From KALW
Living in a multi-cultural city yields all sorts of surprises. On a corner in Oakland just east of Lake Merritt, a small Buddha has helped bring neighbors together.
Neighborhood getting together. (Photo by Tom Levy / KALW)
I didn’t know what to think the first time I saw the makeshift Vietnamese shrine. At the time, a few potted plants and flowers brightened up the corner. A piece of scrap metal protected the statue’s head. I had just moved to the neighborhood.
“Did someone die?” I asked a few women congregating in front of it. They shook their heads. One pointed to the sky and said, “Buddha. Pray.”
In this part of Oakland, deep potholes and trash mark the street. But then, there’s this perfectly manicured shrine. It’s an elaborate structure, decked out with flags, flowers and wall hangings. Vietnamese immigrants chant there every day.
The clack, clack of a wooden stick that sometimes accompanies the chanting is not well received by all the neighbors.
“The Buddhist alarm clock,” they call it. But they’re mostly tolerant, even appreciative. Because before the shrine, the corner was much worse.
“There was a couple of years when there was just a lot of street muggings and a lot of car break-ins,” said Denise Mewbourne, my housemate. We live about half a block from the shrine. She’s been in the neighborhood for more than a decade. At one point, crime was pretty bad, she says, but it’s better now. She and others credit the Buddha.
How that happened is a lesson in how history works. So many major and minor events bumping against each other — and reacting — to get us to where we are now.
By one account, the story of the Buddha goes back to the the 1990s. Oakland installed medians to block streets and slow traffic. At the corner of 11th Avenue and 19th Street, that created a new problem: dumping.
“Mattresses, tables, just junk, just continual junk, a lot of graffiti, a lot of urination and drug use kind of thing,” said Dan Stevenson, who lives catty-corner to the median.
He called the city public works department a lot back then.
“I practically became friends with whoever was on the other end of the line it was so regular that we had to call them.”
Stevenson isn’t religious at all. He’s more of a cynic. But in 2009, inspiration struck. His wife Lu bought a Buddha at ACE Hardware. They thought maybe that would shift the energy. Concerned about vandals, Stevenson epoxied it to a rock on the corner.
“I would have stuck Christ up there if he would have kept the mattresses off,” says Stevenson. “I don’t care who’s doing it.
The dumpings slowed.
But then after about a year, other items started to show up. Flowers, oranges and small coins would appear and disappear. It perplexed Stevenson because he never saw anyone bringing or removing the stuff.
He didn’t know it, but Vietnamese immigrants — including a woman named Vina Vo — had adopted the Buddha.
Vo is a tiny woman, less than five feet tall. She grew up in a village called Quang Ngai. Her 28-year-old son Cuk Vo translated as she told me her story. As a young girl, she learned traditional Buddhist mantras from her grandmother. Every morning she would pray and walk to the temple with her grandmother.
Vo’s family lived through the Vietnam War, and then in 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the Communist north. Vina Vo was 17 years old. The Communists burnt down many homes in the village, including that of her family. Relatives were beaten and killed. The temple was destroyed.
Her grandmother suggested that she should leave the country to find freedom. Part of that freedom included the freedom to practice her religion.
In 1982, Vina, her husband and brother got on a small boat that held 34 people. During a storm, they nearly capsized, but were rescued by Chinese people, who took bribes for their safety.
Eventually, they ended up in a Hong Kong refugee camp. It was a warehouse with bunkbeds and no privacy. There, a monk came to visit once a week. It had been 10 years since Vina recited the mantras her grandmother taught her. But in the camp, she gathered with about 40 people to pray.
“It was very important for me to pray because of the struggle ahead,” Vo told me. “It was for health and peace, but ultimately they were praying for freedom.”
Read the full article HERE.
