AMERASIA JOURNAL

2021, VOL. 47, NO. 1, 73–95

https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2021.1992091

BurmAmerican Foodscapes: Refugee Re-settlement and

Resilience
Tamara Ho
Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay examines the resettlement of Burmese refugees in the United Burmese; refugees; farms;
States through the lens of food. Looking specifically at Christian com- Karen; meat packing; COVID
munity gardens, corporatized meat processing, a feature film, and non-
fiction book, I analyze how Karen refugees have participated in U.S. food
economies and investigate processes of selective and serial migration,
religion, representation, and community-building. “Critically juxtapos-
ing” two different, although related, case studies enables a preliminary
mapping of how refugees from Burma/Myanmar have resettled in the
United States in the early twenty-first century, with a focus on legibility,
racialization, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and mutual aid.

Introducing BurmAmerica
This essay examines ethnic and religious politics in Burmese resettlement in the United
States by focusing on refugee gardens and employment in meat processing. This mapping
highlights two avenues through which refugees and recent immigrants from Myanmar have
entered into American food economies and investigates related processes of representation,
religious dynamics, serial and selective migration, and community formation. Discussing
these two case studies follows the method of “critical juxtaposing,” outlined by Y n Lê
Espiritu in her articulation of Critical Refugee Studies (2014): “the deliberate bringing
together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces
in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible.”1 My assembling of different
food-based sites brings into dialogue work from different disciplines (e.g., area studies,
ethnic studies, religion, anthropology, history, refugee studies, and cultural studies) in order
to illuminate dynamics of Burmese resettlement in the United States in the early twenty-first
century. Heeding Espiritu’s call to conceptualize the “refugee” as a “social actor whose life,
when traced, illuminates the interconnections of colonization, war, and global social
change,”2 this analysis of Burmese refugees offers an inaugural survey of the terms of
legibility, racialization, and community networks in the United States.
Following Karen Cardozo and Banu Subramanian’s critical praxis of “assembling Asian/
American naturecultures,” this essay offers a glimpse at a larger research endeavor that
tracks how immigrants and resettled refugees from Burma/Myanmar have participated in
American food chains.3 This comparative study, to quote from Cardozo and Subramanian,

CONTACT Tamara Ho tammyh@ucr.edu UCR GSST Department, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521, USA
© 2021 The Regents of the University of California
74 T. HO

calls “attention to horizontal/lateral and vertical processes” and “intergenerational genea-

logical transfers” that are mobile, multi-directional, and mutually constitutive.”4
Before 2016, Burmese and Bhutanese constituted the two largest refugee populations
admitted into the United States in the early twenty-first century. Joseph Cheah periodizes
three major waves of Burmese migration to the U.S.: 1967–1988, 1988–2006, 2006–2011,
each tied to major upheavals and ongoing militarized civil, interethnic, and religious
conflicts.5 Over the past quarter century, more than 110,000 refugees from Burma have
fled political, religious, and economic persecution and resettled in the United States.6
Between 2006 and 2011, the U.S. State Department allowed 77% of displaced migrants
who left the nine refugee camps at the Thai-Burma border to resettle in the United States.7
Between 2007 and 2017, roughly one in four U.S.-bound refugees came from Myanmar.8 In
2015, more than 18,000 refugees from Myanmar were resettled in the U.S. By 2019,
however, the number had been reduced to 5,000 by the Trump administration.9 “The
No. 1 group of modern refugees in America is neither Syrian nor Iraqi nor Muslim nor
Arab,” reported Patrick Winn in 2017, “They’re Christians from Myanmar, also called
Burma.” Although most Americans know relatively little about Burma/Myanmar, John
Tinpe, the District of Columbia Commissioner on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, noted
that the “needs of the people are the same: affordable healthcare, housing, food, and
employment; the need to communicate and socialize. What makes the Burmese different
and unique is they come from [a] less known culture and find themselves isolated in
communities.”10
This essay counters this lack of knowledge by examining Burmese refugees’ entry into
voluntary faith-based organizations, community projects, and food-based employment.
While there is a burgeoning corpus of scholarship and media on Asian/American food,
there has yet to be a sustained examination of Burmese diasporic food networks.11 Refugee
farms and community gardens involving resettled migrants from Myanmar are enabled by
Christian religious organizations throughout the United States, particularly in Georgia,
Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, and
Oregon. My articulation of the selective processes of resettlement illuminates less noticed
forms of refugee resilience and mutual aid in the twenty-first century.
The bulk of this essay focuses on the 2017 feature film and nonfiction book All
Saints.12 These two cultural productions publicize the emergence of Christian community
gardening projects initiated and managed by Burmese refugees in the United States.
Introducing Karen immigrants to an American audience, the book and semi-fictional
movie illuminate the interracial benefits of faith-based agricultural projects, albeit
through a decidedly Christian-centered lens that favors an Euro-American perspective.
While the book provides more details about the real-life community built by Karen
refugees, the white Euro-American minister, and congregation of All Saints’ Church,
my analysis focuses on the movie’s cross-racial casting, the racialization of Burmese
refugees, and their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). The film’s redemptive staging
of racial triangulation centers the material sacrifices of both white and Black male
Christian ministers as instrumental in enabling Southeast Asian refugee resettlement
and adaptation, while simultaneously reinforcing settler colonial amnesia about the
forced relocation and displacement of Native peoples. This triangulation interpellates
Karen refugees into the Judeo-Christian hegemony of the United States, and the tradi-
tional ecological knowledge (TEK) of Karen migrants is further valorized and sutured
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 75

into the Euro-American settler myth of agrarian self-sufficiency. To complicate the

romanticized representation of interracial cooperation, my All Saints analysis is critically
juxtaposed with a concluding discussion about Burmese refugee meat-processing workers
in the age of COVID-19, which illustrates the toxic capitalism that represents the under-
side of the American dream.

What’s in a name? Burma/Myanmar

Burma/Myanmar is a diverse Southeast Asian nation with a population of over 53 million
that officially recognizes 135 ethnic minority groups. “Burma” came from the
Anglicization of the ruling ethnic group Bama (a.k.a., Burman or Bamar), when the
territory was annexed as part of British India in the 1800s. Burmans constitute the
national majority (60%) and dominate the ruling postcolonial military elite. In 1989,
the government renamed the country “Myanmar,” and also changed various geographic
signifiers and ethnic minority group names.13 Each national appellation has distinct
historical, ideological, and political connotations. “Myanmar” signals the post-1989 post-
colonial nation-state, controlled by a series of nominally Buddhist but increasingly
authoritarian military juntas, while “Burma” and “Burmese” are favored in vernacular
conversation, human rights activism, ethnic resistance, and area studies scholarship.
“Most democratic opposition groups have rejected the name change,” and many continue
to use “the older naming conventions” out of habit.14 This essay uses “Burmese” and
“Burma” as the preferred signifiers among the sources cited here.15 More importantly,
I seek to work intentionally against the Burman-dominated ethnonationalist grain to
gesture toward a more capacious, transnational sense of shared history and to buttress an
emergent transethnic collective imaginary, which admittedly has been rare and fraught in
Burmese history.16
My mapping of BurmAmerica surveys scattered geopolitical sites in which Burmese
cultures and people interface with communities, institutions, socio-economic land-
scapes, and biopolitics in the United States. I dub this cartographic endeavor with
a neologism coined by Charmaine Craig, a novelist and creative writing professor of
Karen, Sephardic Jewish, and Euro-American ancestry.17 Not only does my study of
BurmAmerican foodways bridge Myanmar and the United States, but it also foregrounds
a Critical Refugee Studies standpoint by articulating the relationality of disparate sites
and food-based case studies within “the context of a flexible field of political
discourses.”18 Following the serial migrations of refugees from Burma who cross multi-
ple national and state borders to survive, my uptake of Craig’s term intentionally
transgresses socially constructed borders and signals a repudiation of the hierarchical
practices that typify contemporary Myanmar as well as the exceptionalist settler colonial
politics of the United States.
My mobilization of BurmAmerica endeavors to chart an emergent multiethnic, multi-
religious transnational community that is situated in the geopolitical territory that is the
United States. This interdisciplinary analysis dialogically juxtaposes Asian area and refugee
studies and Asian American critical ethnic/race studies to reconceptualize the refugee not
merely, in the words of Lan Duong and Y n Lê Espiritu, as “an object of rescue, but as a site
of social and political critiques, whose emergence when traced, made visible the processes of
colonization, war, and displacement.”19
76 T. HO

Ethnic minorities from Burma: Chin/Chinese and Karen/Korean

Offering a counter-discourse to the homogenization of Southeast Asian refugees, this
section addresses the misrecognition and erasure of Burmese ethnic minorities within
U.S. racial paradigms: the catachrestic conflation in which Chin easily becomes “Chinese”
and Karen signifies (only) entitled white women or an alternate spelling of Korean:

