Dr Ninh Speaks On The Importance Of The Church In The Vietnamese Catholic Diaspora

July 17, 2022294 views0

Dr Ninh Speaks On The Importance Of The Church In The Vietnamese Catholic Diaspora

2022-07-17T12:56:17+01:00

By Church News

Dr Thien-Huong Ninh teaches Sociology at the University of California and her research revolves around ethnicity, gender, and religious identities in the context of migration and globalization. In 2017 she published her book Race, Gender, and Religion in the Vietnamese Diaspora. The book studied the Vietnamese Catholics and Cao Dai Community to explore how the racialization of religion facilitates the diasporic formation of ethnic Vietnamese in the United States of America and Cambodia. In this interview, Dr Ninh speaks about the importance of the Church in the Vietnamese Catholic diaspora.What made you study the Catholic Vietnamese diaspora?Born in Vietnam, I grew up in a predominantly Catholic community. As a young girl, for me, Catholicism was the norm because that was the only religion around. Vietnamese Catholics refer to themselves as people of religion. Non- Catholics were considered people without religion or those outside of religion. When I migrated to the United States as a young girl and settled in San Jose, California, and I discovered that Catholicism wasn’t the only religion there. But it was still quite influential in California.I was still drawn and struck by the fact that Catholicism was so diverse and very ethnic. I mean the Vietnamese Catholic Church is fundamental in bringing them together. The church is where they meet regularly. That’s where they gather for mass, weddings, funerals and so forth. But they also celebrate the mid-autumn festival Tết Trung Thu, or the lunar new year. They also organize fundraising events for the local community in San Jose and also for the community in Vietnam. The church is also the place to share news about their relatives in Vietnam or their friends and neighbors.For me, I was so struck by the fact that the church was not simply a place of worship; but that it was in reality the center of the Vietnamese Catholic community. So the church is an ethnic reality for Vietnamese Catholics. But there is also a great diversity among Catholics in California. They are Polish, Korean, Mexican, and Filipino Catholics too. I was very struck by that too.What made you to study female religious figures?I lived in Los Angeles for quite some time when I studied at the University of California and the University of Southern California (USC). There I witnessed again the great diversity within the Catholic Church. I was introduced to Our Lady of Guadalupe, an indigenous native Mexican representation of the Virgin Mary. She was everywhere…in churches, on the street, and as murals in schools. She was not only recognized by Mexican Catholics but also by non-Catholic communities too…such as Protestants or people not following a religion. You would see her, for example, at political rallies such as banners, pictures, paintings, etc. Her images were in public social spaces that were not necessarily Catholic.It made me aware that the Vietnamese Catholic Community had also concocted their own ethnic Virgin Mary. Of course, that was our very own “ethnic” Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Lavang. She is very popular among Vietnamese Catholics. But there was hardly anything that existed about Our Lady of Lavang in academic circles. But I knew that Prof. Peter Phan at Georgetown University had studied it from a theological perspective. So, I also want to pay tribute to his work.I was very puzzled by how she was presented. She looks very Asian, in the sense she is dressed in áo dài which is a Vietnamese traditional attire. She is very distinctive in that way. I didn’t know much about the history of Our Lady of Lavang. I wanted to dig deeper into the history and background. Is it because she appeared to the Vietnamese people in the 18th century as a Vietnamese woman or is he re-represented as a Vietnamese in a later period?So that’s how I started researching the Vietnamese community for my Ph.D. work at USC. At first, I focused on the classic Vietnamese community in Orange County, which has the largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam on a county level. Slowly, I was able to get funding and support for my project, and I was able to expand the project from a local one into a global one. I went to Cambodia, and I was also able to study the Cao Dai community as well. I was comparing the Vietnamese Catholic Community along with some Vietnamese Cao Dai communities. And of course, I would be happy to explain why I chose those two groups if you would like me to.Could you tell us more about this comparative approach and what the Cao Dai religion is?My approach to this project is comparative in the sense that I want to focus on the network – the transnational religious network. In this case, Vietnamese Catholics in Cambodia, and the United States as one network. Of course, there could also be other networks such as Vietnamese in Vietnam and in France. However, my fields of focus were Cambodia and the United States. I wanted to compare the Vietnamese Catholic transnational network to the Cao Dai transnational network at the same field sites.Why these two religions? Well, Catholicism is the religion that was introduced to Vietnam by the Portuguese, and further solidified under French influence. So, it’s what I would approach as a “non-Vietnamese religion.”In comparison, Cao Daism is a distinctively indigenous Vietnamese religion. Certainly, it has French elements but it is distinctly Vietnamese in the sense that it was born in Vietnam; and it did not have any footprints in anywhere else outside Cambodia. But slowly it did move to neighboring Cambodia. But before 1975 (when the Vietnam war ended), it did not have a lot of contacts or footprints in other countries. Hence, it’s very Vietnamese in that way.What was the focus of the study?I wanted to particularly look at Vietnamese immigrants, particularly refugees, who are Vietnamese and of a Catholic faith which is again “non-Vietnamese.” I also wanted to study how they adapt locally and globally when they go to other countries.So, one is the Catholic transnational network, and the other is Cao Dao based in Cambodia and the United States. At the heart of this is the comparison of some questions such as the forces of local assimilation. The hypothesis is that if you are Vietnamese then you are an ethnic minority in the United States and Cambodia.Catholics are influential in the United States. If you move around you can see so many churches. The Catholic Church also has a presence in many countries. The hypothesis is that immigrants who are Catholics would have an easier transition to local adaptation.They would also become less ethnic because they are interacting with Catholics who are of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. So, that’s one hypothesis.The hypothesis for the Vietnamese Cao Dai is if they migrate to another country, they have little chance to find a Cao Dai temple. They would have to build it themselves. The hypothesis is that even if they migrate and live in a foreign nation, they would be more ethnically insular. This means they would have to interact with Vietnamese Cao Dai and the world.So I wanted to compare the two transnational networks.In the process of my studies, I found that it is much more complex than perceived it to be. There are many more nuances. I also discovered several surprising findings. In particular, Vietnamese Catholics appear to be in many ways more ethnic, and the Cao Dai on the other hand take more initiatives to reach beyond their ethnic community.What has been the most challenging in your research?Several things , I must say, in Cambodia for example, the ethnic Vietnamese community has lived in a very precarious situation. Partly or largely because of their necessity, being Vietnamese. So as a Vietnamese American woman trying to understand the ethnic view in the community within the context of Cambodia, I was in between two worlds.I am Vietnamese, but I am not a Vietnamese who has lived in Cambodia or Vietnam. I think building trust with local Vietnamese was very important so that they would talk to me and share with me about their lives.In Vietnam on the one hand, I was an insider and on the other hand, I was an outsider because I had emigrated to the United States. When I speak Vietnamese, some people could detect my accent which is of a refugee from the young generation. So, my Vietnamese background, opened some doors for me, which would have been difficult for some people to access.It also meant some challenges, such as navigating the local political terrain. I needed to make sure not to attract any unnecessary attention from the local government. I was simply trying to understand the people’s faith and their connection to Vietnamese in other countries.ALSO READ The Anointing, skillfulness & exceptional vocal talent Of Doris Dumah (Biography)