Asian Canada – Page 3 – Justin K.H. Tse

SSHRC Postdoc Fieldwork, Summer 2014

I’ve got some fun news. I’m back in the field!

I’ve really missed this. Much of my PhD was consumed with doing ethnographic fieldwork, key informant interviews, and focus groups, both for my actual doctoral project (see my work in San Francisco [x2], Vancouver, and Hong Kong) as well as for the collaborative project on the Highway to Heaven in Richmond, BC. After finishing all of that, I did a ton of writing, which has resulted in a dissertation and will result in a series of publications that you can expect to roll out over the next few years.

But as the summer is starting up, teaching is done, and frameworks are being solidified, it’s time to do some new fieldwork for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship. That’s the whole reason I’m here in Seattle in the first place.

I need your help. I need to talk to people.

Here’s what the project is about.
I am interested in publics. Asian American and Asian Canadian Christian publics, to be specific. And to be really precise, in Seattle and Vancouver, for now. And to be super-precise, publics produced by the younger generation.

What are publics?
That’s actually what I want to find out. There’s a huge academic literature on publics, as well as a lot of popular reflection. In general, a public is just whenever someone puts something into circulation and creates an audience. This is usually contrasted with the private, which means stuff that’s not supposed to be circulated outside of a self-governed institution, like a family, a church, or a corporation. But do younger-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian Christians think of their work as public or private? That’s the golden question.

So what are you really interested in?
I’m interested in how younger-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian Christians understand their participation in making publics. This can be really broad. It can include stuff like electoral politics, grassroots activism on a variety of issues, social media participation, artistic/musical production, social services, and a lot more stuff. Like my PhD on Cantonese-speaking Protestants and how they engaged the civil societies of Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, I let the data drive the issues that I explored.

So what’s the key research question? (Because I’m a social scientist and I know what I’m talking about.)
The key research question is: how do younger-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian Christians in Seattle and Vancouver engage and create publics?

How will you find out about this?
By talking to people. My research is usually driven by key informants. These are usually named individuals (although I always give the option for anonymity) who are positioned well to provide information about a phenomenon. My research is qualitative, so unlike a statistics-based project, I’m not aiming for representativeness. I’m trying to get stories, opinions, perceptions, and insider explanations on the record. To make sense of this data, I usually overlay it with focus groups of lay people and extensive methods where I consult quantitative data that’s already out there. I also use the key informant research to point me to documents that I need to put in my archives.

Who do you need to talk to?
I need to talk to key informants who can talk intelligently about how younger-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian Christians make publics. This means that they are usually a) talking about their own work as an individual or part of an institution or b) talking about people that they work very closely with.

What do you mean by Christian?
I mean people who self-identify as Christian. Evangelicals, liberal Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, hard to categorize, etc. If you’re from another religious tradition or not part of a religious tradition and still want to talk to me, let’s also talk…about Christians.

By Christian, do you mean that you want to talk to Asian American and Asian Canadians who are doing Christian stuff in the public sphere?
NO. I’m also interested in people who are working in the secular public sphere but personally identify as Christians. If the public stuff doesn’t have much to do with personal identification as Christian, that’s interesting too!

What do you mean by younger-generation?
I mean ‘second-generation’ (i.e. born in North America) + people who came here when they were young. This way, I don’t exclude people I should be talking to arbitrarily based on birth. It also means that I’m interested in talking to people who do work in Asian languages, not just English-speaking.

But ‘Asian’ is so diverse!
I know! The thing is, there’s this theory that I’m trying to suss out called pan-ethnicity. People who work on second-generation stuff (especially my colleague Russell Jeung in his book Faithful Generations) have noted how Asian Americans — and to some degree, Asian Canadians — cooperate across ethnic lines (i.e. Chinese, Korean, Filipina/o, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malay, etc.) and talk about themselves as ‘Asian.’ I want to see if that works when Asian Americans and Asian Canadians do stuff in the public sphere.

But I don’t live in Seattle or Vancouver.
That’s OK. For one thing, I need your information to contextualize what I’m finding here in the Pacific Northwest. For another, the data here might lead to sites outside of the Pacific Northwest because this public work might not be regionally bound.

Do you have ethics clearance for this research?
Yes. The University of Washington’s Human Subjects Division in fact determined that my research was exempt from review under Category 2 of their Exempt Determination. This means that — given adherence to common-sense ethical research procedures — my work has been approved by the university.

I’ll be working on the initial phase of collecting data for this project in Seattle and Vancouver throughout Summer 2014. This initial phase means that I am very interested in talking to key informants. This usually means setting up an interview that is usually audio-recorded, lasts for about one hour, and is transcribed for accuracy. I have a formal letter of invitation, consent form, and interview questionnaire available, if you want to see that before talking to me.

Contact me at jkhtse (at) uw (dot) edu, and let’s talk!

