Given the centrality of globalization—economic, political, religious, and cultural—to current anthropological interests, transnational fieldwork, once an “experimental” practice, is now common in contemporary ethnographic research. Kenneth J. Guest’s study of Chinese transnational religious communities is a good example of such ethnography. Guest concludes that undocumented Chinese immigrants who journey to New York in pursuit of the good life rely on social networks generated by their participation in transnational religious communities. By facilitating the exchange of information and providing financial support, Chinese religious communities mobilize the social capital necessary for individuals’ survival during the immigration process. Although the scope of Guest’s study is ambitious, he also attends to the detailed particularities of these transnational processes by presenting the voices of these immigrants who live globally. In so doing, he demonstrates the heterogeneity of the so-called ethnic enclave that is usually singularly identified as “Chinatown.”

By relating the individual experiences and life histories of recent Fuzhou immigrants to New York’s Chinatown, Guest situates both the contemporary situation of immigrants (legal and illegal, men and women) from China and the history of Chinatown in the wider context of U.S. immigration history. Although the social solidarity of an apparent shared Chinese ethnicity helps immigrants survive in a foreign land, Guest shows how the internal dynamics of New York’s Chinatown, with its dense networks of social obligations, also serve to establish a socioeconomic hierarchy—a hierarchy in which recent immigrants find themselves at the bottom. Chinatown is not a harmonious place for recent immigrants, a gateway for them to pursue the American dream; instead, it is a highly stratified community where differences of regional origin, language, educational background, and other socioeconomic and political markers serve as mechanisms with which Chinatown’s elite economically exploits vulnerable newcomers.

Guest situates three of the seven chapters of this ethnography in Fuzhou, describing the local history, diasporic traditions, and religious practices. Fuzhou has a long history of emigration and economic integration with the world capitalist system because of its relative distance from the national capital and its proximity to Taiwan. Guest uses the discourse of orthodoxy and heterodoxy to review the relationship between the Chinese state and popular religious organizations, in which orthodoxy is defined by the state and popular religious organizations provide the source for heterodoxy. Historically, the Chinese state (either in its imperial form in dynastic history or as a modern nation-state with the People’s Republic) has been highly circumspect of religiously inspired organizations because of the politicization of religion in Chinese culture, a phenomenon that Guest details at the local level through the example of an exorcism. This exorcism was conducted by two female leaders of a charismatic Chinese Christian community on a young woman who had developed mental problems after the murders of her father and older brother (while her husband was away as an immigrant in the United States). The competition between these two leaders over exorcising the woman’s demons, each exorcist with her own style and method, led to a conflict that ultimately divided the religious community and escalated to the point at which the local public security bureau had to intervene. As a result, the local state bureaucracy declared the teachings of John Sung, the founder of this charismatic community, heterodox. Although one woman was removed from the leadership of the local public church, both women continued to serve in their ministry—one through a locally tolerated house church, the other more clandestinely because of the attention paid to her by the public security bureau.

The remaining chapters bring readers back to the religious practices of Fuzhou immigrants in New York’s Chinatown. Here, Guest describes how immigrants participate in Buddhist, Catholic, and Protestant communities that build central networks for the immigrants’ material and emotional survival—networks that are both local and transnational. The activities of the immigrants vis-à-vis China do not merely involve one-way transfers of money back to China; their return visits to China also provide them with legitimacy and increased status in New York. As a result of their dependence on and involvement in religious communities, Fuzhou immigrants translate their experiences in terms of the larger structures of meaning from religion.