Crossing the Planes: Gathering, Grafting, and Second Sight in the Hong Kong China International District
Hong Kong, Dan Rather declared as he began his television coverage of the 1997 “handover” from British to Chinese sovereignty, “is Asia for beginners.” That is what it was for me, although it has been my home now for more than twenty years. In all of that time and in all of my work on American culture in transnational contexts, considering how people are changed by their cross-cultural encounters, I have never written about Mormonism and its various crossings in Asia. Although I have no doubt that my beliefs infuse my professional work, as I thought about Asia in my Mormonism, trying to parse influences and see where the academic training and the Mormon upbringing inform one another became impossible.
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