SSHRC Postdoctoral Award, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

While this will come as no news to many of my acquaintances, I am pleased to formally announce that I will be taking up a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Postdoctoral Award at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, beginning on 1 January 2014. This is an externally funded postdoctoral award from the Government of Canada that allowed me to apply by proposing an international institution at which to hold the fellowship. The purpose is for freshly minted Canadian doctoral graduates to be postdoctoral fellows as part of an institution’s academic life. My award funds my postdoctoral fellowship for two years while providing me with a base from which to get launched onto the academic job market.

I chose the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington because I wanted to be part of an institution where I could augment my studies in religion while being part of a community that valued my disciplinary home in human geography and my topical interest in Asian American and Asian Canadian studies. I was attracted to the Jackson School because of the Comparative Religion Unit directed by Professor James K. Wellman, Jr., who will be my postdoctoral supervisor. As a specialist in Protestant studies, Wellman is a good fit because of his knowledge of mainline Protestant studies (I have found his readings of the Niebuhr brothers very enlightening, particularly as he grounds their work ethnographically; see The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism) and evangelical studies (see Evangelical vs. Liberal), including in new evangelical paradigms and megachurch models (see Rob Bell and a New American Christianity). I look forward to working with him to develop my interests in American religion while reading and writing broadly around the nexus of religious studies and theology, which means that I will continue to engage the revisionist conversation on secularization as well. The Comparative Religion Unit is also a base from which to network with a diverse range of scholars across departments at the University of Washington whom I plan to engage in conversation about trends in the social sciences of religion. Finally, because the unit is located within the Jackson School, this situates me in an institution that cares about Canada-America relations, human geography, and Asian American/Asian Canadian/trans-Pacific migration and ethnic studies. I plan also to contact geographers and Asian Americanists for further conversation.

My postdoctoral project is titled Witnessing in the None Zone: Younger Generation Asian North American Protestants and public engagement in the Pacific Northwest. Following on the heels of my doctoral project on Cantonese Protestant engagements with the public sphere, this project now moves to a ‘younger-generation’ Asian American and Asian Canadian Protestant population and how they engage existing publics while creating new ones. By younger generation, I mean to say that I am not only interested in ‘second-generation’ Asian North Americans who are born in North America, but also 1.5-generation and transnational migrants as well. The project starts in the Pacific Northwest (especially Metro Seattle and Metro Vancouver) because much of the work that has been done on younger-generation Asian Americans has been conducted in California. This approach does not exclude the Californian case studies; instead, it can be a way to compare and contrast newer ethnographic work in the Pacific Northwest with the work in California. The Pacific Northwest is itself important because it has been conceptualized by many as a ‘none zone’ of religious life, and the fact that Asian Americans and Asian Canadians are engaging and creating theological publics in these sites may serve as a challenge to that thesis. By starting in the Pacific Northwest, I plan to later extend my postdoctoral fellowship work to other sites southward (say, to the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles, and sites in Texas, such as Houston and Austin) and eastward (say, to Chicago, Toronto, Boston, and New York), depending on where the connections may lead and whether these publics are bound by metropolitan units (as in my doctoral work) or conceptualize their geographical parameters differently. Again, the project does not focus on congregations, per se; it examines rather how younger-generaton Asian American and Asian Canadian Protestants engage and create publics, including in electoral politics, grassroots activism, planting congregations (one area of inquiry is whether congregational sites are conceptualized as public or private), participating in circulations of material culture, and involvement in social media (this list is not exhaustive! I am preparing to be surprised by my findings!). My plan is to start interviewing key informants at the beginning of 2014. In other words, details are forthcoming.

In addition to conducting this new research, I will also be writing papers to submit into academic journals in geography, religious studies, and American ethnic studies, while also converting my dissertation into a book to be submitted to an academic publisher. Finally, in keeping with the regulations of my grant, I will be teaching one course at the Jackson School on American religion in the Winter Quarter in 2014. I will write about that course separately.

I look forward to my time in Seattle as an opportunity for further professional development. I anticipate that there will be a lot to learn, and I am very excited to be working with James Wellman. This postdoctoral fellowship promises to be a time that will hone my work on religious and racialized publics, and I am very eager to be challenged in ways that I will not have previously imagined.

American Academy of Religion: 23-26 November 2013, Baltimore, MD

I am in Baltimore for the next few days for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. There are a ton of people to meet here, as well as a meeting for the steering committee of the Asian North American Religions, Cultures, and Society (ANARCS) group that I need to attend. While the conference lasts until 26 November, I’m actually taking off Monday (25th) afternoon.

Before that, tomorrow I will be in a paper session titled ‘Re-membering Home: Indigenous and Colonial Encounters in Asian North American Religious Spaces.‘ Devin Singh (Yale University) will preside over this panel, which is formed by Melissa Borja (CUNY Staten Island), Ren Ito (Emmanuel College, Toronto), and JuneHee Yoon (Drew University). We are very privileged to have Lisa Rose Mar (University of Maryland, College Park) as our discussant.

