Read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins for Free Online Page B

in decline before the war, were revived. Camp activities became the basis for postwar clubs. These would be private leisure activities. Japanese culture, matsutake picking included, became increasingly popular, but it formed a segregated addition to the performance of American selves. “Japanese-ness” flourished only as an American-style hobby.
    Perhaps you can catch a glimmer of my disconcertment. Japanese American matsutake pickers are quite different from Southeast Asian refugees—and I can’t explain the difference away by “culture” or by “time” spent in the United States, the usual sociological stories of differences among immigrants. Second-generation Southeast Asian Americans are nothing like Japanese American Nisei in their performance of citizenship. The difference has to do with historical events—indeterminate encounters, if you will—in which relations between immigrant groups and the demands of citizenship are formed. Japanese Americans were subject to coercive assimilation. The camps taught them that to be an American required serious work in transforming oneself from inside out. Coercive assimilation showed me its contrast: Southeast Asian refugeeshave become citizens in a moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. A love for freedom may be enough to join the American crowd.
    The contrast hit me in a personal way. My mother came to study in the United States from China just after World War II, when the two countries were allies; after the triumph of communism in China, the U.S. government did not let her go home. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, our family, like other Chinese Americans, was under FBI surveillance as possible enemy aliens. Thus my mother, too, learned a coercive assimilation. She learned to cook hamburgers, meatloaf, and pizza, and when she had children, she refused to allow us to learn Chinese, even though she was still struggling with English. She believed that if we spoke Chinese, our English might show the trace of an accent, revealing us as not quite American. It was unsafe to be bilingual, to carry one’s body in the wrong way, or to eat the wrong foods.
    When I was a child, my family used the term “American” to mean white, and we watched Americans carefully as sources of both emulation and cautionary tales. In the 1970s, I joined Asian American student groups whose participants were of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino origin; even our most radical politics took for granted the coerced assimilation each of these groups had experienced. My background thus prepared me for an easy empathy with the Japanese American matsutake pickers I met in Oregon: I felt comfortable with their way of being Asian American. The elders were second-generation immigrants who spoke hardly a word of Japanese, and who were as likely to go out for cheap Chinese food as to prepare traditional Japanese dishes. They were proud of their Japanese heritage—as witnessed in their devotion to matsutake. But that pride was expressed in self-consciously American ways. Even the matsutake dishes we cooked together were cosmopolitan hybrids that violated every Japanese culinary principle.
    In contrast, I had been utterly unprepared to discover the Asian American cultures of Open Ticket’s matsutake camps. Mien camps struck me with particular force because they reminded me not of the Asian America I knew but of some combination of my mother’s remembered China and the villages in Borneo where I had done fieldwork. Mien come to the Cascades in multigenerational groups of kin and neighbors with the explicit aim of recuperating village life. They remain committed to differences that mattered in Laos; because Lao sit on the floor, Mien sit onthe low stools my mother still longs for as a reminder of China. They refuse raw vegetables—that’s for Lao—but prepare soups and sautés with chopsticks, as do Chinese. No meatloaf or hamburgers are cooked in Mien mushroom camps. Because so many Southeast Asians are