Those who make it to the U.S., however, find that Americans generally have no idea they exist.
“Everyone thinks I’m Chinese,” Kaw Hser says. “That’s what they say. ‘I thought you were
Chinese.’ No, I’m Karen. ‘Korean?’ No, Karen. K-A-R-E-N.”20

The quotation above illustrates how ethnic minority groups from Burma/Myanmar are
often misunderstood within U.S. categories of race and become illegible as ethnic groups
from Asia. Chin and Karen peoples have been favored in past (pre-Trump)
U.S. resettlement policies for refugees from Myanmar, which has resulted in a process of
religious selection and an overdetermination of Christian identification. This section
provides a brief overview of Chin diversity and a longer history of Karen literacy and
migration to the U.S. in order to set up my subsequent discussion of All Saints and to
highlight some material and ideological consequences of this repeated erasure and
misrecognition.
On March 14, 2020, in Midland, Texas, three members of a Chin family, Bawi Cung
Nung and two of his children (ages 2 and 6), were stabbed by a 19 year old who assumed
they were “Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.”21 Around 60,000 Chin
refugees live in the United States, but the bulk of English-language reporting referred to the
victims generically as “Asian” or “Asian American.”22 Some early reports conflated “Chin”
with “Chinese” in their discussion of then-President Donald Trump’s use of the inflamma-
tory phrase “kung flu” and his scapegoating of China during the pandemic. This violent
misrecognition of a resettled Chin refugee family was one of the earliest examples of the
recent escalation in anti-Asian racism catalyzed by white supremacist popular and political
rhetoric (see Figures 1 and 2). Community-based organizations such as Stop AAPI Hate
have documented how, “in 2020, there was a 150% increase in hate crimes against Asian
Americans in 16 cities – physical and verbal harassment, and sometimes, much worse.”23
Chin refugees come from a predominantly Christian ethnic minority group based in
western Burma. Coming from a territory that is one of the most ethnically diverse in the
nation, the people who are labeled “Chin” include at least six primary tribal groups, further
sub-categorized into 63 sub-tribes, with cultural variations and speaking at least 20 mutually
unintelligible dialects. While some Chin practice animism, almost all Chin refugees in the
United States are Christian, having been displaced by brutal ethnoreligious discrimination
under Burman-dominated militarism since 1988. Most belong to Protestant denomina-
tions, especially Baptist, which has facilitated their ability to affiliate with American
Christian communities in the process of resettlement.24
The rest of this section limns the instrumental role that religion has played in Karen
postcolonial literacy, nationalism, and migration order to set the stage for how Karen
refugees from Burma have also forged alliances within U.S. Christian spaces and institu-
tions. The July 2020 meme below highlights how some Karen in the United States desire to
reclaim or resignify their ethnonym (see Figure 3).25 What I highlight here is the endeavor
to articulate a distinct refugee identity through the public sphere of social media: declaring
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 77

Figure 1. “Bawi Cung Nung”. Chinese American artist Rei Lo shared Figures 1 and 2 on Twitter on July 11,
2020 as part of her “Unveiled in Red” series with the hashtags #hateisavirus and #iamnotavirus. Reprinted
with permission of artist. Rei Lo explained on Twitter: “In this series of portraits, I hope to promote greater
awareness and condemn these heinous acts toward the Asian community. Too often our stories go
untold and underreported. It’s time we change that” (July 11, 2020), https://twitter.com/ReiiiLo/status/
1282048135318175744?s=20 and https://twitter.com/ReiiiLo/status/1282049153078636544.

Karen as an “ethnic group indigenous to the Thailand-Burma border region” who have
been displaced from their homelands because of sustained civil warfare and persecution by
the Burman-dominated postcolonial governments of Burma/Myanmar.
The Karen are a highly plural indigenous borderland group. As the “best-documented
minority group in modern Burmese history,” the many studies of Karen history and politics
are impossible to summarize in detail here.26 Within Myanmar, they are considered one of
the major indigenous minority populations, an “ethnic nationality.” Karen migration to
Southeast Asia predates that of the Burmans, “some 1,000 years ago,” and the Pwo Karens
(a.k.a., Talaing Kayin or Mon-Karen) had special ritual status as “original settlers” within
the Mon court.27 Living in the mountainous terrain that is divided today by nations called
Myanmar and Thailand, Karen is “a collective term for twenty-odd ethnic sub-groups,” and
“there are linguistic, sociocultural, religious, and political differences between these various
sub-groups.”28 Although the 1989 renaming campaign dubbed Karen populations “Kayin,”
Karen nationalists “have strongly rejected” both “Myanmar” and the exonym “Kayin.”29
Scholars have noted how members of this population tactically adopt multiple, shifting
ethnic signifiers (e.g., “being ‘Karen’ in some contexts, and ‘Thai’ in others”), yet there is
also a collective sense of kinship among Karen, a shared sense of displacement and desire for
78 T. HO

Figure 2. His 6-year-old son Robert” by Rei Lo (July 2020). Reprinted with permission of artist.

self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty, which is marked by the longest-running

civil war in recorded history (1949 to today).30
Because “the Karens were largely a hill or forest-dwelling people without a written
literature” until the British annexation of Burma, they were “very much on the fringes of
recorded history” prior to the nineteenth century and have traditionally lived by upland
swidden migratory farming. This form of shifting cultivation, or rotational farming, is often
pejoratively called “slash and burn,” yet the latter phrase obscures the careful nurturing and
intentional plot rotations that have enabled the survival of generations: “Karen people also
are known to spread seed along the forest floor, leaving food for the next wave of refugees
fleeing their villages.”31 In her memoir, refugee and activist Zoya Phan explains the
differential relationships that the Karen have had with the empires that have ruled over
Burma. After Pu Tau Meh Pa, the legendary first leader of the Pwa K’Nyaw (“the people”),
led the migration south from Mongolia,

the Karen divided into two. One group, known as the ‘mother side,’ or Pwo Karen, travelled
through central Burma and settled in what is now the Irrawaddy Delta. The “father side,” the
Sgaw Karen, followed the Salween River and settled in an area of mountainous jungle in what is
now the border region of Burma and Thailand. Many centuries later the British officially
created that border and split our tribe in two.32

Phan explains how the Karen were subjugated and persecuted by the Mon and Burman
groups who also settled in the region and established empires prior to British occupation.
The Burmans named the people “Kayin,” and the British adapted this label and institutio-
nalized the name “Karen” in the nineteenth century.33 Phan also notes how British
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 79

Figure 3. “The problem with saying Karen.” July 25, 2020. Posted by karen_never_die on Instagram.
Screenshot on August 5, 2020.

strategies of dividing colonized populations created uneven alliances and intensified reli-
gious antagonisms between Buddhist Burmans and Christian Karens.

When the British colonized Burma, the Karen were treated more equally, and many Karen
considered that life was better under British rule. Many Karen were converted to Christianity,
and the British exploited ethnic and religious differences in Burma in their effective divide and
rule strategy . . . .

During the Second World War the British promised the Karen they would be given an
independent country once Burma gained independence, and so would be free from oppres-
sion. But the British broke their promise, and left the Karen in Burma when the country
gained independence in 1948. So began decades of oppression and discrimination against
the Karen people.34Despite the broken promises of the British, Karen postcolonial nation-
alism is strongly interwoven with Anglo/American loyalty.
Various scholars identify the earliest articulation of Karen ethnic sensibilities and
nationalism to 1842, when The Morning Star (Sah Muh Taw) newspaper was established
through American Baptist patronage in Tavoy.35 Building on Benedict Anderson’s the-
ories of nationalism and print media, Ashley South explains that as “one of the first
indigenous language journals in Asia,” the Morning Star “helped foster the emergence of
a self-consciously Karen, S’ghaw speaking (and Christian) ‘imagined community’.”36
Jeffrey Lewis Petry asserts that The Morning Star, as “the longest running vernacular
newspaper in Southeast Asia” (1842–1962), and other Karen publications of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “broadcast the emergence of a new Christian
nation.”

