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

night to swim the river. She could have been shot; she had a young daughter to carry. Still, despite the danger, the experience showed her that she must seize opportunities. The freedom that pushed her toward the United States was the freedom of the market.
    In contrast, Hmong pickers were adamant about freedom as anticommunism combined with ethnic autonomy. Older Hmong in Open Ticket had fought for General Vang Pao’s CIA army in Laos. The middle-aged had spent years after the communist victory going back and forth between refugee camps in Thailand and rebel camps in Laos. Both these life trajectories combined jungle survival and ethnopolitical loyalty. These were skills that could be used in the United States for kinbased investments, for which Hmong Americans have become known. Sometimes such commitments need to be revived—by life in the wild.
    Everyone I talked to dreamed about livelihood strategies self-consciously tied to their ethnic and political stories. No one in Open Ticket thought immigration meant erasing one’s past to become an American. An ethnic Lao from northeastern Cambodia would like to run trucks between Cambodia and Laos. An ethnic Khmer from Vietnam, whose family crossed the border to defend Cambodia, thought his family’s patriotism made him a good candidate for a military career. While many of these dreams would remain unfulfilled, they told me something about dreaming: these were not the new start we still call “the American dream.”
    The more you stare at it, the more the idea that you should start over to become an American seems strange. What was this American dream then? Clearly, it was more than an effect of economic policy. Might it have been a version of Christian conversion, American-style, in which the sinner opens up to God and resolves to banish his former sinful life? The American dream requires relinquishing one’s old self, and perhaps this is one form of conversion.
    Protestant revivalism has been key to composing the “we” of the American polity since the American Revolution. 6 Furthermore, Protestantism guided the twentieth-century project of American secularization—designed to reject illiberal Christianity while promoting unmarked liberal forms. Susan Harding has shown how U.S. public education in the mid-twentieth century was shaped by projects of secularization, in which some versions of Christianity were promoted as examples of “tolerance,” while other versions were parochialized as exotic remnants of earlier times. 7 In its secular forms, then, this cosmological politics exceeds Christianity; to be an American, you must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.
    In the mid-twentieth century, assimilation was a project of this American Protestant secularism. Immigrants were expected to “convert” by taking on the full array of white American bodily practices and speech habits. Speech was particularly important—the speaking of the “we.” That’s why my mother wouldn’t let me learn Chinese. It would be a sign of the devil, so to speak, peeking out of my American habitus. This is the conversion wave that hit Japanese Americans after World War II.
    It did not necessarily mean becoming a Christian. The Japanese Americans I worked with are mainly Buddhists. Indeed, Buddhist “churches” (as some participants call them) help tie the community together. The one I visited is a curious hybrid. The hall for weekly worship has a colorful Buddhist altar in front. But the rest of the room is an exact model of an American Protestant church. There are rows of wooden pews, complete with holders on the seatbacks for hymnals and announcements. The basement has space for Sunday School classes and for fundraising dinners and bake sales. The core congregation is Japanese American, but they are proud to have a white pastor, whose Buddhism augments their American identity. The congregation’s “American” conversion sponsors religious legibility.
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