My Afterword to the AAPI Esotericism Panel

Not too long ago Serena Saint-Sinclair hosted an AAPI Esotericism Panel where I was one of the panelists, alongside Angela Yuriko Smith, an award-winning Ryukyuan-American writer and poet, David Shi, a North Asian shamanic worker, and Yeong-Tae, a baksu (Korean shaman).

Earlier this year I posted on this blog and my Substack, “Are Asian Folk Traditions ‘Pagan’?” I also have an old post showcasing Asian voices in the tarot community. At the end of that post I reflect a bit on AAPI activism as I’ve experienced it through the decades. Just some related links in case you’re interested.

Anyway, to dovetail on the AAPI Esotericism Panel, I wanted to add an afterword to remark on this newfound popularity of Asian Americans returning to their ancestral spiritual practices. I see it on TikTok and Threads, and I see it among the local AAPI youth.

From Buddhism and Taoism to folk religions, shamanism, and spirit work, a growing number of huayi 華裔 and Diasporic Asians are reclaiming traditions their parents or even grandparents had abandoned.

Quick Note: While I use the terms “Asian” and “Asian American” and want to be inclusive, I am only able to speak to the East Asians of the Sinosphere, so the references I make are going to be specific to the East Asian experience, and not necessarily reflective of all of Asia.

As an Asian American, when I was a young adult, there was little to no interest from our community to reclaim, return to, or even honor the spiritual and religious practices of our ancestors. Which often left me feeling ostracized even within the Asian American community. I was more “at home” among pagans, occultists, ceremonial magicians, and witches from other parts of the world than I was with my own people, due to the religious/spiritual disconnect.

But in this new generation of young AAPIs, I’m seeing a lot more interest in engaging with and practicing our folk traditions. I see it among Asian American youth, but we also see it taking hold in Asia. I also see it in the increasing presence of AAPI in pagan, witchcraft, New Age, and occult spaces.

To understand this Return, I think we need to start by examining why ancestral traditions were left behind by parents or grandparents in the first place.

In terms of discovering (or re-discovering) ourselves, a lot of us Asian Americans have started examining how Christianity entered our ancestral lands, and specifically its entanglement with Western imperialism, colonization, and White cultural dominance. And I do think that’s where many AAPIs need to start in terms of the deconstruction that will then lead them on the spiritual path that ultimately will feel more “like home” for them. Spiritual identity, for us at least, cannot be separated from history, politics, and power.

Christian missionaries came to Asia, propped up by colonial powers, and built hospitals, universities, and Asians associated them with prestige and upward mobility, whereas local folk religions became more and more stigmatized, associated with the lower class and the uneducated. During war and famine, Christian missionaries here from Europe controlled our people’s access to shelter, food, and water, and would condition giving them on conversion.

Conversion to Christianity also granted Asians proximity to whiteness. Being Christian as an Asian signaled that you were educated, upper class, and more cosmopolitan. Resisting conversion signaled lack of education, lower class, and folksy– you must be a peasant. However you dice it, the introduction of Christianity in Asia caused social division, even division among family members.

What resulted was Asian Christians being pitted against Asian non-Christians. Ancestor veneration, spirit mediumship, indigenous practices of shamanism, divination, folk healing traditions were all referred to as superstitions.

If you’re Asian, then whether you were Christian or not wasn’t entirely a neutral, purely spiritual decision; it was tethered to unequal geopolitical power dynamics and frameworks that positioned Western culture as superior to indigenous traditions.

Likewise — and I say this simply because it’s close to home — Hubby and my in-laws are mainland Chinese — state-sponsored secularism that is the legacy of Communism and the Cultural Revolution need to be examined as to why many Chinese Americans are so staunchly atheistic. In China’s modern history, both the KMT (Nationalists) and Communists would portray our folk practices as superstition and relics of the past to be eradicated.

Which Taoist lineages survived and thrived, and which ones had to retreat underground through the dynasties was almost entirely dependent on political capital. Which lineages decided to bend the knee to foreign imperialists and which did not, ultimately, brought privileges still enjoyed by their legacies to this day… and consequences legacies are still paying for today. So, for example, if you’re Asian and you know you’re from generational lineaged Taoism, whether there’s a whole institutionalized construct that you can turn to for resources or it’s totally fragmented and your parents don’t know anything beyond “your great grandpa was a Taoist priest and exorcist but now all of us are Catholic” tells you a lot about how politics affected your clan.

As AAPI, our religious identity is tied to geopolitics. While others might have the luxury of not having to deconstruct identity politics to find their spiritual path, I think part of the personal karma of being born into the hyphenated experience is that you have to. Identity politics is part of how we find our spiritual path. And for sure, each one of us will come away from that deconstruction with possibly very different even contradictory perspectives, and that’s okay. But it’s still inner work we each need to do for ourselves.

Now seeing young AAPIs yearning to return to their ancestral roots, to reclaim what had been long stigmatized, is one of the most incredible things I’ve gotten to witness.

Btw, yes, saying something like “Asian ancestral traditions” rather than getting region-specific is reductive. “Asian ancestral traditions” is by no means a monolith. Heck, even references to “Chinese” can get sociopolitically triggering. Finding the right words and descriptors is a challenge. Lumping all West Asian vs. East Asian, North Asian vs. South Asian cf. Southeast Asian under a generic term of “Asian” is — to use an understatement — imprecise, and in a well-intentioned effort to be inclusive, we end up erasing. Not to mention the point that the term “Asian” itself is a product of a European framework of geography.

One of the enduring problems I still see is infighting and divisiveness within community, and funny enough, I wonder if a large part of this is because an “Asian” native framework for categorizing ourselves would get really granular, by clan or ethnic groups, by the language we speak, or at best, by province. Heck, in Taiwan, in a tiny province called Miaoli, how the Hakka on one side of a mountain practiced spirit mediumship and ancestral veneration was diametrically different from how the Hakka on the other side of the mountain practiced it!

A global 21st century reality, however, is that we need to seek out our commonalities rather than squabble our differences, toward a mission of unity, but in a way manner sincerely honors the differences and maintains balanced representation. And step one is, instead of saying, “You do it differently from me, therefore you are practicing our tradition wrong,” say, “That’s beautiful. It’s different from how I learned it, but I honor and respect your ways.”

I also think panel discussions like the one Serena hosted is a start to fostering the much-needed unity.