The early years
The first publicly reported presence of Chinese Americans in Flushing was a news photo published on August 9, 1930 of a sign for “Chop Suey” on Main Street. Most likely this was a family-operated place. The father and brother would do the cooking, and the mother or oldest daughter would operate the cash register. The extended family members or paper relatives (people passing as relatives on reusable government documents) would work as waiters, busboys, and washers. There may have been a small shrine to the Kitchen God or ancestors if the family was not Christian or secular. At the opening of the restaurant, there would have been firecrackers and good-luck signs draped at the entrance.
After World War II, many of the Chinese American congregations in Queens were started by college students and young professionals. In the period of 1946 to 1951, Flushing was also the site of the United Nations, so many Chinese related to the new organization settled nearby. Refugees from the Communist Revolution in China were also added to the numbers of Chinese moving into the Flushing area.
For example, Paul Szto became a Christian in China, left to study theology in America, graduating in May 1950 from Westminster Theological Seminary, then eventually moving to Queens to establish a ministry to Chinese in 1955. The impact that these global changes would have on New York City was not always well understood at the time.
Anglo-Dutch ministers of Szto’s denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, were not yet convinced that a new influx of Chinese would become a permanent part of the city and turned down support for Szto’s proposal to start a church in Queens. In its report of January 26, 1955, the Eastern Home Mission Board wrote, “The likelihood of being able to establish a Chinese church here is very remote.” In a massive misreading of the totalitarian nature of Communist China, they saw the Chinese in Queens as a temporary phenomenon of students and refugees who would soon return home. Szto, however, was personally experiencing the upheaval.
He had originally planned on returning to China to establish a seminary. A scholarly pastor, he had deliberately accumulated a library to stock the seminary. He was developing his version of Calvinist theology and becoming an expert on Maoism. Upon graduating from seminary, he realized that he couldn’t safely return to China. Indeed, part of his family that stayed behind became functionaries of the Communist Party.
So, Szto bulldozed ahead without the whole-hearted support of his denomination to establish perhaps the earliest Chinese Christian ministry in Flushing. An interesting parallel development was that other Chinese were also launching new enterprises in Queens that laid the foundation for the new Chinatown in Flushing. Jimmy Lum was establishing the locally well-known Lum’s Chinese Restaurant in Flushing that lasted until the 1980s. The rapper, comedian, actress Awkwafina grew up in her grandfather’s restaurant. Szto recognized that he too might be able to gain enough adherents from the students at Queens College, from among the refugees and employees of the new United Nations that was headquartered at that time in Flushing. He established a Mandarin-speaking Bible study in his home and shortly, several of his classmates and former missionaries from China came to help.
The group was able to grow from a study to a house church in 1956, then to a Sunday afternoon gathering at a local Reformed Church, and finally in 1968 to build its own church building in Briarwood, outside of Community District 7 of Flushing, but near the Chinese U.N. employees who lived in Kew Gardens and Jamaica. They also started an English service for the KLM Dutch American families who lived near the airport.
Protestant Chinese Americans emphasize God’s ancient supremacy by addressing Him as Shang-di (Shang-ti). The earliest writing in China was on tortoise shells and bones that were used in religious rituals. The chief deity was the High God or Highest God, Shang-di. The Chinese language Bible makes the implicit claim that before there was Taoism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, the Chinese worshiped the High God, though not in a Christian way. Almost all Protestant Chinese American churches were started by evangelicals.
In 1968, a Chinese group started to meet at First Baptist Church. In 1975, a Chinese congregation also started up at First United Methodist Church. As Taiwanese arrived in greater numbers, they looked toward forming their own churches. Three years later in 1978, Taiwanese immigrants at First Baptist started Sion Christian Fellowship, which came to meet in Bowne Street Community Church. According to a history of the Baptist church by John Wang, the Sion group felt that in Taiwan the Mandarin-speaking Chinese were oppressing Taiwanese-language speakers. So, they wanted a congregation here in which Taiwanese speakers could feel at home. Also, the majority of the Chinese at the Baptist church spoke Cantonese, a dialect which the Taiwanese found difficult to understand. Another difference was that the Taiwanese were mostly Presbyterian, so unity with a Baptist church was not a comfortable fit.
At the same time, the Cantonese were divided on the structure of the church, and some went to form another church while others scattered to various churches. Szto mentored Samuel Ling (Lin Cixin), who shared Szto’s scholarly interests, taking a PhD in history from Temple University in addition seminary degree.
The 1980s and 1990s
In 1981, Ling, who previously had served as a pastor at First Chinese Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, Manhattan, started Covenant Presbyterian Church of America. Sam was a scion of a Hong Kong trading company family and showed his entrepreneurial abilities in founding churches, ministries, seminars, and publications. Encouraged by Szto, he published several path-breaking works on Christianity and Chinese culture: The Chinese way of doing things; Asia’s religions: Christianity’s momentous encounter with paganism; and Chinese intellectuals and the gospel.