My paper is titled ‘Strategies of reconciliation: First Nations and Cantonese evangelicals in Vancouver, BC.’ Here’s the abstract:

This paper performs an empirical analysis of how Cantonese evangelicals have ministered to First Nations populations in British Columbia. Based on 50 key informant interviews and three focus groups, I argue that Cantonese-speaking evangelicals recognize to some extent their duty to help First Nations either through charity or through social justice lobbying as an extension of living out an evangelical understanding of the Gospel. However, these understandings are differential based on their comprehension of orientalization and how to practice evangelical theology based on experiences of racialization. I consider three approaches: a progressive evangelical theology that mandates policy advocacy, a conservative evangelical practice that emphasizes charity work, and lay Cantonese evangelical participation in both strands while being critical of First Nations poverty. This paper contributes to both Asian North American and indigenous religious studies by pointing to the complex potentials for unexpected collaborative avenues in the struggle against white settler ideologies.

I’m also excited for several of the other sessions that ANARCS is sponsoring, including a very promising ‘quad-sponsored’ session titled ‘Placing the Subfield’ that will discuss the ‘Americas’ in the North American religions.

If you are in Baltimore and want to meet up, I’d be very happy to do so. I’m looking forward to a very productive AAR and to learning a lot from my friends and colleagues.

Vancouver Sun: The struggles of affluent East Asian youth in Canada

In this post, I’ll discuss the Vancouver Sun‘s publication of some of the findings in a paper that Johanna Waters and I co-authored in Global Networks. I’ve written about the actual article here, and that’s where I discuss our experimental methodology and some of our key findings.

I like the article that Douglas Todd has written about our piece. This wasn’t something that I set him up to do; in fact, I didn’t even know that he was working on it until he emailed me telling me that it was in that very day’s paper and that he had already gotten feedback on it. As I said, I have been on vacation, so I hadn’t seen a Vancouver Sun where I was vacationing and am relying on the online copy.

The article rightly situates our piece in a longer literature that includes pioneering work done by my supervisor, David Ley, as well as Audrey Kobayashi and Elaine Ho (who incidentally edited the first article I ever published). As those who have read this literature will know, our piece takes seriously this recent literature’s attention to the ’emotional turn’ in cultural geography, an approach to studying space and place that takes seriously how perceptions and constructions of geographies are constituted by emotions. In particular, our piece focuses on the emotional geographies of young people transitioning to adulthood between Hong Kong and Vancouver. Todd reads our two empirical sections fairly and carefully. First, the young people we interviewed described their experience of their family’s supervisory practices as ‘sporadic’ and ‘fragmented’ because while they were grounded in Vancouver, their families often lived at a geographical distance. Second, the young people said that they felt attached to Vancouver, whereas Hong Kong often felt like a ‘hostile’ environment where they didn’t have friends and where they could imagine work hours being unbearable. I am happy with the way that Todd has read our article.

What I’d like to reflect on here is the relationship between academia and journalism. In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this, especially because Douglas Todd’s work and my work are starting to have points of convergence and because Sarah Pulliam Bailey has been doing so well covering the Asian American evangelical activism of which I have been a part. As I said when Todd first interviewed me, I felt that the relationship that we were developing was collegial, and I continue to feel that way. To work with journalists is not to seek publicity. It is to be committed to an academia that engages the public sphere and that demonstrates that academic freedom is vital to our democratic discourse. Working with my colleagues in journalism, I’ve gained a greater appreciation of why the press needs to be free, why it’s important that private entities should not control the press’s discourse (this includes when they read my work), and how the academic conversation is enriched when more public voices are brought into the picture.

For this article, I’m glad that Todd decided to give the article his own read without consulting me. I got a sense of why this research was important to our public discourse. Jo Waters and I had our angle, of course, and that was that our public discourse should not simply assume that children growing up in transnational social fields necessarily desire to live transnational lifestyles. But with Todd bringing it to the public sphere, I’ve been impressed by how important it is that this message gets out, especially in our public conversations about migration and citizenship. I write with gratefulness for Todd’s journalistic craft (and for Bailey’s, for that matter). They are teaching me so much about their trade and how we can work together between our different guilds, and I am grateful for their patience and for their collegiality.

UPDATE: After writing this post, I had the opportunity to read some of the comments about our research. I’m thankful for the many people who resonated, and I’m also grateful for those who posted critical comments that might help us refine our future endeavours. Two comments stick out for me, and I’d like to address them here. First, there is the observation that we ‘forgot’ to interview migrants from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as the ‘astronaut’ phenomenon encompasses more than Hongkongers and there are Hongkongers who work in major cities on the mainland. Second, some noted that this research describes a long phenomenon that can be observed since 1990 (and perhaps before).

Allow me to respond to both, as both can serve as a teaching moment for what we do in academia.

Both Jo Waters and I focused on Hongkongers in our respective projects. This was a practical consideration, as we wanted to limit ourselves to one segment of the Chinese diaspora, and as Weiqiang Lin notes, there are many other Chinese cosmopolitanisms to explore (such as, for Lin, Singapore’s ‘global schoolhouse’). Moreover, we have colleagues who do work on PRC migrants to Vancouver, such as Elaine Ho and Sin Yih Teo. Our study is thus not a comprehensive one that looks at every facet of Chinese transnationalism; instead, academics work with literatures–whole bodies of work–and our contribution is partly to the literature on Chinese transnationalism (as well as literatures on unconventional youth transitions to adulthood, emotional geographies, and cross-border movements more generally). In addition, studying Hongkongers allows for interesting comparative work with the PRC migrants, as well as the ability to unpack how Hongkongers perceive PRC migrants, a theme that was very much part of my master’s work (see this article also) and that has made it obliquely into my PhD work.

