Customer Reviews

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

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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.