Liberal protestant Chinatown: Social gospel geographies in Chinese San Francisco

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Geography
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3158
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This article is about the cultural geography of what I call "Liberal Protestant Chinatown" in San Francisco's Chinatown. (1) I show that, since the 1920s and 1930s, a younger generation of Chinese Americans coming of age in San Francisco espoused a "liberal" theology, which in American Protestantism refers to the interpretation of Christian conversion as the "social gospel," the call to convert the structures of society to be more politically and economically equitable based on a rational, scientific view of just distribution in modern circumstances. (2) While this liberalism is usually opposed to a "fundamentalist" position seeking to defend the scientific inerrancy of the biblical text and the primacy of individual subjective conversion in Christian experience, Liberal Protestant Chinatown rejected both the conservatism of Christians who placed their emphasis on personal subjectivity and a non-Christian Chinese establishment in Chinatown that sought to retain village kinship structures, clan associations, and ritual practices. (3) In this way, liberal Protestants sought to build a new trans-Pacific cultural geography in Chinatown, one marked neither by missionary activity to westernize China nor by an economy linking the United States with Chinese villages, which they alleged at the time to be fraught with the criminal underworld trafficking of persons and narcotics (although this is difficult to fully substantiate and led during this period to the unfair stereotyping of Chinese American young men as gangsters and "gooks," which the liberal Protestants also sought to mitigate). (4) My central argument is that the social gospel of Liberal Protestant Chinatown thus configured the cultural geography of Chinatown into a network of nonprofit organizations seeking legitimate economic advancement for Chinese Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, reframing "Chineseness" as the local heritage of the Chinatown community for which they sought material improvement.Liberal Protestant Chinatown is thus positioned against two other cultural geographies: conservative Christianity and the non-Christian Chinese establishment. These rival spatial ideologies in San Francisco's Chinatown have been discussed at some length in Chinese American scholarship, though seldom explicitly. (5) The geography formed by conservative Christianity can be called "Christian Chinatown," a space inhabited by white missionaries and their Chinese American converts who espoused a "conservative" view of the interior subjective conversion that is central to "Protestant" Christian theology, claiming that one cannot both be Christian and adhere to traditional Chinese ritual practices. (6) This conversionary ideology led to the westernization of Chinese Protestant converts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orienting their trans-Pacific agency toward intervening in China's nation-state formation. The second geography is the opposite of Christian Chinatown: the non-Christian Chinese establishment of the clan associations (the tong) and the merchant companies (the huiguan, especially the Six Companies, or the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association [CCBA]), with their requisite Chinese ritual practices and traditions that Asian American author Frank Chin has termed the "martial tradition," which is marked (he contends) by the "ethic of private revenge" and the "ethic of popular revenge against the corrupt state, or the Confucian mandate of heaven." (7) In this non-Christian Chinese geography, the tongs and the huiguans have often facilitated the circulation of persons, goods, and cultural production across the Pacific and all over the world. (8) Christian Chinatown's insistence on conversion has of course made relations with those adhering to this non-Christian geography rather tense over the years, although Chinese American literature and scholarship have demonstrated that both the Christian and non-Christian worlds have usually intersected in everyday Chinatown lives.