Karen served as jungle guides for British forces and as allies during the Anglo-Burmese wars
(1826, 1852, and 1886) and World War I: “Their knowledge of the local terrain and jungle warfare
made possible the success of guerrilla operations” during World War II, and when “British forces
were driven from Burma in 1942, it was the Karen who covered the British retreat.”37,38
80 T. HO

Although Karen people practice various religions, the religious overdetermination of

Karen, Chin, and other ethnic minority refugees from Burma originates from the influence
of American Christian missionaries in the 1800s and British colonial politics. Myanmar’s
intensified Buddhist nationalism since 1962 and the selective policies of U.S. resettlement
further contribute to the hypervisibility and dominance of Christianity among refugees
from Burma. Islamophobic and genocidal campaigns in the twenty-first century have
contributed to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar,
but Muslim refugees from Burma tend not to be chosen for U.S. resettlement, especially
under Trump’s travel bans (2017–2020).39 In contrast, the manner in which Karen and
Chin Christians have been selectively favored within refugee resettlement programs rein-
forces their affective affinities to the United States. Although Karen literacy is often
attributed to the translation work of American Baptist missionaries Adoniram Judson
and Francis Mason, historian William Womack has documented how Burmese sources
situated the missionary script “as one in a range of different Karen writing systems. In fact,
at least 11 different systems of writing the Pwo and Sgaw Karen languages appeared in
Burma during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”40 Yet, in 1928, Christian Karen
leader Dr. San Crombie Po wrote that the Karen “owe what progress and advancement they
have made, to the missionaries, whom they affectionately called their ‘Mother’ under the
protection of the British government whom they rightly called their ‘Father’.”41
Almost a century later, echoing this religio-political loyalty, Tin, a 38-year-old refugee
from Chin state living in Malaysia, asserted that “America is really our fatherland in terms
of religion. They sent their missionaries to our country and taught us to be Christians. And
now we had to escape.”42 Alongside other Christian refugees from Burma, Tin had been
living in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Kuala Lumpur and had been anticipating
a U.S. visa when Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban” stalled her resettlement.43 Although often
labeled “anti-Muslim,” the xenophobic closing of immigration avenues to the United States
between 2017 and 2020 narrowed resettlement opportunities and ironically, negatively
impacted even Christian minority refugees displaced from the predominantly Buddhist
nation of Myanmar.
Influenced by colonial missionary alliances and selective U.S. resettlement policies, the
hypervisibility of Christian refugees from Myanmar does not accurately index the Burmese
or Karen diaspora.44 Christians are estimated to make up between 15% to 30% of the five to
seven million Karen people in Burma, and less than 20% of Karen on both sides of the
Burma-Thai border. British and American scholars, historians, anthropologists, and mis-
sionaries credit the “literate institutions of the Baptist mission” as providing the “building
blocks” for forging a Christian-led, pan-Karen ethnonationalist identity, although Pwo
Buddhists have tended to shun such secular institutions and separatist politics.45
Christian Karen have occupied the bulk of media and academic discourses, even though
“they have never constituted more than . . . 15% of all Karen” and “Buddhists are probably
still the majority among the Pwo and Sgaw Karen.”46 Sgaw Christians also dominated
nationalist organizations, such as the 1881 Karen National Association (KNA), a forerunner
to the separatist Karen National Union (KNU) which began in 1947 and asserted a pan-
Karen identity as “an ethnoreligious essence,” reifying antagonisms between Buddhist
Burmans and Christian Karen, while also alienating Karen who practice other faith
traditions.47 Muslim and Hindu Karen are rarely mentioned in scholarship and human
rights reports.48
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 81

Thus Burman hegemony, ethnic politics, and colonial religious histories have func-
tioned as “push” factors that drive the displacement and migration of non-Buddhist
populations from Myanmar to the United States. The next section turns to survey the
American landscape of resettlement. My analysis of All Saints highlights how minoritized
Christian refugees from Burma are assimilated into the Black-white racial paradigm and
how Karen have demonstrated resilience by utilizing their traditional ecological knowl-
edge (TEK).

From jungle rebels to refugee farmers: All Saints

My project resists the homogenization of Asian refugees by examining the racialized
representations of Burmese in the U.S. While my first case study highlights a successful
example of mutual aid and interracial community, my critical juxtaposing of refugee
farms and meat-processing employment limns how Burmese immigrants, refugees, and
ethnic minorities are also subjected to insidious forms of erasure, re-presentation, pre-
carity, and toxicity under Euro-American/white Christian hegemony and U.S. capitalist
exploitation.49
Although not the first or only one in the United States, the Burmese refugee farm at All
Saints’ Episcopal Church in Smyrna, Tennessee became famous through an eponymous
feature film and book, both released in 2017.50 The compelling story of how Karen refugees
from Burma revivified a Southern church on the brink of closure was developed into
a Christian feature film by Provident Films and Affirm Films, branches of Sony Pictures
Worldwide focused on faith-based projects. Jewish American director Steve Gomer was
inspired after reading about All Saints in USA Today and spent over nine years developing
the project.51 He hired Steve Armor, who had been raised by a Southern Baptist minister
father and who had spent time in Asia, to write the screenplay.52 In 2015, Gomer relocated
to Nashville “to really spend time” with the All Saints’ congregation, “going and helping in
whatever way I can; helping kids . . ., volunteering, driving the Karen to doctor’s appoint-
ments, stuff like that. I feel like I really am part of that community.”53
The movie and book document how more than 70 Karen refugees joined the small rural
church in 2008, when the Euro-American congregation numbered fewer than 25. John
Corbett plays the protagonist Michael Spurlock, a newly ordained white Episcopalian
minister assigned to oversee a debt-bound, fractured church. While Karen refugees appear
as themselves in the movie and filming took place at the All Saints’ property in Smyrna, the
role of their community leader Ye Win is played by Taiwanese Canadian actor Nelson Lee.
The real Ye Win appears on screen as an unnamed refugee with only a brief speaking role.54
As the group’s translator and spokesperson, Ye Win approaches Spurlock to ask if the
resettled migrants can plant crops on the church’s property to feed their families. After
soliciting the approval of the Bishop and Diocese, Spurlock joins the Karen refugees to farm
the 16 acres owned by the church. Euro-American congregation members further support
Karen resettlement through ESL classes and practical life lessons. Along with squash,
tomatoes, corn, lettuce, radishes, cucumber, and green beans, the Karen migrants grew
sour leaf (hibiscus sabdariffa), an unfamiliar plant to the white All Saints’ community but
a favorite green of Burmese cooking that is popular with local Asian grocery stores. The
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Karen refugees results in unexpected finan-
cial returns:
82 T. HO

the strange crop over which Anglo volunteers had shaken their heads . . . provided the
summer’s greatest cash success. The sour leaf had grown . . . a delicacy that would appear to
be in such demand among Asian Americans that grocery chains were willing to pay three
dollars a pound. The Kurios crop was quickly snapped up, and they could have sold far more.55

The fictional film was favorably reviewed within Christian spheres and by secular publica-
tions such as The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. While Christian audiences appreciated
a “Hollywood” narrative that represented a rural Southern church in a positive way,56 the
true story of mutual aid and the movie’s avoidance of the white messiah/savior trope was
universally praised by secular reviewers as part of its appeal and charm: “At ‘All Saints,’ it
was the refugees who saved the Americans.”57
The publication of the nonfiction book All Saints, co-written by Michael Spurlock and
writer Jeanette Windle, accompanied the movie’s release. It explains how proceeds from
crop sales were donated to help pay All Saints’ $850,000 mortgage and bills, and that the
newly named Kurios Farm also supplied Smyrna’s Food Bank and the Salvation Army food
drive.58 Not surprisingly, the book provides significantly more detail about Karen history,
religion, and politics compared to the film. Spurlock and Windle not only document Ye
Win’s backstory, but also spotlight other key figures who are omitted from the film, such as
Father Bu Christ, the Karen Anglican rector who worked alongside Ye Win and Spurlock as
the refugee community’s spiritual leader. While the religious diversity among the Karen is
not acknowledged in the movie, the book explains that the Karen are the largest ethnic
minority in Myanmar and that many Karen practice animist traditions or “had converted to
the Buddhism of their Burmese conquerors.”59 Many Karen continue to practice traditional
forms of ancestor worship (aw chä), rituals related to rice production, matrilineage, and
animal sacrifice; estimates vary from 42.9% in 1983 to 5-10% in 1998. Animists are officially
subsumed under the “Buddhist” category, which makes up the majority.
As mentioned earlier, despite intraethnic variation within those who are labeled “Karen”
in terms of religion, language, and political orientation, the Karen resistance movement
“has been dominated by a right-wing, Christian (Seventh-day Adventist and Baptist),
S’ghaw-speaking elite.”60 Spurlock and Windle describe Ye Win’s family as part of
a “sizeable percentage” of Karen who can trace their Christian heritage back “four genera-
tions to Adoniram Judson and other foreign missionaries who first brought the gospel of
Jesus Christ to the Karen . . . and other hill peoples of Burma.”61 The book highlights Ye
Win’s Christian genealogy as well as his own crisis of faith with God and with KNU-led
warfare:

Ye Win’s father was a seminary graduate and pastor. Two of his older siblings were evangelists,
but Ye Win himself had turned his back on that life when he first joined the Karen resistance
army at age thirteen. He couldn’t remember the last time he set foot in a church. His world, his
heart, had been so filled with hate, with killing. How could he call out to God with so much
blood on his hands?62

