Dear friends,
I hope the start of 2026 has dawned auspiciously for you in counterbalance to these harrowing times.
🌴
On a family hike in the Coachella Valley Preserve over the holidays, my seven-year-old niece asked about my current writing projects. Auntie Z is a slow writer, I told her, but one project is about things that bring me joy through practice and play, like cello. For the other project, I’m learning about people who inspire me. These people are Buddhist and Asian and have made a difference in America. I call this project “the treasury” because it’s full of treasures.
🫘
The treasury eludes my control. Gems emerge unbidden: acorns in a mast year. It helps to cultivate trust and curiosity and receptivity: inquisitiveness rewards far more than acquisitiveness.
The latest life-giving seeds entered my awareness through a trio of books. Written by Asian and Pacific Islander women rooted in Hawai‘i, the three books are widely divergent in subject matter and style: Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Searching for Mary Foster: Nineteenth-Century Native Hawaiian Buddhist, Philanthropist, and Social Activist by Patricia Lee Masters; and Beads, Boys and the Buddha by Wendy Miyake.
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erin Khuê Ninh’s writing shakes me to the core; her LitHub article “How to Teach a Controversial Novel of Racial and Sexual Violence in 2025” is no exception. The keystone to Ninh’s Asian American Literature course, Blu’s Hanging was published to acclaim and controversy in 1997 and fell out of print until Kaya Press’ gorgeously published reissue last year. As Ninh notes, “this novel that makes nothing easy,” this “novel of terrible beauty,” resounds with “racial and sexual violence, suicidality and depression, self-harm and survival”—tribulations made all the more harrowing by the young age of our protagonists Ivah, Blu, and Maisie Ogata. In Blu, I found a literary character so bold and flawed and irrepressible it shattered my understanding of Asian American Buddhist suffering and joy.
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As a Buddhist and longtime Oahu resident of mixed heritage, Patricia Lee Masters opens Searching for Mary Foster with her realization, on a trip in Bodh Gaya in 1996, that the Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Foster honored in the marble plaque at the entrance of Mulagandhakuti Temple was none other than the philanthropist who bequeathed Foster Botanical Garden to the city of Honolulu.
I’d heard Anagarika Dharmapala’s name many times—the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer of 1893 World Parliament of Religions and Maha Bodhi Society fame is standard religious history fare—but nothing of the woman he called his “foster mother.” Nothing of her lifelong friendship with, and patronage, of Dharmapala. Nothing of her foundational support and guidance for Japanese Buddhists in Hawai‘i.
Like Masters, I am haunted that Mary Elizabeth Mikahala Robinson Foster (1844–1930) barely registers in the history of American Buddhism and the story of global Buddhist modernism; even her wish for a Buddhist funeral was ignored by her Christian family.
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Beads, Boys and the Buddha is out of print, but I must have found a used copy a few years ago. As with so many other threads in the tapestry of Buddhist Asian America, I’m indebted to Aaron J. Lee for this one. Before he started the Angry Asian Buddhist blog, Aaron contributed to a group blog called Dharma Folk. In 2009, when Lion’s Roar was still Shambhala Sun, Aaron wrote a blog post on Wendy Miyake.
Even for we-who-speak-Asian, we can feel walled off from our temples on a generational level. Reading "Remembering Koizumi,” I felt that I’d found a voice that speaks to my generation.
I wish I’d read “Remembering Koizumi”—and the other stories in Miyake’s collection—before Aaron died. I wish I could tell him how wild it was to read, in 2026, seven stories featuring Asian American Buddhist women protagonists from 2006. (It feels like epochs have passed in the last two decades, Aaron, but I hear you on the freshness of Miyake’s voice.) Above all, I wish I could thank Aaron for his visionary view on Buddhist Asian America, a vista so wide it includes suburban Hawaiian chick lit.
Treasures everywhere (channeling Amanda Gorman here) if we’re brave enough to free them, to see them, to be them.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
🐱
PS: At the Living Desert Zoo in Palm Springs, my family and I marveled at a bobcat who leapt vertically into a (honey locust?) tree and went, quite literally, out on a limb (the branch was close to breaking) to swat at the dangling pods—desiccated seed-shells longer than the feline’s spotted limbs. The giant pods didn’t stand a chance. They were swatted at, pounced on, gnawed off—it’s a wonder the whole tree wasn’t denuded. May we counter the challenges of 2026 with such viriya!