We are also aware of how dated the phenomenon that we are studying is. However, it’s partly because we’ve had such a long time to reflect, including the time elapsed between our two projects, that we’ve been able to make some of the claims we make. Again, this provides good comparative material for the new research emerging from our colleagues as well as a call to our fellow researchers to pay attention to the voices of young people in these transnational social fields.

SANACS: Book Review: Jiwu Wang, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”

The fourth journal issue of the Society of Asian North American Christian Studies (SANACS) is out. The issue features some very interesting pieces, with contributions from Esther Chung-Kim, Amos Yong, Charlene Jin Lee, Richard Mouw, Miyoung Yoon Hammer, Andrew Sung Park, Annie Tsai, Jeney Park-Hearn, Andrew Lee, and Henry Kuo. During the course of my fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area and Metro Vancouver, I heard some of these pieces presented live, and my humble opinion is that some of them will become classics in the field of Asian North American Christian studies.

My small contribution (p. 153-6) is a book review of Jiwu Wang’s (2006) “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967. Wang’s general argument is that the racializing attitudes of Protestant missionaries in various Canadian Chinatowns led to the rejection of their Christian message even as it crystallized prevailing ‘Chinese’ cultural frameworks. The book also draws on an extensive array of archival sources, which makes it fairly valuable as a record of sources for further research.

Unfortunately, I also had to pan the book for its theoretical framework. As you will see in the review, Wang’s approach relies a little too much on what he calls ‘sociological conflict theory,’ in which two groups–in his case, the Anglo-Canadian Protestant missionaries and the Chinatown communities–reinforce each other’s cultural frameworks by conflicting with each other. There are two problems that I unfold in this review. The first is that Wang’s idea of what ‘white missionaries’ and ‘Chinese communities’ were is a bit too static, even drawing from traditional Chinese texts to explain ‘Chinese culture’ for these southern Chinese rural migrants. Second, this sociological conflict model fails to take into account the rich literature in Asian Canadian studies that also explores white missionary movements among Chinatown communities in Canada. In other words, while this book bills itself as the first of its kind, it really isn’t, and he really needs to engage the ones that came beforehand.

You’ll find the details of my critique in the review, and you will find articles in the main section of the journal issue that are destined to become classics. My hope is that this issue will begin to fill the hiatus in Asian North American Christian research and will point out ways that one should–and should not!–conduct this kind of research as we develop this field together.

Vancouver Sun: Metro Vancouver’s Chinese Christians wrestle with morality of homosexuality

I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by the Vancouver Sun‘s religion and diversity journalist Douglas Todd. His column piece on me was posted online on Friday; the print version should be out in the next few days. As usual, I’ll say a bit here about how the whole interview process went, what I think of the piece, and how this feeds into academic work. For my part, it certainly was an interesting experience being in the interviewee’s seat after talking to some 140 Chinese Christians in the Pacific Rim region and conducting 13 focus groups there as well, and it’s certainly very stimulating to read how my work is being interpreted in the press. The interpreter is being interpreted; how fun!

Douglas Todd contacted me back in May when the Statistics Canada release came out on ethnicity, language, visible minority status, and religion. We had a brief conversation about the statistics, and my hint to him at the time was to make sure that whatever he did with the large Chinese population that identifies as ‘not religiously affiliated’ (about 61%), don’t write them off as ‘non-religious,’ as many engage in popular familial religions, may hold various views of the supernatural, and may even be influenced by Christian environments, such as schools in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and various parts of Southeast Asia. Although he did not incorporate my comments at the time, we developed a professional and collegial relationship through the process, and I’m fairly pleased with the series of articles generated from the statistics, although I had the occasional question about differences of opinion that I had about how to interpret the data. I suppose that’s how we academics are trained–to be critical, but always in a spirit of collegiality.

In any case, Todd said even at that time that he wanted to do a longer piece on my work, which, after a conversation with my supervisor David Ley, we decided would be good practice for these late stages in my doctoral studies. Indeed, I reviewed some of my comments to Todd during our conversation about statistics and found that I had given him a fairly technical academic answer to his questions. Yet as we spoke, Todd reassured me that my academic comments were exactly what he wanted (which, as I’m told, is unusual for a journalist) and that we would bridge academia and journalism in our piece, as he had himself been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vancouver School of Theology (congratulations, Doug!), and thank you for being able to pull quotes from what I imagine must be a very difficult interview from which to pull, as I like to qualify many of the things that I say.