The book parallels Ye Win and Spurlock as men with doubts about their vocation, while the
film emphasizes their respective sacrifices on behalf of the Karen community and how they
work together to convince the local white congregation, the Bishop, and Episcopalian
diocese council to turn the All Saints’ property into a successful refugee farm.
Armor’s screenplay and Gomer’s identification with the Southeast Asian refugees in
Tennessee interpellate the Karen into the Jewish diaspora and a Judeo-Christian American
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 83

settler identity.63 Since the 1800s, missionary education has encouraged Karen Christians
“to accept, uncritically, certain oral traditions about early Karen history,” in particular the
Y’wa (Yoà) creation myth, which promised the return of Younger White Brother from the
West with a lost (stolen) Golden Book.64 In the 1800s, American Baptist missionary Francis
Mason proposed that the “Karens might be one of the lost tribes of Israel.”65 Other
American missionaries and Karen Christians also reify the synchronicity of the Karen
creator Y’wa/Yoà and Yahweh, the God of the Israelites in the Jewish Bible/Old
Testament. Spurlock and Windle also underscore that some Karen Christians continue to
believe they are the “descendants of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.”66 Reinforcing this
Judeo-Christian association, director Steve Gomer recounted how meeting the Burmese
refugees in Smyrna resonated with his Russian Jewish heritage and with the history of the
United States as a nation built by immigrants and refugees:
At dinner at Ye Win’s house, my wife and I realized we were sort of in a time machine. We were
sitting with our great-grandparents from Russia, who had a very similar experience in the 1890s
as refugees and immigrants . . . . That’s who the United States is. Building community. This is
our story, and it’s any refugee’s story, although there are special circumstances in this story to
make it even better.67

Gomer’s statement about the Karen “time machine” effect is echoed in Armor’s script in
scenes highlighting Karen primitivism.
When the Karen refugees attend their first service at All Saints, Reverend Spurlock
(Corbett) complains to his wife that the Karen are “farmers from the Bronze Age who can’t
even afford shoes!” before he turns and sees that the Karen newcomers do own shoes and have
left them next to the door. Discursive utterances on and off camera situate the Karen refugees
as doubly displaced: both geographically distant from their Southeast Asian homelands and
temporally from another era (1890s or “the Bronze Age”). This lack of coevality emphasizes
how the Karen Christians are out of step with modernity and American norms of civility and
sets the stage for their (past) savagery: “These particular refugees were not just traumatized
refugees but experienced guerrilla fighters.”68 The manner in which the Karen refugees’
combat skills enable them to defend themselves against local drug dealers (in the book) and
school bullies (in the film), and Ye Win’s history with jungle warfare further resonate with the
Southeast Asian refugee soldier figure, theorized by Hmong American scholar Ma Vang.69
The representation of the Karen as out of sync with American norms reifies their exoticism
and their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) signals their indigeneity, yet their
Christianity and willingness to work hard at agricultural and manual labor simultaneously
earn them a meritorious “model minority” status within (Euro)American Protestant settler
imaginaries.70 When Spurlock tries to convince a local retired farmer named Forrest (Barry
Corbin) about the viability of the proposed refugee project, the minister rhetorically asks,
“What’s more American than farming?” This statement implies that the Karen request to
cultivate land owned by the Diocese aligns with the Eurocentric settler-colonial standpoint
that developed the United States. This statement authorizes the Karen refugees’ ability to
assimilate into the settler endeavor of cultivating land and edible plants for profit, which is tied
to Manifest Destiny and the forced displacement of Native, Black, and Brown communities. In
both the book and the movie, Spurlock explains to his wife that God said to him, “I have given
you farmland. And I have given you 65 farmers from the other side of the world. What don’t you
84 T. HO

understand, Michael? You must start a farm.”71 This divine mandate illustrates the settler
amnesia that undergirds the triumphant narrative of All Saints.
What is elided is the fact that the land in Smyrna was not given freely to Spurlock
or the Karen refugees by God or the Episcopal Diocese, but rather was made open for
Euro-American cultivation and Confederate plantations by the displacement of Native
and Black peoples in 1838, when the Tennessee Trail of Tears forced over 15,000
Cherokee from their homes and farms, along with enslaved African Americans and
Creek.72 Forrest opines that Spurlock is not capable of being the (cruel) overseer that
a profitable farm requires; however, he also eventually joins the All Saints’ effort after
bonding with Ye Win as fellow veterans. As survivors of and loyal allies from messy
Southeast Asian wars, the Karen migrants, like Vietnamese and Hmong refugee
soldiers before them, are able to affectively “earn” a vexed place in American resettle-
ment and militarized brotherhood.
At the same time, the film emphasizes the illegibility of the Karen on the American racial
landscape. In an opening scene at a U.S. welfare office, a white clerk (Kate Forbes) summons
an Asian American translator (Ivan Leung) to speak to Ye Win (Nelson Lee). This initial
scene signals to English-speaking audiences that not all Asians speak the same language,
and that Karen is not the same as Korean.

Translator (Leung): Annyeonghaseyo [

Ye Win (Lee): I am . . . sorry?

Translator: Wait, are you Korean? [to clerk] Excuse me! Is he even Korean?

Clerk (Forbes): He said he was.

Ye Win: I am not Korean. Karen. From Burma. Next to Thailand.

Clerk to Translator: So, you don’t speak, um . . . whatever?

Translator: It’s 2000 miles from Korea.

[looks at Ye Win, nods slightly, then leaves, while the clerk shrugs her shoulders]
This distinction is repeated during Ye Win’s first extended conversation with Spurlock:

Ye Win: We have welfare, but many new family sleep on floor, not enough food for their
children . . . . We are Anglican.

Spurlock: I didn’t know Korea had many . . .

Ye Win: Karen. From Burma. We were occupied by the British. We learn about Jesus Christ
from the British.

Spurlock: The Anglicans?

Ye Win: Yes. We are Anglican Church. Episcopalian.

Scriptwriter Armor freely admitted his own confusion between Korean and Karen
in interviews accompanying the movie’s release.74 Even as the film acknowledges
American ignorance about Burma, the next scene shows the pastor at his computer,
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 85

reading online articles about the Karen “genocide” and the protracted half-century of
civil war between the Karen and Burman-dominated governments.
At every turn of the movie, Spurlock labors to convince the Euro-American community
and authority figures to accept and support the Karen refugees. Although secular reviewers
praised All Saints for avoiding the messiah trope, the movie still utilizes white Christian
savior symbolism. Spurlock’s dedication to his new parishioners is not only in terms of
advocacy, but also rendered as corporeal sacrifice. During a misunderstanding that escalates
into violence, Spurlock literally puts his body between two white police officers and agitated
Karen refugees, and receives a blow to his head that causes blood to run down the side of his
face. Despite his physical wounds, Spurlock is able to ameliorate the situation by calling on
redemptive white civility and Christian hegemony. The white minister’s selfless dedication
to the community farm is further emphasized by close-up shots of his blistered and
wounded hands later in the film. When costs escalate, Spurlock takes out a personal loan
and risks his financial future to keep the farm running.
The triangulation of race in the film is enabled by the interracial doubling of pastoral
sacrifice. Spurlock’s efforts on behalf of the Karen are rewarded by unexpected aid from his
mentor and supervisor in the Episcopalian diocese. When the first crop fails due to a flood,
All Saints is saved from closure by Bishop Thompson, who is played by African American
actor Gregory Alan Williams. The cross-racial casting of Bishop Eldon Thompson departs
from the actual racial landscape of Tennessee.75 Although Thompson is initially ambiva-
lent, he is ultimately moved by what Spurlock and the Karen refugees have created:
a Christian, ecumenical community that coheres as religiously pluralist, interracial, and
transnational.76 The Black Bishop resigns his position on the all-white Diocese council so
that his salary can go toward funding the All Saints’ mission. Thompson’s socioeconomic
sacrifice parallels how Spurlock volunteered his body as a material and ideological buffer
during the encounter with the police. While Spurlock offers his body, time, and labor to
help the Southeast Asian refugees, Thompson forfeits his relative affluence and institutional
privilege in order to save All Saints and declares his desire to return to his missionary
vocation of serving underprivileged communities of color. Suggesting that he might return
“to Africa” or “maybe Burma,” Thompson walks away from managing “spreadsheets” and
his administrative role to return to proselytizing in the Global South/Third World. In
interviews, Williams invokes another African American minister, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. and his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The actor opines that All Saints is

a story about how we are more similar than we are different. It’s a great American story. It’s the
kind of story that has repeated itself thousands of times in this country. Dr. King told us that we
are tied to the single garment of destiny and whatever affects one directly, affects all of us
indirectly, and that’s what this story is about. It’s about that single garment of destiny. That one
hungry child, he’s my hungry child, even if it’s not my child. One refugee. A refugee is my
brother, my sister.77

