Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists. By Chenxing Han. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2021. 344 pages. $17.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1623175238.
“Where are all the young adult Asian American Buddhists, and what can we learn from them?” In answering these questions, Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists combats the erasure of Asian American Buddhists in representations of American Buddhism. Despite making up two thirds of the American Buddhist population, Asian Americans are frequently left out of histories of American Buddhism. In “raising the voices of young adult Asian American Buddhists,” Han has created a new American sutra that is at once memoire, ethnography, history, and cultural critique.