The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Read Free Book Online

gathered together, deliveries of Asian vegetables from California family garden plots arrive all the time. Every evening, cooked dishes are exchanged with neighbors, and visitors talk over smoking bongs into the night. When I saw one of my Mien hosts squatting in a sarong and shelling overripe yard-long beans or sharpening her machete, I felt transported to the upland villages in Indonesia where I first learned about Southeast Asia. This wasn’t the United States that I knew.
    The other Southeast Asian groups in Open Ticket are less dedicated to recreating village life; some are from cities, not villages. Still, they have one thing in common with these Mien: a lack of interest in—even an unfamiliarity with—the kind of American assimilation with which I grew up. I wondered, How did they get away with this? At first, I was awed, and perhaps a little jealous. Later, I recognized that they had been asked to assimilate too, in a different mode. This is where freedom and precarity come back into the story: freedom coordinates wildly diverse expressions of American citizenship, and it provides the only official rudder for precarious living. But this means that between the arrival of Japanese Americans and the coming of Lao and Cambodian Americans something important has changed in the relationship of the state and its citizens.
    The pervasive quality of Japanese American assimilation was shaped by the cultural politics of the U.S. welfare state from the New Deal through the late twentieth century. The state was empowered to order people’s lives with attractions as well as coercion. Immigrants were exhorted to join the “melting pot,” to become full Americans by erasing their pasts. Public schools were a venue for making Americans. The affirmative action policies of the 1960s and 1970s not only opened schools but also made it possible for minorities educated in public schools to find professional placements despite their racial exclusion from networks of influence. Japanese Americans were cajoled as well as prodded into the American fold.
    It is the erosion of this apparatus of state welfare that most simply helps to explain why the Southeast Asian Americans of Open Tickethave developed such a different relationship to American citizenship. Since the mid-1980s, when they arrived as refugees, all kinds of state programs have been dismantled. Affirmative action has been criminalized, funds cut for public schools, unions chased out, and standard employment has become a vanishing ideal for anyone, much less entry-level workers. Even if they had managed to become perfect copies of white Americans, there would be few rewards. And the immediate challenges of making a living loom.
    In the 1980s, the refugees had few resources and needed public assistance. Yet welfare in the strict sense was being radically downsized. In California, the destination of many Open Ticket Southeast Asians, eighteen months became the limit for state assistance. Many of the Lao and Cambodian Americans in Open Ticket received some language education and job training, but rarely of a sort that actually helped them get a job. They were left to find their own way in American society. 5 For those few who had Western-style educations, English, or money, there were options. The rest were in the difficult position of finding traction for the resources and skills they had, such as, for example, surviving a war. The freedom they had endorsed to enter the United States had to be translated into livelihood strategies.
    Histories of survival shaped what they could use as livelihood skills. It is a tribute to their resourcefulness that they used them. But this also created differences among the refugees. Consider some of these differences. A Lao buyer from a family of businesswomen in the capital city, Vientiane, explained that she decided to leave because communism was bad for profits. Vientiane is on the Mekong River, across from Thailand, and leaving meant finding a