In that idyllic college town in the mountains of western Massachusetts—where a Congregational church housed in a two-hundred-year-old white colonial building and an Episcopal church housed in an even older Gothic edifice sat in the middle of campus against the spectacular reds, oranges, and yellows of my first fall foliage and then the blinding white of my first New England snow—I felt a little out of place. There was not one pair of chopsticks or a single Buddha statue to be found, except, in the case of the Buddha statue, maybe buried in a photo in one of the books stored in the East Asian
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