Refugee Repairs – KHMERICANA, the Spirit Home:
“I am a Khmerican, implies confidence. It describes the synthesis of two strong cultures, to form a bond as one. It implies equality, and identity, and it indeed identifies the Cambodian as well as the American, living symbiotically, in reality or potentially, in one space – a geographic, emotional, social and cultural space.” – Teresa Tan, 2013.
Wandering amidst the dense cul de sacs of Lowell’s monstrous triple decker mutations, the low winter sun casts a cool pale light onto the crimson gables of Pailin Plaza. As you turn off onto Middlesex Street, the subtle adjustments in signage lead your eye to a four-faced Brahma statue in the heart of Cambodia Town. What may appear at first glance to be some oddly proportioned bird boxes or colorfully stout sheds scattered across the neighborhood, in actuality are a persistent typology with a silent past.
Historically, this tradition of shrine construction predates the arrival of Mahayana Buddhism in Cambodia. The ancient practice of erecting Khmer Tevada was translated into the “spirit home” after the first refugees landed in America. The plinth of the spirit home is an ideological arena, able to inform planning and direct political capital within Cambodia Town. The existing collection of what may constitute Khmericana is fundamentally, “repaired” objects. The spirit home is a uniquely Khmer architectural touchstone to the constructs of ownership and property. Habitually activated during critical cultural events, the Khmerican spirit structure is a power object. The platform of the altar projecting the contemporary aspirations of Cambodia Town.
Repair within this context is understood as re-appropriation, or the absorption of what symbolizes the American (and French) imperialist into the temporalities of the Khmer cosmology. This re-appropriation of Americana is a translation of value, resisting white-washing narratives. Khmericana offers alternative ethics for diasporic Khmer life, grounded in the security and stability of rebuilding through repair. Spirit homes foster a unique urbanism which consolidates Cambodia Towns. These ethnoburbs constitute the expanding and still infantile polity of “Khmerica.” A large frustration for a people who cannot trust the telling of their past, is the insurmountable task of knowing where to begin. Those from Cambodia may attest to the legacy of colonialism and ethnocide which has afflicted the diaspora with the condition of historical amnesia. Khmericana is neither obssessed with nor ignorant of the genocide, but rather busy mending the fatally commercialized myths of Angkor to Angkar.
Khmer Tevada to Khmerican Spirit Home,
Spirit structures litter the suburban American landscape, hidden in plain sight. The spirit home is also understood within the language of suburban home additions. The underlying notion of an addition resulting from an incompatibility between the existing structure and the needs of all the current and future inhabitants. This quietly enduring practice is characterized by several distinct types of structure: for buddhas, devas, and ancestral spirits. The exact specifications which determine how a structure is built for each is primarily still passed down orally. Nonetheless the spirit home maintains an internal construction logic legible as a formal hierarchy of elements. The spirit home operates across three definite scales; the body, plot, and ethnoburb performing a sacred choreography between the figure and public.
Spirit homes exist between the format of an object and a building, across Khmerica they are always erected in relation to a larger structure. Tevada for either Buddhas, or Bodhisattvas are the tallest because their feet must be above your chin during prayer. Routine offerings from nips of Johnny Walker, to hell bank notes and mangoes may be served to appease that particular spirit. The shrine for Devas, or Yaksha were traditionally carved from tropical hardwoods or shaped from clay. Before breaking ground on any new construction in Cambodia, the blessings and ceremonial rites that accompany the commemoration of a tevada is integral for all projects. The spirit home in Khmerica, however, is often purchased and installed as a blessing when a family moves into a new home. The preference for burning either dollar, euro or yen joss paper offerings have similarly fluctuated with trends in the global market. Flammable fakes of Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags as well as Macbooks, iPhones and other high end commodities reflect the increasing commodification of even the spirit world.
