The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

Jonathan H.X. Lee

University of California at Santa Barbara
Mapping the Chinese and Sino-Southeast Asian Daoist and Buddho-Daoist Temples in Southern California

Over the past two and a half decades, Southern California has experienced many demographic reconfigurations. The dynamic of the changes are a direct result of what Asian American scholars call the "third wave" of Asian immigration to the U.S. These new immigrants are partly comprised of the complex ethnic Indo-Chinese refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who were admitted to the U.S. since 1975. The central aim of my project is to map the new religious terrain in Southern California as exemplified by the presence of Sino-Southeast Asian immigrant communities. I will map and survey various Daoist and Buddho-Daoist Sino-Southeast Asian religious sites: the Elderly Indo-Chinese Association of America, that maintains a temple dedicated to Tianhou, the Empress of Heaven, Goddess of the Sea at Lincoln Heights; the Teo Chew Association (a Sino-Southeast Asian Association) at Chinatown, that maintains a temple dedicated to Guandi; the Chua Thien Hau, a Sino-Vietnamese temple to Tianhou at Chinatown; the Phat Hoc Vien Quoc Te, a Vietnamese Buddhist Temple; the Quan Am Vietnamese Temple to the Bodhisattva Guanyin at Los Angeles; the Cambodian Buddhist Association of America; and the Thai Buddhist Temple of Long Beach.

Teo Chew Association (2005)