How the Mormon Church Found Its Place in New York’s Chinese Community
A Chinese Mormon church is a very unlikely combination of words. It’s also home to a very diverse mix of people.
Seth Galbraith, 19, is about 6’7’’ tall. He has a bright smile and a handshake so firm it feels like being gripped in a bear’s paw. Compared to his hulking frame, the ceiling of the church appeared even lower than it already was. He fell humbly to a chair in the front and prayed: he would cross his arms across his chest, eyes shut and head down, or rest his elbows on his lap, his fingers interlocked.
Galbraith grew up under a lot of pressure. He first started praying in first or second grade when he needed help on exams in school. “If I did bad, I would get a whooping at home,” he said. “But the holy ghost can help out in little simple ways. I know it’s helped me a whole lot.”
Born and raised in Taiwan, Galbraith moved to Star, Idaho to live with his grandparents when he was 14. His American father, who was once a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormon church, or the LDS church) in Malaysia, would take him and his sister to sacraments and Sunday school. After high school, he followed his father’s spiritual path and became a Mormon missionary. Now he serves at the church’s Chinatown branch in Manhattan.
Chinatown is not a homogeneous neighborhood. It’s where different communities and causes compete for attention, and the streets are their battlefield: the counterfeit vendors, the activists protesting against the jail there, the Guardian Angels, the Falun Gong people and other various religious groups, including the Mormons.
The Chinatown branch of the LDS church is located a block away from the giant golden faux facade of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple, which is probably the first thing people see entering the city from Manhattan Bridge. On the fourth floor of a rental office building just off Canal Street, forty-something churchgoers gather every Sunday to worship God and praise their prophet Joseph Smith, who is said to have restored the Gospel, with hymns and testimonies. On virtually every wall are sacred paintings and pictures of their Holy Temple on Columbus Avenue, which is a boxy building atopped by a golden statue of angel Moroni, an architectural staple of LDS temples.
“One of the reasons why I’m out here right now is not only to share the peace and happiness that the Gospel brings, but also to be an example to my family,” Galbraith said. His mother, who is Taiwanese, briefly converted to Mormonism after meeting his father, but soon lost interest. “My mom’s side of the family — my entire Chinese family — they’re all Buddhists or atheists.”
In Galbraith’s native Taiwan, the most practiced religions are traditional folk religions, Buddhism and Taoism. Catholics and Protestants together account for about 7 percent of the population, and the LDS church an even smaller share. Across the Taiwan Strait in the mostly atheist mainland China, Christians only account for 5.1 percent of the population.
Since the 1980s, the largest source of Chinese immigrants to New York and the U.S. has been Fuzhou, which experienced a religious revival after 1979. In his book God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community, Kenneth Guest proposes that religious communities have long been an initial point of entry into the American reality for many immigrants, because newcomers can retain a sense of connection and find support there. Guest remarks on the religious diversity of Fuzhou as a historical port that received domestic migrants and sent off international immigrants, but still in his book there’s no mention of the Mormon church’s presence in either China or New York. Fuzhounese immigrants’ openness to Western cultures might have facilitated their acceptance of Christianity, but a Chinese Mormon church is indeed a very unlikely combination of words.
In New York, the LDS church has three branches (also called “wards”) serving Chinese-speaking populations, respectively in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue and Queens’ Flushing. The Manhattan branch — the smallest of the three — alone has about 200 congregants, most of whom are immigrants from Fuzhuo, Taiwan, and Singapore, and some speak little to no English. The Queens ward, the largest, has three groups: a Chinese-speaking group, which has 400 members, a smaller Korean-speaking group and an English/Spanish group. According to Bishop Taylor, head of the Chinese-speaking branches in the NYC metro area, the Chinatown branch saw an influx of about 15 new members in the last six to eight months. “It’s just a real family community,” said Taylor. “Everyone [is] trying to strengthen each other and building one another.”
The Chinese LDS church in New York is home to a very diverse mix of people. In a way, it is a microcosm of the Chinese immigrant community in New York, one that is ever growing not just in numbers but also in the depth in which they engage in different social sectors.
The Missionaries
Galbraith is one of the six missionaries at the Chinatown branch. The LDS church practices missionary work very widely and actively. Most missionaries are volunteers aged 18–21 who are sent to one of the 404 missions around the world. They don’t get to choose where they go on mission, but the church does take into consideration their language proficiency and cultural background. Galbraith, a native Mandarin speaker, was thus dispatched to Chinatown, where he doubles as the resident translator. Other missionaries learn their destination’s language at the missionary training center, a nine-week program where they also learn to proselytize, which means to promote the Gospel.
