Making a Cantonese-Christian family: Quotidian habits of language and background in a transnational Hongkonger church

• Main Author: TSE, Justin K. H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3099; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4356/viewcontent/psp.640__PV.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Studies of the Hong Kong‐Vancouver transnational migration network seldom pay close attention to religion in the everyday lives of Hongkonger migrants. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork at St. Matthew's Church, a Hong Kong church in Metro Vancouver, this paper examines the tacit assumptions and taken‐for‐granted quotidian practices through which a Hongkonger church is made. I argue that St. Matthew's Church has been constructed as a Hong Kong Cantonese‐Christian family space through the everyday use of language and invocations of a common educational background. This argument extends the literature on Hongkonger migration to Metro Vancouver by grounding it in a religious site whose intersections with Hong Kong migration to Vancouver consolidates the church as a religious mission with a specifically Hongkonger migration narrative. This consolidation is problematised as I show that contestations in church life by migrants from the People's Republic of China over language and asymmetrical educational backgrounds both reinforce and challenge the church as a Hongkonger congregation. Through an examination of these everyday interactions at St. Matthew's Church, this paper advances the geography of religion as I demonstrate that specific geographical narratives and networks shape quotidian practices in religious sites.