Chinese immigrants build faith networks in Chinatown

Jan. 12, 2004

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."

*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service staff writer based in New York.  News media can contact her at (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.