'Buddhianity' in Lowell

Four weeks into my pilgrimage, on Labor Day, 1999, I found myself sitting with Sokha Diep at her kitchen table in Lowell, Massachusetts. I asked Sokha how she had met her husband, Tony.

"Meet?" she asked, as her hands, the color of varnished wood, darted up from her lap to cover her mouth. "Oh, funny. He believe in Chinese fortune-teller. He looking for wife. So he went to Chinatown in New York, and he met this fortune-teller, this Chinese guy." Sokha dipped her head slightly, a gesture informing me that she had found this method not altogether authoritative. Sokha, about 5 feet tall, appeared taller sitting upright against her straight-back chair. A black-and-white-striped scarf with yellow flowers was wrapped snugly over her head.

"And you know," Sokha said, "the Chinese guy take chopstick that has some certain word written on it, and put it in a can, and he shake, shake, shake." Sokha, imitating the diviner, moved her hands as if mixing a drink served in a coconut. "Whatever chopstick falls on to the ground, then they pick that and read your future. So they said, 'If you looking for wife, then you come up this way.'"

"So the fortune-teller was right?" I suggested.

"Yeah," she conceded, giggling. "The fortune-teller was right."

Sokha Diep arrived in the United States 18 years ago, a 16-year-old survivor of the war in Cambodia. Like many of her country's refugees, her immigration was sponsored by a church group. She learned English in high school, eventually attending community college near her home in New England. After moving to Lowell, she entered the health-care field as a kind of cultural mediator, advocating and translating for Cambodian patients in local hospitals, advising them how best to synthesize traditional medicines with Western care.

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