King’s exhortation about “an inescapable network of mutuality” represents the interracial
tapestry, “that single garment of destiny,” that is the United States, and Williams further
extends King’s offer of kinship and mutual aid to twenty-first century refugees.
All Saints’ cross-racial casting both buttresses the film’s interracial appeal and reveals its
limits. The inclusion of a Black Bishop as the only African American character in the movie
indexes the history and continuing presence of Black religious leadership in the U.S. South
86 T. HO

and civil rights movements, a connection evinced by Williams’s invocation of King in

interviews about the movie. In real life, however, all the Episcopalian Bishops of Tennessee
have been white, including John Crawford Bauerschmidt, the eleventh and current Bishop
of Tennessee since 2007. The cross-racial casting in All Saints also does not guarantee full
racial inclusion or refugee visibility. As mentioned earlier, a key figure absent from the film
but included in the book is Father Bu Christ, the Karen minister who accompanied his
congregation from the refugee camps of Thailand to Louisville, Kentucky and then to
Smyrna, Tennessee and functioned as Spurlock’s complement at All Saints.
While the inclusion of a Black Bishop appeals to collective desires for more racial diversity, the
film still forecloses the window of inclusion for Karen refugees by allowing them only one
community leader. The movie portrays Ye Win as a noble, hard-working, humble, but ultimately
deferential “model minority” and domesticated refugee soldier. The book and the promotional
videos for the film valorize Ye Win’s heroic past and dedicated labor in caring for the Karen
refugee community: translating, managing the refugees’ finances, and tending the church farm
while working full time to support his wife and children. He also bears the wounds of war on his
body (displayed in the movie) and loses his wife because of the time spent taking care of the other
refugees and Kurios Farm. Recognizing the potential in the expanded All Saints’ congregation,
the Episcopalian diocese paid off the church’s mortgage and hired Ye Win as a full-time lay
worker in 2008. Yet what is lost in the film’s singular focus on Ye Win is how the Reverend
Thomas Bu Christ has been the celebrant at All Saints’ Karen services since 2007, and how he,
other Karen community leaders, and members of the Euro-American congregation also con-
tributed to and are still involved in tending to the refugees’ spiritual well-being, acculturation,
and the farm’s ongoing success.
All Saints’ focus on interracial mutual aid, the white minister (savior), and the Black/
white racial binary obscures the central role that Karen knowledge and resilience also
played in establishing Smyrna’s refugee garden. Burmese refugees have partnered with
Euro-American Christian institutions and local food-based economies to create avenues
of survival and resilience that function independent of and beyond U.S. resettlement
programs and welfare systems.78 What is less emphasized in the book and movie,
although celebrated in reportage covering similar refugee farms, is how TEK has enabled
Burmese and Karen refugees to create collective mutual aid projects that foster individual
and collective well-being.79
The All Saints film and book make explicit how the Karen refugees have survived more than
a half-century of displacement, trauma, precarity, food insecurity, and for some, sexual assault/
rape. Many migrants from Burma/Myanmar suffer from PTSD because of their sustained
experiences with militarized warfare, genocide, torture, forced labor, and decades either on the
run or displaced as refugees. The book details how Ye Win survived three bullet wounds while
fighting for the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and was then reassigned to help others
get to refugees camps in Thailand.80 I would emphasize that Burmese refugees’ ongoing
husbandry of Christian-owned land in the United States has contributed not only to faith-
based community building (“helping foster relationships among refugees, members of the host
congregation, and the wider community”), but also to ecological sustainability and immigrant
public health.81 Developed by Karen and other Burmese refugees’ TEK and survival skills,
refugee gardens function as a reparative collective practice and productive therapeutic ritual.
Enabling a connection to land, these forms of mutual aid have helped refugees to (re)claim
a sense of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and rooted community after a life of serial displacement
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 87

and forced migration.82 Although not necessarily decolonial or restorative in relation to Native
American advocacy for land back, food justice, or African American reparations, these farming
projects have given refugee families access to an ongoing supply of fresh food outside of the
U.S. welfare or traditional capitalist system while also counteracting the more toxic influence of
the Standard American diet, which encourages the overconsumption of fat, sugar, and processed
foods.83

American nightmares: Meat plants and COVID-19

Another avenue through which Burmese refugees have entered the U.S. food economy is as
meat processing laborers. Since the late twentieth century, agribusiness corporations have
recruited and employed refugees from Myanmar, particularly in the Midwest and South.
My critical juxtaposing of meat-packing employment and refugee farms counters the
homogenization of the grateful, meritorious, and hyperproductive “good refugee” depicted
in the All Saints narratives.
In the movie, Spurlock attempts to recruit affluent business leaders by explaining: “The Karen
are here legally. They’re eager for a fresh start, ready to work.” Through a job service program
that has “24 jobs stripping chickens at the Pardee Poultry plant” nearby, the Karen refugees find
employment at the local chicken plant, working twelve-hour shifts, while doing a double shift at
the All Saints’ farm. Refugee employment at poultry factories is also documented in the book: “A
number of Karen had found work at the Tyson poultry plant and needed to know terminology,
so another evening was devoted learning the names of each chicken part.”84 Throughout the
United States, meat-packing corporations have increasingly recruited non-Latino refugee work-
ers since 2008. In 2013, Tyson public relations manager Worth Sparkman
noted the success of efforts to bolster Tyson’s labor pool for its poultry, beef and pork processing
plants elsewhere in the nation by working with nonprofit refugee resettlement agencies . . .

Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride and other large food processors in the U.S. increasingly are
turning to refugees from Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia, and other countries for a more stable
workforce. Tyson Foods processing complexes in Center, Texas; Shelbyville, Tennessee;
Waterloo, Iowa; and elsewhere each employ hundreds of resettled refugees.85 That
same year, 400 Chin refugees “descended on” Columbus Junction, Iowa, “and more are
arriving by the week to reunite with friends and relatives and work grueling jobs for Tyson.
Like other waves of immigrants, they were drawn to this poor, sparsely populated region of
southeastern Iowa by the promise of jobs, good schools and welcoming people.”86
In 2020, many meat processing workers who first tested positive for and eventually died
because of COVID-19 were refugees from Myanmar (some Chin, some Karen, but detailed
disaggregated ethnic information is not yet available). Catastrophic outbreaks affecting refugee
workers from Myanmar were reported in Texas, Colorado, and Iowa. Many Burmese employed
in meat packing – like the refugees based in Dallas, Texas, Karen in Tennessee, and Chin in
Iowa – regularly make long commutes between their factory workplaces and their “tight-knit
neighborhoods,” often in crowded multi-passenger carpool vans. Corporate capitalism acceler-
ated the spread of COVID-19 among workers through punitive workplaces, lack of social
distancing, inadequate personal protective equipment, and incentivizing working while sick.
Despite 444 Tyson workers in Waterloo, Iowa testing positive for COVID-19 in April 2020,
Tyson, with support from the Iowa governor, delayed closing the plant as the outbreak spread to
88 T. HO

local nursing homes and the area prison. Although the county’s public health director said 90%
of the local cases were “attributed or related to the plant,” by May, the Tyson factory was “poised
to resume production after President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to
require meatpackers to stay open.”87
My critical juxtaposing of refugee farms with the recruitment of Burmese refugees for
dangerous jobs in U.S. meat-packing plants resists the construction of Burmese refugees as
an example par excellence of a twenty-first century Asian American model minority. The
exploitation of Burmese refugee workers within rural factory farms and urban meat
processing sites owned by corporations such as Tyson, JBS, and Smithfield not only high-
lights the fatal toxicity of the capitalist operations that drive industrialized agribusiness, but
also the heightened danger and health risks that vulnerable factory workers endure,
particularly in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coda: September 2021

Myanmar has been in chaos following the February 2021 military coup, and the ensuing
nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement has already seen over a thousand fatalities.
Thousands of activists, journalists, and artists have been killed, disappeared, arrested,
imprisoned, and brutalized. More than 75 children have been killed by indiscriminate
violence, and more than 1000 have been arbitrarily detained, according to the UN child
rights committee. The U.S. is still dealing with the newest wave and variant of the pandemic,
its deleterious impact on food-related industries, and increasing anti-Asian xenophobia. My
research is ongoing. Recalling Cardozo and Subramanian’s assembling of “Asian/American
naturecultures” as “always in making, but never complete or finished,”88 I conclude this
inaugural mapping of BurmAmerican foodways with an extended jeremiad from San Twin,
a Burmese American daughter and grocery worker who lost her refugee mother to corpo-
rate cruelty and COVID-19 in 2020:
JBS denies it did anything wrong, but my mother, who worked for JBS for 12 years, was almost
certainly exposed to COVID-19 in the Greeley [Colorado] meat packing plant, where she
worked long, hard hours to keep America’s grocery stores well-stocked, and an endless supply
of meat available for summer grilling . . . . OSHA only fined JBS $15,615 . . . My mom’s life is
only worth $2,230?