His call came last Friday. We set up a time for this Monday, and we spoke at length for about two hours about my thesis work, as well as my various theoretical and popular interests. I also sent him various academic articles I had written, emphasizing my interest in both ‘grounded theologies’ and in the empirical work of Cantonese migrations in the Pacific region with a religious spin. There were also popular articles in the batch as well, such as the Schema autobiographical piece and the Ricepaper pieces on Ken Shigematsu and on ‘how Asian religions aren’t that exotic.’ I suppose this may be why he calls me a ‘scholarly dynamo,’ although I certainly do not feel that way most days.

Because the conversation revolved around my thesis’s interest in how Cantonese-speaking Protestants engage the public spheres and civil societies of Metro Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Hong Kong SAR, the discussion naturally veered toward the sexuality issues without us even attempting to get there. As you will see in the piece, we spoke at length about some of the pressing issues in Vancouver around parental rights activism, the drama between Liberal and Conservative Chinese Christian politicians vying for the vote in Richmond, and the Anglican crisis in the Diocese of New Westminster. What I did was to try to shed light on the internal conversations that I have been hearing in relation to what I have read in more popular and academic portrayals. Todd is right to say that the press has been interested in this story for quite some time, himself being one of this literature’s main contributors. There are also other journalists like Marci McDonald (in The Armageddon Factor), John Ibbitson and Joe Friesen at the Globe and Mail, and Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun, who have all written about Chinese Christians engaging the Canadian public sphere, and sexuality has often come up as an item of interest. Indeed, one might say that their work lies somewhere close to the genesis of my doctoral project, for if they were examining the conversation as outsiders, I thought that it might be interesting to tackle the question of what imaginations and practices constitute Cantonese Protestant public engagements from within the community itself.

I should note that this body of journalistic work has often been met with mixed reviews by both conservative and progressive Asian Canadians for different reasons, yet both because of the work’s philosophically (and arguably, politically) liberal framework. By ‘liberal,’ I don’t mean the archetypal open-minded opposition to ‘conservatism,’ but the philosophical bent that attempts to seek an ‘overlapping consensus’ from various groups that have bracketed their communities of identity to seek some sort of abstract common ground for political life together. On the right, this work has been seen as ‘liberal’–as in too far to the left–because it is viewed as generally unsympathetic to a case against gay rights; some Chinese Christians have often decried how they have been portrayed as a propaganda-spreading community that is generally top down and unwilling to integrate into Canadian civil society, while many others protest the ‘overlapping consensus’ approach as not paying attention to how their views might be part of a majority Canadian view that is being contested by a vocal minority. A relevant situation was in 2011, when Todd’s Chinese New Year piece was read as saying that Chinese Christian communities were unwilling to integrate into a liberal society, sparking outrage within Chinese Christian churches and a fairly assertive rebuttal from the Vancouver Chinese Evangelical Ministerial Fellowship that Chinese Christians were Canadian too. On the left, however, this body of literature has also been criticized as overly ‘liberal’–as in too far to the right–in their critique of Asian Canadian identity politics and their recent assertions that the racializing wrongs of the past can be attributed purely to economic reasons. In either case, this body of work has often been done by those who are not themselves Asian Canadian, writing often as outsiders attempting to write about a complex community. With that view in mind, I also regard this work critically while valuing it precisely for its outsider perspectives, views that can come into very interesting conversation with insider accounts, for at a methodological level, there is no monopoly on knowledge by either insiders or outsiders to a community.

All that is to say that it was pleasantly interesting to be interpreted by someone with likely a different philosophical, political, and theoretical bent from mine. As he notes, I do thank ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ in my MA thesis (and my B.A. [Hons.] as well, and it will probably make it into my PhD), and I have a whole chapter there detailing my theological orientation at the time. (I also have a positionality chapter in my PhD.) As those who have read the grounded theologies piece will know, my theological leanings are heavily shaped by the new critical re-assessments of the secularization thesis at the nexus of theology and religious studies, a reformulation of concepts like ‘theology,’ ‘religion,’ and the ‘secular’ in ways that on the one hand promise to transcend the culture wars of our time and on the other have potential to demonstrate that ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’ are veiled theological concepts themselves. I’m not saying that my views would be diametrically opposed to Todd’s, but I am saying that our theoretical and philosophical approaches are probably fairly divergent. That said, with the exception of the blow-up around Todd’s 2011 piece, he has followed the Chinese Christian story very closely since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, covering stories such as the Chinese New Year celebrations at Oak Ridge Mall in the early 1990s, Bill Chu’s work with First Nations since the late 1990s, shifting immigrant voting patterns in the 2000s, Chinese Christian involvement in the Anglican Communion’s woes since synods in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the activism around Tenth Avenue Alliance Church’s challenge to the city’s requirement for them to obtain a social services permit to feed the homeless from 2007 to 2008. In other words, I’m a bit flattered that my PhD work is the latest episode in Douglas Todd’s long career of covering Chinese Christians, and I was delighted and honoured to converse with him, especially because I knew that we would have a fun conversation given our theoretical differences. (It is hard to have conversations with those who are exactly the same as oneself.)