Szto’s church also started an outreach to Stuyvesant High School students because the church sent eleven kids there. The church also hosted other church starts by Koreans, Messianic Jews, and others. After Terry Gyger of the Presbyterian Church of America spoke at the church’s conference on “The Joyful Servant” in the summer of 1984, he left New York wondering if his denomination could plant a tent-post (main central) church in Manhattan. Gyger’s interests came to fruition when his church planting group sent Tim Keller to New York City.
In the late 1980s, Ling introduced Keller to the city with whirlwind of tours-with-seminars. Keller recalls that this introduction to multicultural New York City was crucial for his understanding of how to start up Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. You might say that the boom of evangelical church planting in Manhattan was sparked by the wisdom of Chinese-American Christian sages in Flushing.
Other Chinatown church leaders and institutions also started working in Flushing in the 1980s. The social service-orientated Chinese Christian Herald Crusade started reaching out to youth and helping the jobless in 1982. Three years later, the Chinese Evangelical Church was founded.
In 1986, one of the largest Chinese churches in the United States, Overseas Chinese Mission in Manhattan, Chinatown, started its Boon Church extension with John Hao as pastor. Overseas Chinese Mission, which was founded in the early 1960s by Chinese from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, had a wide-ranging vision of establishing ministries to Chinese around the world. Hao was ablaze with this global view and pushed the church toward greater efforts.
Hao grew up as an atheist in Hong Kong and became a Christian while attending college in the Philippines. After seminary in California, he took part in a church plant in San Jose. Then, Overseas Chinese Mission called him in 1985 to plant Boon Church in Flushing.
Other Chinese American churches in Flushing were also receiving members from the Chinese diaspora around the world. For example, John (Chen T.) Wang came from Buenos Aires, Argentina to further his education as a civil engineer. He started attending First Baptist in 1988. He felt that God was calling him to be a bi-vocational engineer-missionary. At that time, Henry Kwan, the pastor of the Chinese congregation, was himself an immigrant from Hong Kong. As Chinese from around the world streamed into Flushing, they established churches and developed global mission strategies.
For almost a decade, most of Hao’s energy went into establishing and expanding the church to encompass 600 people in their own two-story building. However, he kept in mind a desire to train and send others to plant churches all over Asia and beyond. In 1989, he became aware of the great changes in religious faith taking place among asylum seekers fleeing from the crushing of the Democracy Movement by the Chinese government. Among the 52,425 Chinese who fled, several moved to Flushing, including some significant ex-government officials. The bruising experience and the compassionate reception by Chinese churches lead some to become Christians. The streams of new arrivals created the need for more ministers. In 1990, Hao added a duty of heading up a New York extension of his old seminary.
In 1995, Hao struck out on his own by founding Faith Bible Institute and church. Flushing was still somewhat dilapidated at that time, so he was able to purchase an old warehouse practically in the center of Downtown Flushing. He and his wife asked friends around the world for help, and it came in the form of daily letters with prayers and money.
Meanwhile, Wang started studying for his master’s of divinity. His church First Baptist had established a seminary program tailored to bi-vocational pastors like himself. “I would leave work in Manhattan at 4 pm to attend class until 10:30 pm. At first, I attended a branch of the seminary program that was in Manhattan. Later, they changed the location of the program to the Baptist Temple near the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn,” he recalls about the strenuous effort. Wang, then, had to take a subway from Brooklyn to catch the Long Island Rail Road and bus back to his home in Bayside. This schedule continued over a five-year period! Chinese American Christians were determined to gain a toehold for the expression of their faith as they also fought to succeed economically.
In 1998, Hao’s church founded another church in Corona, Queens. Faith Bible was experiencing explosive growth in Queens.
One source of this explosive growth was the conversion of young Chinese American “Nones” (those who say that they have no religious belief) and nominal Buddhists. According to a massive 1997 survey of New York City college freshmen analyzed by the Values Research Institute of New York, 94% of the “born-again” students were Asian Americans. 42% of the “born-agains” were Korean Americans, 40% Chinese Americans, 7% Southeast Asian Americans, 5% other Asian Americans.
About one-third of the Asian American born-again Christians were converts. 17% of them reported that their parents had no religious preference and 13% came from Buddhist families. Buddhism mostly meant popular Buddhism devoted to offerings to various deities and ancestors and rituals of luck-gaining and avoidance of misfortunes. These folk religious practices lost their attraction to the younger generation. There was also a movement of young Asian Americans from mainline liberal Christian denominations into evangelical churches. For example, almost half of the Episcopalian Asian American youth switched to more evangelical churches.
After 9/11
The attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 affected Chinese American Christians according to how far away their homes were from Ground Zero. Those who lived nearest the catastrophe suffered profound scarring from the experience. If you were elderly, the fears for family and being left alone in life shot up like a hot fever on a thermometer.