The tevada translated, manifest from the Home Depot catalog of standardized (ready-made), Do-It-Yourself materials. Carefully selected signifiers of success tied to the white power structure, which easily camouflage into the suburban context. Buddhist prayer flags inscribed with Pali script hidden behind white picket fences, or humbly holding the header of a door. The spirit home is the contemporary reincarnation of the tevada. Both may be ceded by inheritance and are regularly maintenanced through a notion of collective ownership within Cambodia Town. Beliefs vary regionally with no ultimate consensus on which and how many spirits may coexist within them. Yet they negotiate both Buddhist and local place-based beliefs, customarily practiced as ancestor worship. Ancestral shrines rest atop four piliotis, and are typically around waist height. These invited spirits are the inhabitants of the spirit home, wandering souls awaiting rebirth. The ‘true’ reasons and organizational logic were forgotten long ago, allowing the spirit home to become self-referential.
Spirit homes provoke questions of cultural contradiction, which may be observed through what content and how these offerings are positioned on the plinth. They also express desire and expectations, which may be understood and rationalized by studying the application of ornament and offerings presented. These monuments are lined with faux Rococo molding and a skillfully composed Buddhist color palette supplied by Benjamin Moore. They are topped off by an opulent display of gold and bedazzled New England Patriots pendants. These aesthetic decisions project the tension between the class values and devotion of the Khmerican diaspora who pray to them today.
The spirit home is typically a portable structure which is invoked by individuals who are either coping with anxious doubts or sending for blessings from the heavens. Typically they are positioned along the property line of a plot or facing out from the main home, business, or temple. Spirit homes are an ancient Angkorean power object that is either commissioned or built with the most readily accessible materials. Spirit structures tend to live in packs and rely on the array of their families to display the full effect of spectacle. The impression of a much larger scale for instance, is achieved by stacking trim atop of trim, multiplying the number of edges on a spirit home. At rest the spirit home sits within the property line, but it is not necessarily bound to its perimeter. The spirit home functions as a conduit for expressing and translating individual desire into a collective political force for urban transformation. This typology allows for thinking about the production of architecture as forecasting certain kinds of deployment, instantiation, and habitual activation.
Cambodia Town,
In 1975, the US federal government funded a ‘model American home’ within the Khmer refugee camps located along the border of Thailand in Phanat Nikhom. Batches of Khmer refugees were civilized through lessons that summarized the basics of ‘American’ life. Demonstrations on how to use a flush toilet and operate a television were deemed the necessary skills these newly minted citizens must assimilate to. They would soon find that American conquest creates the unintentional by-product of multiculturalism. Unaware of America’s ongoing genocide of its own native peoples, the refugees only knew that this wonderfully perplexing electricity kept them warm at night. The furnaces fueled by stolen resources extracted by the exploited black and brown bodies of America’s melting pot. The whole world at a flip of the switch. Off they went, thoroughly indoctrinated with American exceptionalism without any choice other than the promise of an American Dream.
Between 1975 through 1994, the Office of Refugee Resettlement relocated over 150,000 Khmer refugees in “ideal” locales across America. By the 90s industry had abandoned Lowell nearly a century ago foreshadowing a notorious reputation for drug use and gang rivalry. Within this context, Cambodia Town began forming amidst Lowell’s housing stock of dilapidated triple deckers. The chique homes of a refugee’s sponsors by comparison equated stability with private property already latent within the idea of suburbia. The suburban planning paradigm that William Levitt initially advertised as a generational asset is the American Dream spatialized as settlement.
The new middle-class Khmerican “ethnoburb” of Cambodia Town sits in the Lower Highlands neighborhood of Lowell. The ethnoburb implies a certain degree of buy into this iteration of the American Dream. The pursuit of property ownership which in theory begins with the purchase of a starter home, that in time is swapped for a larger rental and eventually an age-in home. All the while, these life-changing purchases at odds with the shifting personal expectations of what a “dream home” should be. There is an uncanny connection between this process of property acquisition and the function of a spirit home distinguished by the scale of “dreaming.”