Now for the piece itself: I am generally pleased by how the article panned out (if you must know, ‘generally pleased’ in academic-speak is generally high praise). The headline of the piece is ‘Metro Vancouver’s Chinese Christians wrestle with morality of homosexuality,’ and the new tagline just posted reads, ‘Community has been in the forefront of opposition to gay rights, but it’s not a unanimous stand.’ As I’d point out to the editors, while the title is catchy and will certainly lead to the article being more read to my dully titled blog posts, the article is not only about homosexuality, nor is my thesis work, and Todd understands that and tries to signal that as well. After all, my thesis work is about ‘the public sphere,’ not only about sexuality issues, although it is true that sexuality issues are fascinating theoretical cases for studies of the public sphere as they challenge public-private boundaries. To that end, I hope that the small, yet necessarily incomplete, picture we painted in the article of the Chinese Christians does not make it sound like they are only concerned about sexuality issues, but about a broad range of topics that generally surround how they negotiate the boundaries between public and private spheres.

As for the content of the comments, here is a brief word for the methodologically curious. The Vancouver research is based on 50 key informant semi-structured interviews with either Cantonese-speaking Christians or those who have worked closely with them, and they are supplemented by three focus groups among Cantonese-speaking Protestants whom I met in Burnaby, Coquitlam, and Richmond. As my project is limited to ‘Cantonese,’ I did not expound on the Mandarin-speaking Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) in Vancouver, although my MA project touched on how Cantonese-speaking congregations deal with their Mandarin-speaking newcomers and neighbours (and a comment from that work made its way into the article). As this is a qualitative project, my approach was to ask key informants to share their stories and to put together the picture of their public engagements from their responses; I think of them as people who can shed insider knowledge on various churches, organizations, and networks from whose information a general portrait of their public activities can be extracted. Each of the statements in the article is defensible from the data; in fact, reading through the piece, I think immediately of key quotes from the data that come to mind. I am especially happy that Todd went to the nuance of talking about the balance of ‘rights,’ as this was one of the core issues in the Vancouver site.

The tagline ‘Community has been in the forefront of opposition to gay rights, but it’s not a unanimous stand,’ is admittedly a bit cheeky, but I see how the editors might get that impression from the piece itself. For my part, my reading of the situation is that there is no one ‘Chinese community’ as a monolithic body. Instead, respondents often spoke of the Chinese population in Vancouver as a ‘pot of scattered sand’ (一盆散沙) and of their frustrations that it was difficult to mobilize people for any sort of political action, even when it came to the sexuality issues. Moreover, some were upset that their second generation did not hold to their strong views on sexual normativity, be it for biblical reasons or for essentialized cultural reasons. Breaking down this conversation, what I found was that the fissures among Chinese Christians became extremely important for telling the story, especially to counteract the narrative in the press that a unified ‘Chinese community’ with well-defined ‘Chinese community leaders’ were able to mobilize effective ethnic political action. Quite the contrary: I found that there were debates about what was religious and what was secular, what was public and what was private, how children should be educated and what parents should do about it, who their leaders were and why they should be (or should not be) acknowledged, etc. While some also complained to me that this disunity lacked a sort of harmony, my sense was that these internal deliberations were themselves the stuff of democracy. In other words, bringing out these internal complexities and conversations is a way of demonstrating that Chinese Canadians are actively grappling with how to be democratic citizens, hardly the picture of a community that is uninterested in ‘integration.’

In other words, I’m fairly happy about the level of complexity with which Todd is willing to grapple. As I said, I’m often told that journalists do not have the patience for academic ramblings (that is to say, our closely argued theses), and I’m grateful that Todd was willing to take the time to wrestle with the nuances.

And that brings me finally to a word about public academia. My sense is that journalists and academics both perform a remarkable service to democratic deliberations because they seek to inform the public forum. My hope is that this piece can be taken as a sort of model for how the two sectors can engage each other (or perhaps, how journalists can ask pointed questions to academics to get the quotes they need!), as journalists and academics are not the same, but we can certainly complement each other. In fact, we need each other. Where we academics perform the service of close argument and teaching students and readers to do the same, journalists have a sort of immediacy in their dissemination that is also a profound public service; they are fast and direct, where we are slow and cautious, and I think that’s where we strike an excellent balance when we work together. This experience has been a good first lesson for me in interacting with a very patient journalist who is actually willing to hear my complex thoughts and to represent them with careful nuance and skill; I suspect that some in the future will be less patient with me. I also appreciate how Todd demonstrates in this article how one can represent someone from a different philosophical bent studying people who are very different from himself and come out with this level of insight.

So thank you, Doug, and I certainly hope that this piece will feed nuance and complexity into an ongoing public conversation that seriously needs that level of depth to be able to grapple with the difficult issues so skillfully articulated in this article.

Introducing: Religion. Ethnicity. Wired.

I am pleased to announce that I’ve started a public blog. It’s called Religion. Ethnicity. Wired.

Religion. Ethnicity. Wired. is where I’ll be blogging about current events in light of what I work on in geographies of religion, ethnicities, migrations, politics, and Pacific cities. I explicitly apply the grounded theologies axis of analysis wherever possible to some of the things I discuss. As you’ll see, the issues there are broader than the Cantonese-speaking Protestant Christians on which I’m actively writing in my doctoral dissertation. It’s a chance for readers to be able to see the breadth of what my seemingly narrow doctoral topic can actually encompass.

