An insightful look into the central role of religious community in the largest contemporary wave of new immigrants to New York Chinatown yet God in Chinatown is a path breaking 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.

Now back in print, the groundbreaking history of the rise and fall of labor movements in New York's Chinatown, updated with a new introduction and epilogue. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

"Piecing together various historical fragments and anecdotes from the years before Chinatown emerged in the late 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's historical landscape and broadens our understanding of the role of port cultures in the making of American identities."--BOOK JACKET.

In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people. “Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it’s all true.” —Time Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.

Manhattan's Chinatown is an enclave located in the oldest section of New York City, Manhattan's Lower East Side. For most who reside there, Chinatown serves as the quintessential microcosm. It is a place to do business, buy groceries, and raise families. For many Chinese immigrants, it provides a stepping stone to a perceived better life that may only be achieved through hard work, determination, sacrifice, and assimilation. Chinatown's main sources of income and employment lie in its many restaurants, factories, small shops, and businesses. However, for generations of New Yorkers and visitors, Chinatown represents the very embodiment of exotica. With its ancient tenements, temples, fragrant food aromas, neon signs, colorful sites and sounds, and aromatic curio shops, it provides the ultimate journey of the senses, revealing an energetic and vibrant world. Through vintage postcards, Manhattan's Chinatown chronicles how this community has continually evolved over 150 years.