrella of “Asian Pacific Islander” and the violences we often commit as a result. The spiritual and cultural grounding of our communities is valuable and important but only if it is used to fight for collective liberation.

In middle school, I looked forward to Thursdays because that was basketball practice night at the Buddhist Church. I liked changing out of the gray pleated skirt and white polo shirt that was our uniform into a t-shirt and basketball shorts. I liked leaving Catholic school, with all its unfamiliar rituals, and returning to a community that felt like home.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I don’t really consider myself a Buddhist. I’m not that into organized religion, and the more I learn about the ways Buddhism has been used in violent and oppressive ways, the more reluctant I am to identify with it. Because I’m not Japanese American, I don’t feel comfortable claiming the kind of Buddhism I grew up with. The Buddhism I’ve encountered since then has mostly been filtered through whiteness: the chapter on Asia in my seventh grade history book, white professors, white queers who meditate, Zen-branded oil emulsifiers, shower gels, and Whole Foods muffins.

Once, when I was a college student, I was wandering around in the snow feeling sorry for myself. I’d heard that the chaplain’s office was hosting a dharma talk, and I went because it seemed like a good way to channel my angst. The person giving the talk was a white man in robes from the local Zen center. I don’t remember what the talk was on, something about being present or dealing with anger or whatever. I do remember it being vaguely self-helpy and mansplainy in a way that I’ve come to associate with white Buddhists and white people in general. I left the talk confused, wondering if I was being melodramatic for disliking the guy so much and also frustrated that he was my access point to Buddhism.

Now that most of the people around me are trans and queer, everyone I know seems to be honoring their ancestors, making altars, and insisting on rituals. I used to think this was weird and depending on the situation, culturally appropriative. Sometimes, I still think these things. Every time we start a meeting with a grounding exercise, I find myself wanting to roll my eyes.

But as I parse through my own memories of the Buddhist Church and my own family’s scattered rituals, I’m starting to realize the wisdom behind these impulses. In order to create the futures we want, we need to understand the lessons imparted by those who came before us, and we also need the rituals and practices, spiritual or otherwise, that keep us connected and clear in our sense of purpose. I’m not sure if I’ve found these things for myself, but I would like to. I would like to be able to imagine a way forward.