It’s also an exercise in public academia. On the blog, I routinely articulate how I think academia should be conceptualized as a public good. While academics are often perceived as impractical theoreticians pontificating from their revolving chairs, I make the case every so often on the blog that academics are interested in contributing the knowledge of their fields to an ongoing public democratic discussion, one that often results in concrete policy implications. This is not to say that academics pitch policy solutions–more often than not, we refrain from doing that–but this means that academics have a vital contribution to make to the public sphere that should not be overlooked by either the public or the university. In my posts, then, I try to be explicit about precisely where the academic contributions lie in the issues I’m raising.

So do follow me, and find me on Facebook and Twitter. And (I can’t resist this tagline) remember, if you stalk this page long enough, religion and ethnicity will wire you like coffee too.

Metropolis BC Working Paper 13-06: Immigrant Integration and Religious Transnationalism: the case of the ‘Highway to Heaven’ in Richmond, BC

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a working paper for Metropolis British Columbia on our collaborative project on the ‘Highway to Heaven,’ No. 5 Road in Richmond, BC, on which over 20 religious institutions are arrayed on a stretch of 3 kilometres. Titled ‘Immigrant Integration and Religious Transnationalism: the case of the ‘Highway to Heaven’ in Richmond, BC,’ this co-authored report among Claire Dwyer (University College London), David Ley (UBC), and myself explores the question of what ‘immigrant integration’ means on the Highway to Heaven.

The paper can be accessed here. A policy briefing note is also available. For the complete list of published reports in 2013, please click here.

Here is the abstract:

This paper draws on a case study of religious institutions on No. 5 Road in Richmond, British Columbia to explore the role of religious institutions in the process of immigrant integration. Colloquially known as the ‘Highway to Heaven’, No. 5 Road includes over twenty religious communities on a three-kilometre stretch of road, their location the result of a planning policy for an ‘Assembly District’ in the Agricultural Land Reserve. Drawing on interviews conducted with twenty-two out of twenty-four of the religious institutions as well as with policymakers and staff at Richmond City Hall from 2010 to 2012, we argue that integration is a complex term, which can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. We identify a range of different ways in which the religious institutions along No. 5 Road might defi ne their activities as contributing to the integration of immigrants, and we discuss a range of practices that support integration. However, we argue that immigrant integration was not the primary planning objective, nor was it the main theological purpose for religious congregations. Nonetheless, we conclude that policy makers could draw on the range of activities we explore to use the road as an educational resource to promote public conversation about the intricate relationships between faith, migration, and the contested meanings of ‘integration.’

This report is important as an act of public academic engagement with questions in Metro Vancouver’s civil society. In the last few years, accusations and insinuations have circulated that new immigrant populations are not ‘integrating’ in Vancouver, a discourse that is made even more confusing because there are migrants who both support and challenge this claim. Our report shows that when the question of ‘integration’ is examined in a geographical site like No. 5 Road, there are a variety of ways in which migrants say that they are ‘integrating.’ As a result, our advocacy is not based on whether migrants should or should not integrate. We’re saying that sites like No. 5 Road are excellent sites for public education and discussion about what ‘integration’ actually means.

This is the first in a series of papers that we will be publishing on No. 5 Road’s ‘Highway to Heaven,’ and we will also actively be revising this report for publication in an academic journal. Please feel free to send comments and feedback. We look forward to the public conversation that can develop from this report.

Asia-Pacific Worlds in Motion V: Migration Beyond Borders (St. John’s College, UBC)

I am currently at a graduate student conference called Asia-Pacific Worlds in Motion V: Migration Beyond Borders at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) St. John’s College. This is a conference co-organized by graduate students at UBC and the National University of Singapore started by my friend and colleague Mark Lawrence Santiago in 2008. I was a co-organizer of its third iteration (Mobile Identities) in 2010, also at St. John’s College, and I play a marginal alumnus role on this year’s committee, though I’ve been appointed the point person on site for the conference (although the credit for organizing really goes to largely to the co-chairs, Lachlan Barber and Kara Shin).

I presented in a panel this afternoon on Migrant Families and Youth, along with my fellow co-panelists from UBC’s Educational Studies program, Yao Xiao and Ee-Seul Yoon, as well as our discussant, education and family scholar Dr. Mona Gleason. Yao presented on ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: educational narratives of migrant families in urban China,’ and Ee-Seul spoke on ‘Border anxiety in migrant youths’ phenomenology of secondary school choice in Vancouver.’ My presentation was titled Re-working Family Values: ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ approaches to family and religion in Hong Kong. Here’s the abstract:

In its contemporary usage, the term ‘family values’ has come to evoke strong feelings, usually along the lines of sexuality. The term has usually been employed by religious groups, and those who dub themselves ‘pro-family values’ might argue that the term encompasses more than sexuality and should translate more broadly into public policies that encourage more healthy family psychology, thus discouraging gambling, drug abuse, and pornography while encouraging best parental practices. In this paper, I will explore a neglected dimension of ‘family values’ by examining Protestant and Catholic approaches to the ‘right of abode’ in Hong Kong. A key policy issue under contestation in Hong Kong is the rights of those entering Hong Kong to reside there, especially with regards to temporary foreign domestic workers and pregnant women from the People’s Republic of China entering Hong Kong to give birth. The Protestant and Catholic approaches to this migration issue are strikingly different. While evangelical Protestant leaders have concentrated on the sexual and psychological dimensions of family values, they view these migrations as undocumented, and thus illegal. However, a coalition of Catholics and progressive Protestants who are said to be more liberal on sexual issues approach the issue precisely as one of family values, for to deny the right of abode would divide families. I draw on 43 key informant interviews with both Protestant and Catholic leaders, in Hong Kong, 5 focus groups with Protestant Christians, and documentary evidence to triangulate the oral data. This paper thus introduces the term ‘family values’ into a discussion of transnational families and migration policy and argues that ideologies of family must be more carefully examined in Asia-Pacific migration studies, as they have direct relevance to migration policy.

As a panel, we are very grateful to Mona for responding about the ways each of our papers explored how families constitute the nation-state by making the personal political, with the state and families themselves constructing all sorts of borders to conceptualize the family.

We also had a fantastic keynote talk this morning from my friend and co-author Dr. Johanna Waters on ‘Education Beyond Borders? some implications of contemporary educational migrations,’ in which she examined the stories of failure emerging from international education as well as its domestication through extension campuses in post-colonial sites. Tomorrow morning, Dr. Eric Thompson will speak on ‘Singapore perspectives on migration research: a review.‘

This conference is always an excellent space for conversation because of the interdisciplinarity of the participants, and what I have experienced so far has been very productive. I’m very excited about the next two days.

Migrant Faith (Jeremia Chow and Sarah Crutchfield): helping out with a History 485 Final Project

I had the privilege of being a key informant and informal adviser to an exciting undergraduate class project for UBC’s History 485 course. Taught by Asian American historian Henry Yu (Thinking Orientals, 2001), the course focuses on Asian migrant communities in Vancouver, understanding them in the context of what Yu calls “Pacific Canada.”

Two students, Jeremia Chow and Sarah Crutchfield, approached me with an idea for their final project in that course, one that has successfully come to fruition through this website. They wanted to focus on Chinese churches, and fortuitously, they found my blog and contacted me (unaware, it seems, that Henry Yu is one of my committee members and ardent supporter of my various projects). Their research question focused on how Chinese churches integrated new immigrants, a concern that has run throughout my M.A. project on a transnational Hongkonger congregation in a Vancouver suburb, the collaborative Highway to Heaven project on new suburban religious landscapes and immigrant integration, and the PhD dissertation on how Cantonese Protestant theologies are grounded in Pacific Rim civil societies.

My modest contribution to this project was an interview I granted them on March 26. We met in Vancouver for coffee and Thai food. Their questions revolved around how to approach congregations with the question of immigrant integration. I gave a two-pronged answer.

Theoretically, I told them that they might need to disentangle the assumptions that congregations are de facto parts of civil society, that they provide institutionalized social services, and that their theologies support civil society engagement on the part of the church. Instead, I advised them to look from the ground up, inquiring about grounded theologies and being open to the reality that social services provided by churches might be informal. (This was a similar point I raised in my BBC Heart and Soul interview.)

Methodologically, I emphasized that positionality is important when conducting interviews. Because of the way that interviewees read interviewers for race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, Jeri and Sarah had to be aware of their own positionalities and understand that their self-awareness could be important for the dynamics of data collection. Because they needed to disentangle their own assumptions about how churches contributed to immigrant integration, I suggested that if Sarah conducted the interviews, then interviewees would find themselves explaining more to her without presuming prior knowledge. In turn, this would enable their data collection to be more thorough so that they could see exactly where their assumptions are dissonant with the data.

I’m happy to report that I am overall very pleased with the end result. Not only was the data collection thorough enough to challenge their own prior assumptions, but they have stumbled upon the next frontier of Chinese church research in Vancouver: Mandarin-speaking charismatic churches. Because of the dominance of Cantonese churches, Mandarin churches have been understudied. Their data provides an important window into Mandarin-speaking churches, enabling comparisons with existing work on Cantonese Protestant congregations and engagements with civil society.

This is my second foray into helping undergraduates design a research project. My prior experience took place in another course taught by Henry Yu comparing transnational migration in Vancouver and Singapore in the summer of 2011. I led a group documentary project on religion and migration, from which we produced a short film Moving Faith (we are working to disseminate this project!). These experiences have been formative for my own pedagogical convictions, as these public presentations are an excellent venue for demonstrating the value of undergraduate public education. I will certainly use field work as a required component of courses I teach in the future, and these two projects have given me valuable insight into how field work can be presented to a public outside of the classroom.

Thanks, Jeri and Sarah, for including me in this very insightful project.