Long time residents of California, Dan and Lu Stevenson had a peculiar idea to address the rampant illegal dumping on their Oakland property. The couple had bought a hardware store Buddha and put it into their backyard, inadvertently creating the conditions for a Southeast Asian power object. The NorCal Vietnamese Buddhist community began appearing early in the morning to pray, cultivating a community around the statue akin to the venerated village shrines they had left behind. Buses full of tourists began coming to visit too; cementing the reputation of the “Oakland Buddha” as a neighborhood icon.
The Stevensons had created a monument which triggered a series of almost immediate and striking urban implications. When the Oakland Public Works Department tried to remove the statue in 2012, fierce and coordinated community push back quickly settled the matter. Since then, more statues and structures have joined the Oakland Buddha. This precedent speaks to the spirit home’s remarkable ability to gather a following to inspire collective investment in a shared resource. It creates a financial outcome that benefits local economies as a by product of an engaged community.
With the founding of any ethnoburb, there is a precondition of private property bound to the categories of ownership. Cambodia Town stands as a clear declaration of Khmerican dominion. The ethnoburb founded upon a constantly evolving ideal and ambition for an inherently “Khmer” (insert blank) way of life. There is an opportunity for a powerful syncretism between the custom of collectivized ownership ordering the spirit home and the multi-faceted Khmerican Dream structuring Cambodia Town. When spirit homes are built in different locations, the understanding is that many people will come to appeal to these shrines. The belief being that the more who come to pay respect to that particular shrine, the greater the good karma conjured for the property owners it resides on. The spirit home is a token of good luck believed to possess the ability to ward off calamity.
A self-affirming marker of the Khmer community which lends psychological comfort to a place. Ethnoburbia is the often dismissed safe space of suburban, residential, and business clusters housing a notable number of a particular minority group. A Khmer wat (temple), market, and community institution are historically the first architectural typologies to emerge as the pillars of any Khmerican ethnoburb. Cambodia Town provides a delineated spatial boundary wherein the diaspora may feel safe enough to publicly exhibit their traditional religious and cultural values. Although people of Khmer descent reflect only a small proportion of Lowell’s overall population, they greatly influence the social geography of the city. Cambodia Towns are a type of ethnoburb in dialog with Chinatowns, Little Ethiopias and Paseo Boricuas. The spirit home is part of a family of animist monuments which endure as a typology found across Khmerica.
Across the continental US, a patchwork of spiritual monuments compose a vital flow of people, goods, and ideas that comprise the psychogeographical conception of Khmerica. These spirit structures act as an informal network of hubs for Khmerican urban, social, and cultural development. Cambodia Towns are the cultural epicenter of production for all manners of Khmer services and goods. The spirit home typology can organize political capital towards guided improvements in Cambodia Town. Spirit structures catalyze the community to further clarify what specific kinds of developments must be addressed within the ethnoburb. Depending on the scale of a new construction, the spirit home often formally implies either a tectonic logic or symbolic set of programs.
Spirit structures are often precursors to a larger action, literally mobilized during communal events. Some are outfitted with caster wheels allowing them to be easily repositioned within the property lines of the wat or leave as a float for a ceremonial procession. During Lowell’s annual Southeast Asian Water Festival, New England’s Khmerican community converges on the shores of the Merrimack River to race dragon boats, perform traditional dances, and sell revered goods. The spirit homes of Wat Glory are rolled out to distinguish each zone of activity, temporarily expanding the ethnoburb into a completely different part of the city.
Khmerica,
A series of monuments within Cambodia Town have attempted to consolidate a national identity reminiscent of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum. The lineage of the tradition of tevada spans time immemorial demonstrating the capacity for architecture to embody an identity. Often remembered as Cambodia’s golden years, these commercialized representations are reproduced with overplayed tropes and symbols. From rock n’ roll legend Sinn Sisamouth’s Afro-Carribean samples, to the phonetic subtleties of saying “Mercedes” with a French or a Khmer accent. The culture of Cambodia has always been in global dialog. The variation in taste and scale of each spirit home, more telling of the current Khmer condition than Vann Molyvann’s modernist “New Khmer” vision ever was.