My mom was a healthy 60-year old working woman with no preexisting conditions . . . Then
one day at work, she started showing symptoms . . . . the on-site clinic at JBS . . . told her it was
just a common cold . . . and sent her right back on the floor . . . . she asked her supervisor if she
could . . . go to the bathroom. He told her no. And my proud, beautiful, hard working mother
urinated on herself. Soaked in urine, she put her head down and kept working. And all the
while, the virus was wreaking havoc on her body.

You wouldn’t have heard this story. After all, she was just a refugee-turned-meatpacker . . . .

I don’t enjoy telling our story. It hurts to remember. But the most painful thing is going over all
the what ifs? If JBS had closed earlier. Or cleaned the plant more thoroughly. Or gave the
meatpackers personal protective equipment immediately. Tin Aye, my mom, didn’t matter
nearly as much as the bottom line . . . .

My mom was a meatpacker. It’s the kind of job where you come home dirty every night, dead
tired. It’ll never make you rich, or bring you glory. But it’s the kind of job America was built on,
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 89

the hard work of everyday people. My little brother is a Marine, deployed overseas. He’s willing
to risk his life for his country. My mom never should have been forced to risk hers, especially
for a company that doesn’t care about its people.89

Notes
1. Y n Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(e)s (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2014), 21; 180.
2. Ibid., 11.
3. Karen Cardozo and Banu Subramaniam, “Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures:
Orientalism and Invited Invasions,” Journal of Asian American Studies 16, no. 1 (2013): 4.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Joseph Cheah, Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant
Adaptation, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 117–19.
6. Monica M. Trieu and Chia Youyee Vang, Invisible Newcomers: Refugees from Burma/Myanmar
and Bhutan in the United States (Association for Asian American Studies/Asian & Pacific Islander
American Scholarship Fund, 2014). http://apiasf.org/research/APIASF_Burma_Bhutan_Report.
pdf. Reprinted in Journal of Asian American Studies 18, no. 3 (October 2015): 347–69.
7. Sang Kook Lee, “Scattered but Connected: Karen Refugees’ Networking in and beyond the
Thailand-Burma Borderland,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21, no. 2 (2012): 278.
8. Patrick Winn, “The biggest group of current refugees in the US? Christians from Myanmar,”
The World, PRI.org, May 4, 2017, https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-04/biggest-group-
refugees-us-christians-myanmar.
9. Kristi Eaton, “In Oklahoma, a Myanmar refugee community worries about Trump’s expanded
travel ban,” NBC News, February 10, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/okla
homa-myanmar-refugee-community-worries-about-trump-s-expanded-travel-n1132821.
10. Trieu and Vang, Invisible Newcomers, 26.
11. E.g., Anita Mannur and Valerie Matsumoto, eds., “Asian Americans on Meat versus Rice”
(Special Issue), Amerasia Journal 32, no. 2, 2006; Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in
South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Robert Ji-Song
Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur, eds., Eating Asian America: A Food Studies
Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Mark Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire:
Food and the Making of Thai America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Samuel
H. Yamashita, Hawai i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai i
Eats (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2019).
12. All Saints. Directed by Steve Gomer. Screenplay by Steve Armor. Los Angeles: Sony Pictures
Entertainment, release of an Affirm Films and Provident Films presentation (of an Autumn
Pictures production), 2017. Michael Spurlock and Jeanette Windle, All Saints: The Surprising
True Story of How Refugees from Burma Brought Life Back to a Dying Church (Bloomington,
MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2017).
13. “In 1989, the military regime changed its name from Burma to Myanmar on the grounds that
the former name was tied to the colonial past. The state claims to include all citizens of different
ethnic groups with the name change, and not just of ethnic-majority, Burman . . . The new
name Myanmar literally means fast and strong (myan: fast and ma: strong). The regime hoped
for a fresh start in its post-colonial nation-building process with the change in all English
proper names into modern literary Burmese pronunciation. However, the new name has not
always been well-received among the public . . . . Some reject the new name Myanmar, as it was
reinforced by the authoritative regime and a reminisce of public fear and anxieties.” Chu May
Paing, “In Need of Daughters of Good Lineage: Placing Gender in Myanmar’s Buddhist
Nationalist Discourse,” in Studies in the Anthropology of Language in Mainland Southeast
Asia (Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society), ed. N.J. Enfield, Jack Sidnell, Charles
H.P. Zuckerman (Honolulu: University of Hawai´i Press, 2020), 44–45.
90 T. HO

14. Ashley South, “Karen Nationalist Communities: The ‘Problem’ of Diversity,” Contemporary
Southeast Asia 29, no. 1 (2007): 56.
15. When relevant, ethnic specificity and minority groups from Myanmar, such as Karen, Shan,
Chin, and Burman, will be signified as such.
16. “The circulation of inclusionary protest signs on Facebook points to the possibility of a more
capacious political community being imagined in Myanmar . . . . evidence of emerging trans-ethnic
solidarity between urban elites in Yangon and Rohingya refugees, between rebel leaders and labor
movements, and between migrant laborers and protesters is promising. The coup is transforming
multiple divergent groups into one counterpublic with an immediate goal, to undermine and crush
the military dictatorship. . .[and] to reimagine belonging and politics as becoming equitable for all
ethnicities, religions, and classes in Myanmar.” Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Tani Sebro, “The View of
the Coup from the Camp: Myanmar’s Emergent Trans-Ethnic Solidarity,” Georgetown Journal of
International Affairs (GJIA), March 17, 2021, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/03/17/https-twitter-
com-natrani-status-1360993418445524999-photo-1/ (accessed March 18, 2021).
17. “BurmAmerica” is the 2011 title of an unpublished novel inspired by Craig’s mother, Karen freedom
fighter and beloved human rights activist Naw Louisa Benson (later Craig, 1941–2010) and also
served as the title of Craig’s public reading at University of California, Riverside in February 2011.
Charmaine Craig. Miss Burma (New York: Grove Press, 2017).
18. Espiritu, Body Counts, 21.
19. Lan Duong and Y n Lê Espiritu, “Toward Critical Refugee Studies: Being and Becoming in
Exceptional States of War, Violence, and Militarism,” UCHRI Residential Research Group
(2015–16), https://uchri.org/awards/toward-critical-refugee-studies-being-and-becoming-in-
exceptional-states-of-war-violence-and-militarism/ (accessed August 15, 2020).
20. Winn, “The biggest group of current refugees in the US?.” Because Burmese names do not
follow a patrilineal naming system, but rather are individual designations related to one’s day
of birth, Burmese names in this essay will generally remain in their full form.
21. Josh Margolin, “FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid
coronavirus,” ABC News, March 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-
surge-hate-crimes-asian-americans/story?id=69831920 (accessed August 15, 2020).
22. Chin state is one of the poorest, most underdeveloped territories in Myanmar, and home to an
estimated 500,000 ethnic Chin. Although “Chin” refers to a major ethnic minority group who are
connected by a geographical homeland, traditional practices, and a shared history shaped by British
colonialism, it is not universally accepted as the preferred ethnonym by all who live in or come from
Chin state. Some prefer tribal affiliations: e.g., Mizo (Lushai), Zomi (Kuki), Asho, or Cho (Sho).
Since 1988, thousands from Chin state have been displaced by religious persecution and militarized
Buddhist nationalism and have resettled in India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Thailand. There are
estimated to be more than 200,000 Chin asylum seekers and refugees around the world. One of the
largest concentrations of Chin people outside of Myanmar is based in Indianapolis. Because of the
almost 20,000 Chin who live in Southport, the area is nicknamed “Chindianapolis.” Access to
employment, low housing prices, and an abundance of Christian churches appealed to Chin
refugees seeking more secure resettlement. Amy Alexander, “‘We Are Like Forgotten People.’
The Chin People of Burma: Unsafe in Burma, Unprotected in India.” (Report 2–56432-426-5), ed.
Elaine Pearson, Dinah PoKempner, and Joseph Saunders, Human Rights Watch (January 27, 2009):
48, 73, 9 (note 3), https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/01/27/we-are-forgotten-people/chin-people-
burma-unsafe-burma-unprotected-india# (accessed April 2, 2021); Susan Salaz and Steve Raymer,
“Welcome To Chindianapolis,” Indianapolis Monthly, December 12, 2020, https://www.indianapo
lismonthly.com/arts-and-culture/circle-city/welcome-to-chindianapolis.
23. Roxane Gay, “A White Man’s Bad Day,” The Audacity, March 17, 2021, https://audacity.
substack.com/p/a-white-mans-bad-day. Stop AAPI Hate collected and recorded 3,795 first-
hand accounts of anti-Asian hate and abuse between the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in
March 2020 and February 2021. Russell Jeung, Aggie Yellow Horse, Tara Popovic, and Richard
Lim, “Stop AAPI Hate National Report 3/19/20 – 2/28/21,” March 16, 2021, 1, https://
secureservercdn.net/104.238.69.231/a1w.90d.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/
210312-Stop-AAPI-Hate-National-Report-.pdf (accessed March 21, 2021).
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 91

