God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York's Evolving Immigrant Community (review)

This is an ethnographic study of the recently emerging community of immigrants from Fuzhou in New York's Chinatown and their global network, which reaches across the United States and the Pacific in dynamic communication and interaction. The bulk of these newcomers from China have come to the United States within the last twenty years, beginning in the early 1980s. Whether the religion they brought with them was in the form of local deities, a blending of Buddhism and Daoism, or a reconnected Christianity—either established Protestant or, especially, Roman Catholic churches in Manhattan—the God of the immigrants from Fuzhou in Chinatown is transnational in nature, not limited to the geographical confines of this ethnic Chinese enclave in New York City.

The scope of Kenneth J. Guest's study of a transient population with its "long-established strategy of self-preservation and economic enhancement" (p. 45) is both broad and comprehensive. In tracing their movements Guest continually goes back and forth between Asia and North America, focusing alternately on the micro-picture of a particular people in a particular destination (New York City) and their places of origin in the province of Fuzhou, and then on the larger macro-picture that takes in politics, economics, and human ecology on a global scale and their relation to the dislocation of peoples and the demographic changes in the countries of both origin and destination.

With assurance and a demonstrated competence in the study of religion, history, and the social sciences, the author provides a concise account of revolutionary China from the Qing to the Nationalists to the present-day Communists; the migratory tradition of the South China provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang; the Overseas Chinese of South Asia and their economic power; the Chinese in America, with a focus on New York; popular religion and Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity in China and their current situation under the post-Mao regime; and China's place in the globalized capitalist economy and its human ecology, including the outflow of emigrants. Guest's extensive overview establishes the appropriate contexts necessary for a greater understanding of the evolving immigrant community of Fuzhou Chinese in New York and its transnational network.

Beginning in 1994 with an initial overview survey of Protestant churches and proceeding to a more in-depth, systematic street-to-street identification of all religious institutions within the sixty-block area of New York's Chinatown (1997 ), from established churches and temples to makeshift storefront organizations, and including the results of his interviews and personal observations (1998, 2001) on the religious life of the community, Guest has invested almost a decade of his life to come to know and empathize with the struggle for survival of immigrants from Fuzhou in their new and often hostile environment.

Many of the recent newcomers from Fuzhou, especially during the latter part of the 1980s, were illegal immigrants who arrived in New York via circuitous routes, for example traveling first to Mexico and Los Angeles, smuggled in vessels as human cargo arranged by an international crime syndicate operating out of Taiwan. Their long journey to the United States has also included travel by air using false passports and visas—which may have cost between twenty-five and fifty thousand U.S. dollars—leaving them with a heavy burden of debt at exorbitant interest rates. In the last decade many of the newcomers from Fuzhou, the children or relatives of earlier immigrants, have become legal residents following the executive orders of the senior President Bush in 1989 (after the Beijing tragedy) and 1990 (in response to the stringent birth-control measures in the PRC). However, a large number of present-day immigrants are still undocumented, and they live from day to day without the security of official-residency status.

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