The Sangkum Era evokes a more carefree memory of Cambodia, the zenith of the Royal Ballet which saw the likes of Norodom Buppha Devi’s hypnotic grace. The impossibly curved hand gestures of dancing apsaras juxtapose the demonic grins of masked asuras. Despite its official name, Royal-Buddhist socialism had very little to do with Marxism or its permutations. The chants of pseudo-socialist slogans thinly veiled as monarch worship applauded conservative Theravada Buddhist social values. The principles of Sangkum were left intentionally vague, claiming progressive goals which paid lip service to the eradication of social injustice. It was a laughable thought that with the promise of modernization, the wealthy would then give to the poor for merit. In reality the movement revealed a form of crony capitalism which managed state enterprises for the personal benefit of those in Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s favor. Phnom Penh became known as “the pearl of Asia” in a time of great prosperity, prolific cultural production, and rampant corruption leading up to the genocide.
According to some beliefs, the Tevada had once been venerated as a panacea for all kinds of misfortune. Accounts even mentioning their function as a form of rural judicial process, wherein the accused must swear before the shrine of the village spirit. The correlation between the rate of production and spirit structure mutations found in a Cambodia Town may be signs of a Khmerican ethnoburb under duress. The spirit home holds space for vulnerability and humility amidst the imperial violence which has necessitated its translation and reproduction in America.
The contemporary “American Dream” is inseparable from the stability associated with owning private property and this construct of ownership. The continued affinity for Sangkum memorabilia within the Khmer community reveals the problematic objectives that underlie that aesthetic movement. These seemingly distant and distinct cultures are in actuality intimately tied together by the lived experiences of any Khmerican. The simplistic food metaphors of American multiculturalism are met with a renunciation of the hyphenated identity by the claim of Khmerican.
By combining the contributions of the “home addition” with the spirit home’s mobility, the political and economic capital of this community can create a paradigm of “urban reincarnation.” A process which may already be observed in a new front of Lowell’s Cambodia Town, which shares a strip with an existing Irish business cluster on the edge of the Upper Highlands. Transitional neighborhoods have always been crucial to each new group of immigrants assimilating into mainstream American society. Neighborhoods meant to only be for a moment, that trap and don’t allow for a transition stagnate into hoods. Reincarnation is defined as the rebirth of a soul into a new body. A way to nurture a consolidated community cluster able to effectively articulate and negotiate its needs and desires. By 2045, the US Census projects America will technically become minority white. America’s future is black, brown, and mixed. The spatial knowledge of the “diaspora” initiates a particular history of mobility within the built environment depending on the community. Only time will really tell if this projection actually leads to the displacement of white supremacy as the global status quo. Nonetheless, the cultural compromises of this demographic shift will enable new forms of identity formation and processes of communal enrichment.
Epilogue,
The warning of any movement prefaced by ethnic descent is the unacceptable risk of xenophobia. What is the analog to the most liberatory manifestation of the ethnoburb not necessarily founded upon ethnicity? The abstraction of diaspora offers the potential for an intersectional identity which organizes community-oriented planning. Khmericana reclaims the fragmented memories of the Khmer diaspora within the historical maelstrom of nationalist day-dreams. Relatively speaking, the struggle of diaspora touches upon a universal experience which transcends borders and cultures.
Khmericana anticipates the need for artifacts that speak to the diasporic heritage associated along each rung of the American Dream. By organizing this habit of spirit home stewardship, the pace of Khmerican development escalates while nurturing novel and diverging cultures within Cambodia Town. This use of repair may also be understood as a moral proposition which invokes the ongoing conversation around what “sanctuary” can mean in America. Particularly in a heightened period of mass deportations and police brutality, Khmer immigrants often with petty charges board guarded planes bound for a country they know nothing about. Immigration and Customs Enforcement often conduct mass raids against communities during the holidays, to guarantee they meet their quotas and fill flights. In a country that arguably prides itself upon being a nation of immigrants (and settlers), the project of Khmericana is that of a still largely unwritten legacy.