24. Sandy Barron, Refugees from Burma: Their Backgrounds and Refugee Experiences. United States
(Washington D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, Cultural Orientation Resource Center, 2007), 52.
25. Since 2020, the name “Karen” has become popular shorthand for entitled white women who
call the police in encounters with people of color. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss
Karen as a new racial stereotype that may function bivalently: as a cathartic “derogatory”
hailing that calls out feminized white supremacist entitlement and complicity in the carceral
state and/or as a misogynist slur that censors white female behavior and speech. Some claim the
two forms of “Karen” are easily differentiated by context or pronunciation, but I would argue
that these dismissals ignore the cognitive slippages that haunt and overshadow the ethnonyms
used and preferred by refugees from Burma. As stated on the meme, “it’s not different on
paper. it’s time to quit using Karen in this way” [sic].
26. William B Womack, “Literate networks and the production of Sgaw and Pwo Karen writing in
Burma c.1830–1930” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
2005), 15.
27. Jessica Harriden, “‘Making a Name for Themselves’: Karen Identity and the Politicization of
Ethnicity in Burma,” Journal of Burma Studies 7, no. 1 (2002): 92.
28. Ibid., 85. “The term ‘Karen’ denotes several different but related ethnic groups speaking languages
belonging to a distinct branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. The Sgaw and Pwo, numbering 350,000
of a total of 750,000 members of the hill tribe population of Northern Thailand, are the two main
Karen groups in that country. Other subgroups include the Kayah, Palaung and Taungthu (Pa-O).”
Roland Platz, “Buddhism and Christianity in Competition? Religious and Ethnic Identity in Karen
Communities of Northern Thailand,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2003): 473,
doi:10.1017/S0022463403000432. See also Harriden, “‘Making a Name’,” 85.
29. South, “Karen Nationalist Communities,” 56.
30. Ibid., 57, citing Charles Keyes (1979). André Gallant, “In Comer, refugees apply old traditions,”
Athens Banner-Herald, October 27, 2012, https://www.onlineathens.com/features/2012-10-27/
comer-refugees-apply-old-traditions (accessed April 10, 2021).
31. Martin Smith, “Burma: The Karen Conflict,” in Encyclopedia of Modern Ethnic Conflicts, ed.
Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr. (London: Greenwood Press, 2003); quoted in South, “Karen Nationalist
Communities,” 58. Paul Kenny and Kate Lockwood-Kenny, “A Mixed Blessing: Karen
Resettlement to the United States,” Journal of Refugee Studies 24, no. 2 (2011): 221.
32. Zoya Phan with Damien Lewis, Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West
(London: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster UK, 2009), 15. Republished as Zoya Phan with
Damien Lewis, Undaunted A Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma (New York: Free
Press, 2010), 1–2.
33. Ibid, 16 (Undaunted, 2).
34. Ibid.
35. American Baptist Historical Society (ABHS), “Morning Star,” Mercer University Libraries
Institutional Repository, University Research, Scholarship, and Archives (URSA), https://
libraries.mercer.edu/ursa/handle/10898/669 (accessed August 22, 2020).
36. South, “Karen Nationalist Communities,” 58 [sic.]. S’ghaw and Sgaw are variations in spelling.
South cites Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
37. Jeffrey Lewis Petry, “The Sword of the Spirit: Christians, Karens, Colonialists, and the Creation
of a Nation in Burma” (PhD diss, Rice University, 1993), 84, https://scholarship.rice.edu/
bitstream/handle/1911/19085/9408655.PDF (accessed August 12, 2021).
38. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 23.
39. Signed in 2017, Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the
United States,” was colloquially known as “the Muslim ban” and suspended entry of refugees from
Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and reduced U.S. visas for refugees by 55%,
adversely affecting resettlement of displaced peoples from Myanmar. North Korea and Venezuela
were added in 2018. In January 2020, the Trump administration expanded the ban to include six
more nations in Africa and Asia, including Myanmar.
40. Womack, “Literate networks,” 4.
92 T. HO

41. Quoted in Harriden, “‘Making a Name’,”88.

42. “Refugees From Myanmar Hurt Most by Trump Cuts,” Voice of America News, March 16,
2017, https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-politics/refugees-myanmar-hurt-most-trump-cuts.
43. In January 2020, the Trump administration expanded its controversial anti-Muslim travel bans
to include Myanmar, Nigeria, Eritrea, and Kyrgyzstan, barring anyone from those countries
from applying for U.S. visas. In January 2021, Biden signed an executive order ending Trump’s
travel ban on noncitizens from thirteen countries, including Myanmar.
44. “Karen refugees are currently one of the designated nationalities selected by the US government to
be of special humanitarian concern.” Many also gain admittance through referral from an immedi-
ate family member who has already resettled in the US. Kenny and Lockwood-Kenny, “A Mixed
Blessing,” 224.
45. South, “Karen Nationalist Communities,” 58. See Ibid. See also Harriden, “‘Making a Name’,”
94 and 98 on Pwo Buddhists’ politics.
46. Mikael Gravers, “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion Among the Buddhist Karen in Burma
and Thailand,” Moussons (Recherche en sciences humaines sur l’Asie du Sud-Est/Social Science
Research on Southeast Asia) 4 (2001): 3–31. https://doi.org/10.4000/moussons.3181. Accessed
March 1, 2021. https://journals.openedition.org/moussons/3181?lang=en.
47. Harriden, “‘Making a Name’,” 95.
48. The Burma Ethnic Research Group (1998), cited in South, “Karen Nationalist Communities,”
56. Yōko Hayami, “Karen Culture of Evangelism and Early Baptist Mission in Nineteenth
Century Burma,” Social Sciences and Missions 31, no. 3/4 (2018): 252; Winai Boonlue,
“Walking-on-borderland: Karen Strategies and Tactics of Survival at the Thailand-Burma
Border,” Thammasat Review 19, no. 1 (2016): 114.
49. See Khyati Joshi, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America
(New York: New York University Press, 2020), 64.
50. William B. Womack. “Putting Down Roots: Karen Refugee Gardens in the American South”
(Unpublished conference presentation delivered at the 56th annual meeting of the Southeast
Conference of Asian Studies, University of Mississippi, January 14, 2017).
51. Bob Smietana, “How a Group of Refugees Saved a Church on the Brink of Collapsing,” (Weblog
post), Washington Post, August 18, 2017, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1930029794?accoun
tid=14521. Daniel Dercksen, “All Saints – A Story of Faith,” The Writing Studio, November 7, 2017,
https://writingstudio.co.za/all-saints-a-story-of-faith/ (accessed August 16, 2020).
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. As a flood approaches, the real Ye Win warns Spurlock and his cinematic avatar (Nelson Lee)
about the swelling river toward the end of the movie. Po, the Karen teenager who befriends
Spurlock’s son Atticus in the movie, is played by John Wise Win, Ye Win’s son.
55. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 151. Sour leaf is called chin baung ywet (literally “sour leaf”) in
Burmese. Hibiscus sabdariffa is “a medicinal plant with a worldwide fame.” Known by various
names (e.g., roselle, gongura, zobo, Guinea/Indian/Jamaican/Caribbean/red sorrel/saril, karkadi
(karkade), Florida cranberry, Queensland jelly plant), sour leaf is consumed by many populations
in the African diaspora and by indigenous groups of Southeast Asia and northeastern India. Pragya
Singh, Mahejibin Khan, and Hailu Hailemariam, “Nutritional and health importance of Hibiscus
sabdariffa: A review and indication for research needs,” Journal of Nutritional Health and Food
Engineering 6, no. 5 (2017):125–28, DOI: 10.15406/jnhfe.2017.06.00212; Mike Sula. “How to Eat
Hibiscus like the Burmese,” Bleader/Chicago Reader, September 4, 2013, https://www.chicagoreader.
com/Bleader/archives/2013/09/04/how-to-eat-hibiscus-like-the-burmese (accessed August 22,
2020); Desmond Tan and Kate Leahy, “Sourleaf Soup,” Burma Inc., May 18, 2018, https://www.
burmainc.com/new-blog-1/2018/5/21/sourleaf-soup (accessed August 22, 2020). Albert Ayeni,
Meredith Melendez, Andrew Rysanek, and Mara Sanders, “Ultra-Niche Crops Series: Roselle
(Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) Production and Marketing in New Jersey” (Cooperative Extension Fact
Sheet FS1298),” New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station/Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, October 2018, https://njaes.rutgers.edu/fs1298/ (accessed August 15, 2020).
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 93

