On Building Chineseness

This book explores the Chinese American community by looking at its churches. Christianity is an ideology that many Chinese immigrants both identify with and reconceptualize in Confucian terms. This "Christianity with a Chinese character" has been created via a host of factors, two of the main ones being the historical transformation of Chinatown and the practical help the churches have rendered their parishioners in meeting their social and psychological needs. The author argues that Confucian-Christianity has become a common ideology shared by many Chinese Americans: not only the first-generation immigrants who must strive to assimilate but also those second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Americans who join the church largely to partake of the unique communion that it provides and indeed creates.