Lotuses in the Mud: House-Temples in Little Saigon
I can feel the familiar itch of a mosquito bite beginning to spread across the back of my hand. We’re standing in the backyard of my mom’s coworker’s home, a beautiful garden lush with flowers and a serene pond, undoubtedly the breeding ground for the mosquitoes attacking us on this humid summer day. Cô Uyên notices my excessive scratching and rubs the back of her neatly shaved head. “They always get me too,” she laughs, “my head makes an easy target.”
Cô Uyên’s house is both a home and a temple. It is a space for gathering, visiting, praying, eating, sleeping, and living. And in our hometown of Garden Grove, California, at the heart of Orange County’s Little Saigon, there are many more like it. These “house-temples,” as we call them, are scattered across the city in the homes of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns like Cô Uyên, who, whether out of a lack of resources to build more formal temple buildings or out of a simple sense of neighborliness, have transformed their single-family residences into functional gathering and ritual spaces. These residences also operate as central places from which monks and nuns offer charitable and educational services. In doing so, house-temples reimagine the single-family house as something far removed from its intended or historical uses.
Emerging more of necessity than by intention, the vast majority of house-temples are undocumented in any official capacity, making it difficult to track their history definitively. However, from what we know of the city’s history and our experiences living in it, we can assume that the first house-temples appeared in conjunction with the development of Little Saigon in the mid- to late-1970s, following the Fall of Saigon and the arrival of Vietnamese refugees to the United States en masse. After an initial wave of refugees relocated to the affordable neighborhoods along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, Little Saigon gradually expanded north into Garden Grove. Practicing Buddhists of limited means found that the predominantly white neighborhoods of these cities lacked a Buddhist community. In the absence of existing temples or the resources to build them, the houses of local monks and nuns provided a necessary alternative.
This alternative is not without its own costs, and the lives of house-temples are constantly influenced by financial difficulties. Cô Uyên, for example, expressed the difficulty for monks and nuns in providing for themselves (monks and nuns in Little Saigon often work full-time jobs outside of their devotion), as well as the determination that all money gifted to her and her temple be redistributed through charitable service. These financial difficulties, along with the desire of many Vietnamese Buddhists to visit monks’ residences and be in the presence of wise and devout mentors, provide very practical motivations for the development of these houses into more persistent gathering spaces.
As Little Saigon has grown alongside further waves of immigration, house-temples continue to emerge across the region, even alongside the establishment of larger, traditional temples. House-temples are so firmly embedded in Vietnamese-American neighborhoods that even non-Buddhist Vietnamese-Americans are familiar with and can often identify them in passing. Because the existence of these structures is so common, Vietnamese-Americans will most commonly refer to a house-temple as a “chùa,” the Vietnamese word for temple. There has been little practical need to distinguish between a formal temple and a house-temple, and therefore there is no standard term for the “house-temple.” It is our hope that through this research we can understand these homes as neither house nor temple, but as something else. In doing so, we might begin to challenge our assumptions and see the single-family home as a space open to reimagination.
And so, it’s on this hot mid-June morning that we find ourselves standing in front of Cô Uyên’s residence, a house-temple in Garden Grove. Located on the edge of a cul-de-sac just two miles from my parents’ house and shouldering a busy street that parallels the Garden Grove Freeway, her house is one that I’d driven past hundreds of times but had never noticed before. After ringing the doorbell, we stand at the front door for a few minutes contemplating whether or not we had the right address, but the image of a lotus flower on the gate confirms that we are at a Buddhist residence. We call Cô Uyên, who instructs us to enter through the unlocked gate to the backyard.
We have been able to map more than two dozen house-temples active in Garden Grove alone, only a single city in the much greater region of Little Saigon, but despite our best efforts we are confident that many more continue to escape our documentation. While the majority of those documented were discovered through navigation apps and social media, many more could not be found online and were discovered only by chance in our movement around the city. As informal spaces that primarily serve a local community already aware of their presence, house-temples do little to make themselves visible. Constrained by zoning ordinances which limit the degree to which residences may be adapted into religious spaces, street-facing modifications are minimal. In fact, one such ordinance requiring a 40-ft setback for all religious spaces entered off the street means that virtually all house-temples are entered from the sides or back, discouraging any visible additions or modifications which would indicate entrance as one might expect of a traditional temple.
House-temples possess a coded visibility that may be difficult to identify to those outside of the community they serve. But for those familiar with Buddhist temples, house-temples provide a few signals. The most obvious is the Buddhist flag, which indicates quite clearly that the house belongs to Buddhists and, in nearly all cases, is a religious site. This flag is often flown beside a South Vietnamese flag, common across neighborhoods of Little Saigon and indicating to neighbors that this house is not only Buddhist but Vietnamese. While Garden Grove has its share of non-Vietnamese Buddhists, this practice illustrates the significance of the house-temple in producing specifically Vietnamese-American spaces within historically white neighborhoods. Similarly, house-temples occasionally incorporate traditional Southeast Asian styling, particularly of the roof. This practice is not found in the majority of house-temples but, when paired with other modifications, represents an attempt to adapt typical Californian ranch-style houses into more welcoming temple spaces of a Vietnamese and Buddhist character.
A final indicator of a house-temple is the decoration of the front lawn as a garden. The manner and extent to which each temple decorates its lawn varies considerably, ranging from everyday lawn ornaments, which would appear ordinary if not for their overabundance, to grand statues and sculptures of Buddha or related figures and deities. Many house-temples incorporate the lotus flower, an important Buddhist symbol of purity as well as the national flower of Vietnam, on fence gates or as finials. In all cases, the lawn fulfills an important role in not only providing garden space typical of Buddhist temples but also signaling to passers-by, inviting them towards even more elaborate gardens in the back.
As we enter through the back gate, we are greeted by a monk who pulls out two plastic stools, gesturing for us to sit beneath the shade of a pergola. While waiting for Cô Uyên, we observe the backyard, which had been designed to feature lush scenes of tranquility. Tucked into the corner is the focal point of the yard: a small koi pond overlooked by a white statue of Quán Thế Âm Bồ Tát, the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy. The pond is nearly swallowed by an overgrowing assortment of greenery.
Cô Uyên emerges from the house and greets us. As we continue to admire the garden, she explains to us that she hired professional landscapers to design it. She tells us proudly that the garden’s maintenance and decoration, however, is her own work. As she answers our questions about the modifications made to her house and obtaining the necessary permits, the peace and tranquility of the garden is dissolved by an…
…there’s more in Issue 31.
Joey Guadagno is a third-year M.Arch student at Princeton University. He holds a B.A. in Architectural Studies from UCLA.
Jacquelyn Do the eldest child of two Vietnamese-American immigrants. She holds a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.