Future-Making Rituals: Lunar New Year and Community Formation in an Immigrant Buddhist Temple

How does an immigrant Buddhist temple in New England sustain a sense of temporal order and materialize hope for the future among intergenerational Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants? This paper draws on ethnography at a Chinese Buddhist temple, the Thousand Buddha Temple (TBT) in Quincy, Massachusetts, to analyze one of the most significant annual celebrations of the Chinese community—the Lunar New Year. It explores how Chinese immigrants negotiate with the predominantly Christian host cultural environment through calendric rituals in their effort to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity as a community. In this process, the Buddhist temple functions as a “temporal container” for the immigrants, serving as a space where participants reproduce and inhabit cultural time and enact hope. This research offers an empirically grounded case study of how community is shaped through cultural ritual life.