56. Amy Sowder and Heather Hahn, “Karen refugees revitalize two mainline churches, inspire film All
Saints,” The Christian Century, September 5, 2017. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/news/
karen-refugees-revitalize-two-mainline-churches-inspire-film-all-saints-0 (accessed August 16,
2020).
57. Frank Scheck praises All Saints as “a faith-based film that even atheists can embrace . . . . By
avoiding excessive proselytizing and instead simply and effectively relating its moving tale, All
Saints proves stirring in a way many of its cinematic brethren do not.” Frank Scheck “‘All Saints’:
Film Review,” Hollywood Reporter, August 25, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
review/all-saints-1032329 (accessed August 10, 2020). Joe Leydon, “Film Review: ‘All Saints’,”
Variety, August 24, 2017, https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/all-saints-review-1202538667/
(accessed August 10, 2020).
58. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 151. The All Saints’ project is named Kurios Farms. “The Greek
word for ‘lord’ kurios was a common word for God in the original language of the New Testament.
A reminder to Michael, his parish, and the world that this was God’s farm and God was in charge of
it” (130).
59. Ibid., 13.
60. South, “Karen Nationalist Communities,” 60.
61. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 13.
62. Ibid.
63. Reagan Hignojos similarly likens Bawi Cung Nung to Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.
Reagan Hignojos and Brandi Addison, “Sam’s stabbing victim offers lesson in grace,”
Midland Reporter-Telegram, April 12, 2020, https://www.mrt.com/opinion/article/OPINION-
Sam-s-stabbing-victim-offers-lesson-in-15195816.php.
64. Harriden, “‘Making a Name’,” 94; Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 22. See also Phan, Little
Daughter, 68; Craig, Miss Burma, 18.
65. Womack, “Literate networks,” 184.
66. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 22. See also Platz, “Buddhism and Christianity,” 478 and Winai
Boonlue, “Karen imaginary of suffering in relation to Burmese and Thai history,” in Present State of
Cultural Heritages in Asia, ed. S. Nakamura and Y. Yoshida (Kanazawa, Japan: Kanazawa
University, 2012), 22.
67. Amy Sowder, “All Saints’ movie details how refugees saved struggling Episcopal church,”
Episcopal News Service, August 25, 2017, https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2017/08/25/
all-saints-movie-details-how-refugees-saved-struggling-episcopal-church/ (accessed
August 21, 2020). Sowder and Hahn, “Karen refugees.”
68. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 134.
69. An extended comparison of Karen and Hmong refugee soldier figures is beyond the scope of this
essay but would be useful in tracking differential Southeast Asian forms of the “noble savage” and
“natural” warrior trope. For more on the (Hmong) “refugee soldier figure who emerged as an ally
through U.S. global interventions but was displaced as a refugee,” see Ma Vang, “The Refugee
Soldier: A Critique of Recognition and Citizenship in the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of
1997,” History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2021), 94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1c9hm60.7.
70. “Michael was surprised to see Karen walking along the fence dividing church land from the highway,
pulling up what appeared to be weeds. They did the same along the creek and tree line that edged the
church’s bottomland. Michael learned that they were actually harvesting edible greens. When spring
rains brought the usual wild onions springing up all over the lawn, he saw Karen women and
children carefully pulling up every shoot . . . . These people are survivors! Michael realized. I look out
over our land and see weeds and wildlife. They see dinner!” (Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 101–02).
71. Ibid, 110, italics in original. In the movie, God tells Spurlock, “You do the math.”
72. In 1796, when Tennessee joined the United States, five-sixths of present-day territory was still
inhabited by the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations. Native peoples who lived there prior to
removal included the Shawnee, Yuchi, Natchez, Muscogee (Creek), and Catawba. More than
a thousand Cherokee died during their forced migration west and resettlement in Oklahoma
(1838–39), and it is estimated that several thousand perished from the consequences of the
94 T. HO

relocation. Smyrna began as an agrarian community as Europeans settled the area and was first
incorporated in 1869. The town’s most important historical site remains the Sam Davis
plantation, named after a local Confederate “boy soldier” who was hanged by the Union
Army for spying. Agriculture continued to be the principal economic activity in Smyrna
until the establishment of the Army Air Base in 1941.
73. “Hello. Are you trying to help these people apply for benefits?” Translated by Min Yoo.
Personal communication, August 24, 2020. Actor Ivan Leung is likely of Chinese descent
and probably not fluent in Korean.
74. All Saints movie. “All Saints: Ye Win and the Karen.” YouTube.com, July 11, 2017. https://
youtu.be/QmuEyvcSMf0 (accessed August 15, 2020).
75. John Bauerschmidt (2007 to present) was Spurlock’s supervisor and head of the diocese in the book.
76. In his final sermon in the film, Spurlock says, “We tried to save our church by starting a farm, but as
we fought together down in these fields, we found that we had actually started something else,
something each of us in our own way needed more: a community. Baptists from Riverview,
Buddhists from Nashville, farmers from Smyrna, farmers from the other side of the world,
connected beyond that building, beyond this land . . . Maybe it’s what God intended all along.”
77. Quoted in Dercksen, “All Saints – A Story of Faith.”
78. This pattern has been noted in studies of Karen refugee resettlement: “non-governmental
agencies contracted by the state were conspicuously absent in the post-resettlement phase, with
a number of unofficial non-governmental organizations, primarily religious ones, filling the
void.” Kenny and Lockwood-Kenny, “A Mixed Blessing,” 217, 219, and 235.
79. “Built without power tools, save for the odd chainsaw cut, and seemingly without fasteners, the
constructions employ skills the Karen people learned in their childhoods . . . . ‘The land is a place
where refugees are teachers,” [Jubilee staff member Russ] Dyck said . . . . “this is a place of healing. It’s
been amazing to see how Karen and other refugees connect with this piece of land.” At Jubilee,
refugees garden, raise and kill goats and practice other traditional skills.” Gallant, “In Comer,
refugees apply old traditions.”
80. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 12–13.
81. Church World Service, “Church-hosted refugee gardens prove drought-resistant,” CWS
Global, November 28, 2012, https://cwsglobal.org/church-hosted-refugee-gardens-prove-
drought-resistant/ (accessed August 23, 2020).
82. Ibid. The benefits of gardening are not exclusive to Burmese refugees. Christian refugee farm
projects throughout the United States are also tended by refugees from Cuba, Somalia, Bhutan,
Albania, Bosnia, Iran, Liberia, and elsewhere. See for example, Jubilee Partners’ Neighbor’s Field
in Comer, Georgia, and the Pamoja (Swahili for “together”) Garden in Hudsonville, Michigan.
83. See Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-
American Recipes for Health and Healing (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015), 22.
84. Spurlock and Windle, All Saints, 134.
85. Jule Hubbard, “Tyson plans to employ refugees,” Wilkes Journal-Patriot, November 1, 2013,
updated May 4, 2021, https://www.journalpatriot.com/news/tyson-plans-to-employ-refugees
/article_313389c6-4319-11e3-8ce8-0019bb30f31a.html (accessed August 12, 2021).
86. Ryan Foley, “Burmese Refugees Flock to Iowa Meatpacking Town,” Associated Press, May 5, 2013.
Reprinted at The Irrawaddy, May, 6, 2013, https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/burmese-
refugees-flock-to-iowa-meatpacking-town.html and Manufacturing.net on May 13, 2013, https://
www.manufacturing.net/home/news/13173250/burmese-refugees-flock-to-iowa-meatpacking
-town.
87. Ryan Foley, “Coronavirus cuts ‘deep scars’ through meatpacking cities,” Associated Press,
May 5, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/6de2477c31301e779ea13d43ef0f2262.
88. Cardozo and Subramaniam, “Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures,” 4, italics in original.
89. San Twin, “COVID-19 Ravaged Meat Plants: My Refugee Mother’s Life Is Worth More than the
Bottom Line” (Opinion), USA Today, October 1, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/
voices/2020/10/01/meat-packing-plants-coronavirus-covid-19-death-column/3586030001/.
 AMERASIA JOURNAL 95

Acknowledgments
Deepest gratitude to my mother and extended family for teaching me about Burmese food. I also am
indebted to William B. Womack for sharing his conference presentation about Karen refugee farms and to
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Donatella Galella, Anita Mannur, Deborah Wong, Himanee Gupta-Carlson, Stephen
Sohn, SueJeanne Koh, Dana Simmons, Jonathan Eacott, and other members of the AAAS Feminisms
writing group (especially Kavita Daiya, Patricia Chu, GJ Sevillano, and Catherine Phuc To) who encour-
aged this project and generously read earlier drafts. Sincere thanks to the Critical Refugee Studies Collective
for research funding support (UC Office of the President Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives
grant ID number MRP-17-454891) and to David A. Martinez for his keen editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (UC Office of the President
Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant ID number MRP-17-454891)

ORCID
Tamara Ho http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6894-9517