wfn.org | Chinese immigrants build faith networks in Chinatown

["NewsDesk" <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Jan. 12, 2004  News media contact: Linda Bloom7(646) 369-37597New
York7E-mail: newsdesk@umcom.org ALL-AS-I{008}

By Linda Bloom*

NEW YORK (UMNS) - As Ken Guest began his search for God in Chinatown, he had
to take to the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

He was looking beyond the long-established neighborhood, known by tourists
and restaurant-goers, where the mainline congregations, such as the Chinese
United Methodist Church, focus more on the earlier Cantonese immigrants and
their American-born children.

Instead, he traveled to East Broadway, which has become the main street of a
relatively new population of immigrants from towns and villages near Fuzhou
in southeastern China - a population that does not speak English or
Cantonese. Motivated by economic conditions and transported by smugglers, the
Fuzhounese consider Chinatown the place to make the necessary connections for
life in the United States.

Guest, the son of a United Methodist pastor and grandson of a Methodist
missionary couple who served in Asia, was curious enough about these new
immigrants to make them the focus of his doctoral thesis.

"When I started doing my research, no one really knew anything about religion
in Chinatown," he said during a walk there on a brisk day. "So I basically
just started walking. Every time I found something vaguely religious, I'd
duck in and do an interview. I found 62 religious associations in the
neighborhood. 

"These churches and temples are reconstructions of their hometown networks,"
added Guest, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Baruch College. "They rely on these networks to survive
here."

His study of the role religion has played in the lives of the Fuzhounese,
both in China and Chinatown, has evolved into a book, God in Chinatown:
Religion and Survival in New York's Evolving Immigrant Community. Published
by New York University Press, it can be ordered at www.nyupress.org online or
through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. 

Guest's interest in China grew as he studied Mandarin while an undergraduate
at Columbia University. In 1984, he spent eight months in Beijing, making
contacts with Christians there as churches and seminaries re-opened following
a long period of closure during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and
'70s. From 1985 to 1987, he was an intern with the United Methodist Board of
Global Ministries' China Program and spent a year based in Hong Kong.

After serving as a staff executive for youth and young adults from 1989 to
1995 at the Board of Global Ministries, Guest decided to pursue a doctorate
on religion and anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate
Center.

"I was really interested in what difference religion makes in people's
lives," he said. "I decided to use anthropology as a lens to look at
religion."

As part of his research, Guest made several visits to Fuzhou, beginning in
1997. The province became a prime missionary destination after being opened
to the West in the 1840s. The Methodist Church sent its first missionary in
1848, and the denomination ran schools and hospitals in the region, he said.
Fuzhou continues to have a strong Catholic and Protestant presence, and he
found Christians there who still acknowledge their Methodist history.

But many have left the region, and during his visits, Guest discovered that
"more than half of the people (who emigrated) from those towns and villages
are here in New York."

Current estimates are that, at any one time, about 60,000 of the 300,000
Fuzhounese in the United States live in New York. Most are undocumented, and
many have paid smugglers, called "snakeheads," tens of thousands of dollars
to smuggle them into the United States.

The foot of their Chinatown neighborhood is Chatham Square, anchored by a
statue of Lin Zexu, 1785-1850, who was involved in China's 19th-century opium
war with the British. A myriad of restaurants, fruit stands, food stores,
legal services offices, employment agencies fill the blocks of East Broadway,
with garment factories, offices and associations occupying the upper floors
of the buildings lining the street.

Job listings for restaurant, construction and factory workers are posted by
area code in the employment agencies. "The Fuzhounese are constantly moving
up and down the East Coast to jobs," Guest explained. Inexpensive tickets are
available for the frequent buses that travel to Washington, Boston,
Philadelphia and beyond.

The Fuzhounese continue to expand east into what were once the tenement
houses of European Jewish immigrants, surrounding the few remaining
synagogues. Grace Protestant Church occupies a former public bathhouse, built
in 1804, on Allen Street. The Rev. Matthew Ding, a Methodist from Singapore,
stepped outside to greet Guest when he arrived at the church.

The Church of Grace, founded in 1988, and the New York House Church, formed
by a split with Grace in 1998, have distinct Fuzhounese identities, according
to Guest, and use the Fuzhou dialect in their services and programs. Grace
now has more than 1,000 members and a mailing list of 2,000. 

Churches like Grace are centers of ritual, but they also serve as community
centers for a population that often is marginalized in New York, he noted.
"These churches give them a chance to feel included again, like there's a
place where they belong."

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*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service staff writer based in New York.

 
 

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United Methodist News Service
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