- Paperback: 237 pages
- Publisher: New York University Press; illustrated edition edition (August 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0814731546
- ISBN-13: 978-0814731543
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 181 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,188,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Chock full of great quotes and insights, Ken Guest's eight years of fieldwork and research has produced a wonderful study on the role of religious networks in transnational migration. While mindful of exploitation and geopolitics, Guest zeroes in on the decisions and meanings migrants make of their own lives for themselves and for their families."
-John Kuo Wei Tchen, author of "New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Making of American Culture, 1776-1882"
Product Description
"God in Chinatown" is a study of the largest contemporary wave of new immigrants to Chinatown. Since the 1980s, tens of thousands of mostly rural Chinese have migrated from Fuzhou, on China's southeastern coast, to New York's Chinatown. Like the Cantonese who comprised the previous wave of migrants, the Fuzhou have brought with them their religious beliefs, practices, and local deities. In recent years these immigrants have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, and Chinese popular religion to Protestant and Catholic Christianity. This ethnographic study examines the central role of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown's highly stratified ethnic enclave, as well as the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and China. The author's knowledge of Chinese coupled with his extensive fieldwork in both China and New York enable him to illuminate how these networks transmit religious and social dynamics to the United States, as well as how these new American institutions influence religious and social relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China. God in Chinatown is the first study to bring to light religion's significant role in the Fuzhounese immigrants' dramatic transformation of the face of New York's Chinatown.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
On a spring Sunday afternoon in 1999 I stood in the fellowship hall of the Church of Grace to the Fujianese in Chinatown, on New York's Lower East Side, eating lunch with about 150 recently arrived immigrants. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
On a spring Sunday afternoon in 1999 I stood in the fellowship hall of the Church of Grace to the Fujianese in Chinatown, on New York's Lower East Side, eating lunch with about 150 recently arrived immigrants. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
difficult circumstances, July 23 2008
By W Boudville - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York's Evolving Immigrant Community (Hardcover)
New York has always been a polyglot society. Guest has chosen to look at a relatively small and recently arrived segment. Immigrants, legal or otherwise, from Fuzhou in China.The book starts off with an overview of Chinatown's history. Going back a century. But the narrative quickly centres on the Fuzhounese. Replete with interviews with several, that describe their experiences. These often include being smuggled into the US by snakehead organisations that stretch from China to New York. The hapless immigrant typically incurs massive debt that takes years to pay off. Think of it perhaps as a mortgage on a person rather than a house. And instead of a bank making the "loan", it is an underground society with shall we say informal means of collection. Generally, the person has to endure years of low paying manual labour, in stereotypical surroundings like Chinese restaurants, to break free of the debt.
There is also a study of the religious and linguistic diversity amongst these immigrants. Reflecting the complexity of the Chinese diaspora.
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