An Excerpt from “Sheets of Scattered Sand” by Justin K.H. Tse

In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the “Pacific Rim” refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives emphasized skilled migration and the rise of multicultural societies. Diasporic Cantonese Protestant Christians of this time were frequently portrayed as a homogenous people bringing their Chinese culture and Christian communities from Hong Kong to cities such as Vancouver and San Francisco. In Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim, Justin K.H. Tse challenges that depiction of Cantonese Protestants with authentic voices from the community.

In 2004, Vancouver Sun reporter Chad Skelton wrote about the “shifting immigrant vote” in Canada. He observed that the swing issues of abortion and same-sex marriage as well as the fact that new arrivals in Canada tended to be business owners concerned about their taxable income. Skelton reported the Centre for Research and Information’s finding that among immigrants who had arrived in Canada after 1990, “fully 65 per cent” said that having a gay family member “would make them feel uncomfortable” and attributed this homophobia as a key reason that the newly configured Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 was chipping away at the Liberal domination of the immigrant vote at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Skelton’s article was not the only one to make such observations. A special front-page issue of the national Globe and Mail newspaper in 2010 featured a report by journalists John Ibbitson and Joe Friesen that opened with a tale told by a Hong Kong migrant in a Toronto suburb. She said that her pastor asked her congregation to support the Conservative Party because they opposed same-sex marriage. Ibbitson and Friesen then noted that Conservatives achieved electoral successes in the 2008 election in six ridings across Canada with “visible minority populations of 20 per cent or higher.” They sought to understand what could be making new immigrants espouse a kind of political conservatism that was unexpected because they were supposed to have arrived in Canada because of multicultural policies designed by the Liberal Party. A sociologist at the University of Toronto, Myer Siemiatycki, offered this explanation: “When newcomers come to Canada they bring with them homeland values and traditions, but Canada is not a blank slate. We have a whole bunch of ways—from school to television to the law—that send signals of what the values of this society are.”

I want to offer a different interpretation. As transpacific as Cantonese Protestant revivalist theologies might have been in their origins, they were not, I claim, importing their homeland politics. If anything, they were trying to fit in to the secular civil societies in which they lived, whether those were places to which they had moved (like the Bay Area and Vancouver) or where they had stayed (like Hong Kong). This kind of legibility required a balancing act. On the one hand, the Cantonese Protestants I spoke to had to maintain their theological convictions, which could be for the most part traced back to the revivalism that regarded their churches as spaces that were supposed to be disentangled from secular politics. But by the 1990s, they also realized that the building spaces in which they gathered and worshipped, as well as the sites where they established parachurch organizations and engaged with the public sphere, were regulated by governments, at least at the local level. Legibility to those governing bodies, as well as to the civil societies from which those states derived their legitimacy, was not optional, if they wanted to be able to meet in the buildings of their own choice and be taken seriously as participants in society.

What I want to show in turn is that each civil society to which Cantonese Protestants attempted to be legible also instantiated the secular dream of the Pacific Rim in ever-so-different ways. Often in transpacific studies, the Pacific Rim is described as a product of American empire, or a re-assertion of an abandoned notion of British empire with the foregrounding of Commonwealth nation-states like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as desirable sites of migration, or even an ongoing contest that extends the United States’s Cold War project to contain Chinese communism and nationalisms in its various guises and permutations in the region. In such global imaginations, it is as if the Pacific Rim is conceived of as a single sheet, one that holds the scattered sands together. But in each specific place, Cantonese Protestants engaged the structures of specific civil societies—arenas of democratic participation that are also ultimately entangled with states and markets—that were in the thrall of the dream. They may all share similar dreams—multicultural societies, political stability, preparedness for ecological and economic disaster even while pursuing shared transpacific prosperity—but because there is no one institution that unites them, such dreaming works out differently in different civil societies.

Because of the differences among Pacific Rim civil societies, it is also difficult to describe Cantonese Protestants as maintaining transpacific and cross-society networks. Certainly, Cantonese Protestants may consider Hong Kong as a kind of point of common origin, but Hong Kong as a civil society itself has remained very different from, say, the Bay Area and Vancouver. In this chapter, my task is to demonstrate how, far from importing their “homeland politics,” Cantonese Protestants actively sought to be legible to the civil societies they lived while attempting to keep something of their revivalist theological inclinations. I take the three examples that this story of Cantonese Protestants has traversed so far, but there is of course more to this story that San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong. Certainly, a fuller story could also sketch out Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among others. The point, however, is simply to show how different these societies are from each other; more examples would simply make the same point. I will move in order through each society as I have traced them in previous chapters, tracking how Cantonese Protestant churches, organizations, and institutions are networked among themselves and contort their narratives of theology to engage their local civil societies legibly. In the Bay Area, the story is an economistic one. Cantonese Protestants have to prove, I show, that their property purchases to house their own institutions add something to the value of local Bay Area economies. In Vancouver, the contest revolves around the meaning of social work, as Cantonese Protestants only seem to become legible when they offer immigrant social services and re-orient their institutions to fit that narrative—and even then are still not taken seriously in some quarters as part of Vancouver’s multicultural society. Hong Kong presents an even greater challenge after the 1997 handover, as Cantonese Protestant collaboration with the Hong Kong government can be construed as being entangled with an undemocratic state.

And yet, I suggest, there is still a way in which they come together. Indeed, I argue that they all still instantiate some version of the Pacific Rim dream, which can be detected in what Cantonese Protestants call the “secular” with which they must engage to be legible. These struggles for secular legibility are precisely that, I also hope to show: struggles that scatter Cantonese Protestants as sand on sheets that instantiate the dream in differing ways. Yet out of the scattering, I suggest, emerges new consensus among Cantonese Protestants about what they think would be legible to those societies. Out of these struggles for legibility, new theologies emerge that not only alter the practices of Cantonese Protestantism, but also their position among Pacific Rim civil societies. The task of this chapter is ultimately to narrate those fresh theological syntheses, which are particular to each society where Cantonese Protestants live.

(excerpted from chapter 10)

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