Hailing from Provo, Utah, John Sandberg, 18, started learning Chinese when he was six in a dual-immersion elementary school. Utah is one of the five states that have more than 200 dual language education programs, along with states like California, Texas, New York and North Carolina, which have much higher population and immigrant density. Sandberg is now fluent in Chinese with only a light accent, and he teaches a free English class open to Chinese-speaking immigrants at the Brooklyn church, where he is based.
The missionaries follow a very strict daily regimen in accordance with the church’s “Words of Wisdom,” namely the rules of abstinence from premarital sex, nicotine, caffeine and any harmful substances. On top of that, missionaries also have to give up consuming any news or social media for entertainment purposes so as to not get distracted from their work. Their phones — all Androids with the Holy Temple’s image on their lock screen — are monitored by the church. The Brooklyn church houses a baptism font and an indoor gym which can also double as gathering space for big events. During the day when church members have to go to work, they would leave their children to play there.
Every morning Sandberg gets up at 6:30 a.m. to play basketball (in a suit and tie, of course, the standard attire of male missionaries). Before he started his mission, he was a basketball junkie who followed NBA updates nightly.
“But right now, I think the playoffs are happening?” he said. “I can’t really tell you. I’m not in the loop right now.”
The missionaries’ most important job is to proselytize. They spend around three hours daily on the streets or in the subway or buses, trying to talk to people about the Gospel. Sandberg said it’s stressful and frustrating, even “scary” at times, to talk to strangers, because most people don’t want to talk.
“The funny thing is, when you’re frustrated, then people want to talk to you even less, because you don’t have a happy countenance,” he said. That’s when I noticed that the missionaries are almost always smiling when they speak of God. When he does feel daunted because hours have gone by and no one showed any interest in learning about the church, one thing that helps him gain patience is to — and you guessed it — say a prayer.
“When you run into the people who do want to talk, then it’s really fun,” he said. “[God] is putting people in our paths that are ready to learn about the Gospel.” Depending on the day and the area, he can pull off five to ten successful conversations each day. He found it more challenging to proselytize in Asian enclaves because those communities have much less knowledge about God than, say, Jamaica, Queens. In a New York Times story, a Mormon missionary in Brazil is said to have converted 70 people and talked to an estimated 3,100 during his two-year mission.
“I’ve never been sad that I’ve tried to talk to someone,” Sandberg added. “The only times you feel regret as a missionary is when you didn’t talk to anyone because you were too scared maybe they won’t going to want to talk to you.”
The English Class
Forty minutes away by train from the Chinatown branch of the church is the Brooklyn branch, located between 60 and 61 St. This Chinatown in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park is the second largest in New York City, bested by Flushing, Queens. Extending roughly from 40 to 68 Streets around Eighth Avenue, this growing community dwarfs the Chinatown in Manhattan.
On the church’s glass door, a sign reads “Free English Class” in Chinese. Upon entering, I was greeted by three church members. Two of them were wearing long floral skirts and a name tag with their missionary names emblazoned on it in Chinese. The LDS missionaries are referred to by their last name with the prefix “elder” (or “Zhanglao”). In Mandarin-speaking parishes, missionaries with Western surnames would adopt a one-character Chinese name based on the phonetics. For example, Elder Sandberg would become Song Zhanglao in Chinese.
The Brooklyn branch offers English classes at three levels twice a week: introductory, intermediate and advanced. There is no enrollment required, and all you need to do is show up. I asked to sit in at the intro class taught by Sandberg, and an Elder Larson led me to a classroom in the back. The room was small but intimate, with a few pairs of desks and chairs facing a blackboard. A few minutes past 7 p.m., Sandberg came to the room with his missionary partner. They had just finished proselytizing for the day — it was a good day for them, he told me, as far as Tuesdays go. They managed to have five solid conversations.
Sandberg led the class in Mandarin, although it seemed like among the eight students that attended there must have been ten dialects of Chinese spoken. Jinglun Wang, from Beijing, tried to strike up a conversation with the student sitting next to him, but the exchange didn’t go very far, as Wang didn’t understand the other person’s Fuzhou dialect. As a refresher Sandberg went over the pronunciation of a few consonants that are difficult for Chinese speakers: “th,” “ch” and “sh.” On the blackboard, he jotted down words with those sounds for the class to practice.
“Th-ere,” he pulled down his mask to show the placement of his tongue. “Put your tongue between your teeth.”
The consonant “th” was the hardest and most confusing for the students, as neither of its two pronunciations is present in most Chinese dialects. The Fuzhounese student, who was over sixty years old and had almost no knowledge of English, had a particularly hard time saying the words, but Sandberg was encouraging and patient. The Fuzhounese student, who was here for the first time, gestured with his hands as if steering a car, and from that Sandberg gathered that he was a truck driver, so he suggested that for the rest of the class we would learn about words related to driving.
