Chinatown’s religious life is a landscape indeed: made up of many intertwined elements coming together to make a beautiful, expansive scene. I found it particularly striking that although we may compartmentalize religions in the U.S., it is not always so in China culturally; Grant is trying to prove that strict religious distinctions in Chinatown are in fact nonexistent and blurred. One prime example of this is the He Xian Ju temple, which i centered around a Daoist deity from a province in north Fuzhou by the name of Fuqi yet is considered a Buddhist temple, while also integrating different religious practices from traditional China. For the first time, I have been able to think of religious as a way of expressing oneself, inclusive of “funerals, weddings, veneration of ancestors, and festival related to the Chinese lunar calendar” (124) and everyday traditions practiced by families such as shrines devoted to the kitchen god.
In addition to the way that Chinese in New York cannot quite categorize themselves so neatly, it is apparent that each of the religious communities discussed has served as a haven for new immigrants looking for a way to identify themselves in a vast, new world. Master Lu, the center and medium of He Xian Jun in the temple located on Eldridge street in New York City, himself was an illegal immigrant looking for a means to establish himself in the United States. Continuing his work of serving as a messenger for He Xian Jun has proved to be successful and so it is now in his good nature that he helps other Chinese immigrants who are struggling to “make it” with large fees owed to snake heads just as he did. Master Lu’s story is quite interesting, as he told Grant that He Xian actually instructed him to build a temple, even if he was still in debt to many people helping him pay off his loaned money for the voyage over. As a result, Master Lu then built a sprawling, beautiful temple honoring He Xian Jun in Fuqi, where the ties are currently still very strong; this is transnationalism at it’s best. Still very well known in his region of Fuzhou, Master Lu is mostly in New York City answering the various questions posed by Fuquian devotees about anything including “business ventures…children’s names…potential success of petitions for political asylum…thanks for safe passage across the ocean” (129).
However helpful and inclusive religious communities are for newly arriving Fuzhounese immigrants, there are still (more importantly) issues within the communities. It is a struggle to establish an identity in a place where belief systems are seen from a very rigid point of view (ie: surveys here ask Chinese to check one: Buddhist, Daoist, Catholic, etc.), and communities are constantly shifting to economically and emotionally serve the needs of a rapidly growing immigrant population.
