"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.

"This fascinating book by Professor Tchen is required reading for anyone interested in the history of New York City." -- Dolores Hayden, author of The Power of Place

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.

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.

Beginning in the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants arrived in New York City with hopes of more opportunity for better lives. Once confined to a few streets in downtown Manhattan, the Chinese people gradually moved throughout the city. Their rich cultural traditions contribute to New York's vibrant multicultural community. New York City's Chinese Community captures the people, culture, history, businesses, events, and neighborhoods that have defined this community from the early days to more recent times. Historic photographs highlight details from the life and experiences of the Chinese population in New York, including their deep-rooted heritage and their new American ways of life.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY New York Times Critics • Wall Street Journal • Kirkus Reviews Christian Science Monitor • San Francisco Chronicle Finalist for the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Biography Award Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize The deeply reported story of one indelible family transplanted from rural China to New York City, forging a life between two worlds In 2014, in a snow-covered house in Flushing, Queens, a village revolutionary from Southern China considered his options. Zhuang Liehong was the son of a fisherman, the former owner of a small tea shop, and the spark that had sent his village into an uproar—pitting residents against a corrupt local government. Under the alias Patriot Number One, he had stoked a series of pro-democracy protests, hoping to change his home for the better. Instead, sensing an impending crackdown, Zhuang and his wife, Little Yan, left their infant son with relatives and traveled to America. With few contacts and only a shaky grasp of English, they had to start from scratch. In Patriot Number One, Hilgers follows this dauntless family through a world hidden in plain sight: a byzantine network of employment agencies and language schools, of underground asylum brokers and illegal dormitories that Flushing’s Chinese community relies on for survival. As the irrepressibly opinionated Zhuang and the more pragmatic Little Yan pursue legal status and struggle to reunite with their son, we also meet others piecing together a new life in Flushing. Tang, a democracy activist who was caught up in the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, is still dedicated to his cause after more than a decade in exile. Karen, a college graduate whose mother imagined a bold American life for her, works part-time in a nail salon as she attends vocational school, and refuses to look backward. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, Hilgers captures the joys and indignities of building a life in a new country—and the stubborn allure of the American dream.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.