“I certainly learned something here, but it’s hard to say how much,” said Wang. He is hesitant to join the church, as he wants to know more about the faith. “It will never be too late to join.”
After class, when the students were already packing to leave, Sandberg whipped out a copy of the Book of Mormon from his messenger bag to share a message. While he read a verse from the book, some already got up and were on their way out. Sandberg seemed unbothered and thanked everyone for coming.
“It’s truly cool to make friends, to be able to first serve them with English and then also be able to teach them a little bit about the Gospel,” Sandberg said. “A lot of them need that help.” Before he was transferred to Brooklyn, he brought in about three or four new members to the church through the English class during his 12-week stay at the Chinatown location.
In an English lesson that was live-streamed on the church’s Facebook page, a photo of Jesus Christ was posted on the black board. “One of the misconceptions about us is that teaching English is not our end purpose,” Flushing missionary Nick Boyd said in Mandarin in a video posted on Facebook. “In fact, we care about everyone who wants to learn English. Our English class is just a service.”
The Churchgoers
While the Brooklyn congregation serves more families, the Chinatown congregants are mostly middle aged or older immigrants, with the exception of a few young professionals.
Kevin Wong, 21, is one of the younger folks who frequent the Manhattan branch. A native New Yorker, Wong is very shy and reserved and has a slight stutter, always sitting quietly in his navy suit, sometimes fidgeting.
Living with his grandmother, Wong’s parents are away in Brooklyn. He participates in the Day Habilitation Without Walls program at AHRC, an organization serving people with intellectual disabilities, where he learns to cook.
He was introduced to the church at 15, when he was approached by a missionary on his walk home. At 18, Wong got baptized and became the only church member among his family and friends.
“It means family to me,” Wong said of the church.
Wong never brought any of his family members to the church because he thought they wouldn’t be interested. The LDS church never turns away anyone, as they believe the Gospel is God’s gift to all of mankind, but it definitely isn’t a place for everyone.
Gina Barrett, for one, took issue with how the LDS church operates. She left an angry one-star review on Google Maps for the Chinese church’s Brooklyn branch, which had only received five-stars reviews (save for one user who rated the place one-star without elaboration) prior.
“BEWARE they try to baptize you & recruit you. They try to Make you devote your life to their church,” Barrett wrote. “They do it slowly & keep asking more of you little by little until you say What the Heck did I get myself into.”
Barrett was looking for a safe place to meet new, interesting people, just to “get out of the house” and “look for something to believe in,” when she came upon the Brooklyn branch. She found the missionaries there very friendly and welcoming at first, but slowly she was put off by how much the church was asking of her.
“I do not believe that Jesus Christ wants me to give 24 hours of my day to a religion,” said Barrett, who was born Roman Catholic. “I think Jesus Christ wants me to live as a good person during my day and pay homage to him at certain times.”
After establishing initial contact with potential converts, the missionary would schedule weekly lessons with them to share messages from the Book of Mormon, the LDS church’s scripture in addition to the Bible. At the end of the first lesson, which is about the tenets of the religion, the missionary would preliminarily schedule a date for the potential member to be baptized. According to Galbraith, baptism is a crucial part of the Gospel because Jesus Christ himself was baptized.
“If we want to do everything that we can to follow his example, we have to be baptized,” Galbraith said.
Barrett was involved with the Brooklyn branch for a total of four months. What started for Barrett as weekly sessions turned into three meetings a week.
“I’m going to burn that book,” Barrett contended. “I was like, I feel like I’m going into a frickin’ cult.”
In addition, she found the church’s ban on tea and alcohol problematic.
“You told me you read from the Old Testament and the New Testament,” she said, with a thick Brooklyn accent. “Do you realize the scripture says how Jesus turned water into wine?”
The purpose of the “Words of Wisdom” is to help those who practice them have an eternal family filled with peace and harmony, according to Chinatown missionary Jialu Fan. Fan said his father used to be a “business drinker” in Beijing, where drinking is an essential part of deal-making and networking. In China, a lot of business people who are non-social drinkers are pressured into consuming alcohol, because rejecting a toast is considered disrespectful.
“My father would come home drunk, and he would go to the bathroom to puke,” Fan recalls. He said his parents used to fight a lot over his father’s drinking. “My dad said it was all for the family. But if he hadn’t drunk that much, there wouldn’t have been so much fight in my family.”
Fan moved to Irvine, California with his family three years ago, where they joined the local Mandarin-speaking LDS church. He immediately knew he wanted to be a missionary.
“We believe we are not restrained by the covenants,” said Fan. “If we get addicted to something, it’s that thing that’s restraining our freedom.”