We have remarkable documentation of the fears and faith in the form of a survey-based upon a random sample of 521 Chinese American Christian elderly after the catastrophe. Because this sample is from Chinatown, the fears are probably much higher than for those who lived in Flushing. However, the kinds of fears and the role of religion in countering those fears were probably very similar.
The rise of more fears among the Chinese American seniors was closely tied to their fears of losing a family member, being left alone, isolated, and bereft of the ability to live independently. One Chinese American senior said, “I worry about something happening to me because of the burden it would put on my children, and I worry about something happening to my children because then I wouldn’t be able to support them.” The elderly also feared much that such a catastrophe could interrupt their need for health care services, because that is what happened on September 11th and the following days. 63% of the seniors said that “after 9/11, I worry a lot.”
To some extent, having the work of worrying about their families was healthy. They had an important role in their children’s lives – they worry for them! They weren’t so worried about their own deaths.
However, when worries got too burdensome, Protestant Chinese American seniors found solace in their faith. The proportion of Protestant Chinese American seniors expressing a lot of fear after 9/11 was 40% less than the average for all Chinese American seniors (a similar, somewhat lower relief of fears was found among Buddhists).
Protestant Chinese American seniors told interviewers that their beliefs in God and salvation helped them to manage their fears. The seniors also were helped by being integrated into a church community, so that they had friends to help them if need be. Their spiritual experiences and church life acted as twin shock absorbers against extreme traumatic shocks. 53% of the Chinese American elderly said that religion played a very important or important role in their lives. 37% of all seniors in Chinatown said Christianity was most attractive to them, and 35% indicated that they attended religious services (of any religion) a few times a month or more. The Christian seniors listed over twenty-four churches that they attended in the Chinatown area.
In several interviews, Flushing seniors said that their Christian faith played an important role in their responses to the terrorist attacks. However, their orientation was a little different, because they were far away from Ground Zero. The Flushing Chinese American seniors more often talked about their worries for the people directly affected by the attacks. Their prayers were not so much for themselves as for the victims and their families.
The catastrophe also moved along the ministry commitments of church leaders. After receiving his seminary degree, Wang was just at the point of deciding on how to balance out his church work with his engineering job. “I thought I would continue to do the bi-vocational thing. Then, September 11th happened.”
The catastrophe reinforced Wang’s inclination to go into full-time ministry. His new boss at First Baptist was Henry Kwon, who had immigrated from Hong Kong, and he was the type of supervisor who provided stability, encouragement, and mentoring.
By 2008, nearby Faith Bible had seven services in six languages, seven churches in New York and around the world, and five seminaries. The DNA of the Faith Bible Institute churches was to invest in church planting training, send people out, and do community services.
Chinese foreign students in Queens College and elsewhere in the city also provided a flow of religious believers into Flushing.
By 2011, Asia was sending 723,000 students to the United States, the largest group (158,000) being from China, according to the International Institute of Education.
Today, the wave of Chinese students at Queens College includes many who became religious in China or became Christians here. According to a recent study of the religions of Chinese coming to study at colleges in the United States, 72% completely or somewhat believe a religion. About one-fourth believe in Christianity and one-fourth in Buddhism. At Queens College, there are Christian groups like International Students, Inc., Chinese Christian Herald Crusade, Stone (Shr) Fellowship, and a Faith Bible Church student gathering.
Today, the Faith Bible church association has ten church branches, seminaries in Taiwan, Montreal, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Johannesburg, South Africa, and the People’s Republic of China. All told, the Faith Bible-connected churches in China have over 500,000 members.
First Baptist is also changing. Originally, it was known as a Cantonese-speaking church, but now it is known as a Mandarin-speaking church with Cantonese facilities. The number of new immigrants from Taiwan is decreasing. Other Cantonese churches are also reporting a decline in attendance and a reorientation of their ministries. Within the short lifetime of A Journey through NYC religions, Queens Christian Alliance Church has converted from a church that emphasized Cantonese ministry to promoting multicultural and Spanish ministries. It is a little disorientating to see the passing of the historic Cantonese church traditions in Flushing, Queens.
The Cantonese-orientated church founded by Pastor Szto in Briarwood now survives in a neighborhood of Russian and South Asian Americans. Several synagogues, mosques, and temples have sprouted up around the church. The Cantonese have moved or aged out of the neighborhood and the nearest concentration of Chinese Americans is Mandarin-speakers in the neighboring communities of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills.
Recently, the Fujianese immigrants have been founding churches. Manhattan’s Church of Grace to the Fujianese People founded Fa la Sheng Men En/Flushing Grace Church on Roosevelt Avenue.
Older Chinese Americans are also moving into Flushing because of the ready availability of Chinese doctors and hospitals.
Flushing’s Chinese American Christian churches are becoming global hubs for Chinese Christians, retirement centers, and new immigrant way-stations.
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Thanks, John! You were one of the original young generations who passed through Queens!
Excellent research, interview and article!