Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Ken Guest 
Over the last 25 years hundreds of thousands of new immigrants have been arriving in New York City from rural areas near Fuzhou, southeast China. Fuzhounese immigrants, many undocumented, work primarily in restaurant, construction and garment industries. In the last few years, their children have begun to attend Baruch College—a senior college in the City University … Read more
Over the past twenty years Fuzhounese immigrants have transformed the face of New York’s Chinatown, supplanting the Cantonese as Chinatown’s largest ethnic Chinese community and vying for leadership in the area’s economics, politics, social life, and even language use. Drawing upon ongoing field research in New York and Fuzhou, this lecture will explore the emergence … Read more
Since the 1980s, as many as 200,000 mostly rural Chinese have migrated, legally and illegally, from the towns and villages outside the city of Fuzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, to New York’s Chinatown, bringing with them their religious beliefs, their religious practices and even their local deities. In recent years these immigrant laborers in Chinatown’s restaurants and garment sweatshops have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, Protestant and Catholic Christianity to popular Chinese religion.
This ethnographic study examines the central roles of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown’s highly stratified ethnic enclave. It also explores the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and Fuzhou, including their role in transmitting religious and social constructs from China to the United States and the influence of these new US institutions on religious and social
relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China.