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GREGORY E. GULDIN
We Fujianese are conservative and don't just start talking or making friends with strangers. Anyway, you'll only meet your best friends through already close friends or relatives or "tong xiang".
This ethnic feeling of separateness (as well as the reality of separation) has led to the emergence in Little Fujian of what Milton Gordon (1964:30) has called an "ethnic sub-societal network" that enables Fujianese to form nearly all of their solidary and stable relations—relatives, friends, and neighbors—with Southern Fujianese like themselves. Furthermore, even the characteristically unidimensional and fleeting nature of many urban roles (Southall 1973: 82) turns out to have a remarkable ethnic coloration in Little Fujian, as witness social interaction in the Chun Yeung Street market, for example, where shopkeepers, clerks and customers are all Fujianese. In North Point, because of patterns of ethnic selection and preference, these roles are at the same time both unidimensional and ethnic.
Little Fujian: Sub-Neighborhood and Community
Ethnically-significant patterns do then exist among the Fujianese of North Point. Does this in itself qualify North Point's Little Fujian as a community? Some sociologists suggest that residential segregation is crucial to the maintenance of ethnic community or solidarity (Joy 1972; Lieberson 1970) but Drieger and Church (1947:30) have rightly criticized this unidimensional insistence on residential segregation as too crude a diagnostic.
Unfortunately, they too propose (1974:36) a crude diagnostic that of the ethnic percentage of a neighborhood's population. A better approach would be the realization that a sense of community is not automatically reached when the actual ethnic population counters reach a certain total but when the intensity of ethnic social interaction reaches a point that it gives an overall ethnic flavoring to the social interaction of a specific group. Enveloped in the substantially ethnically-enclosed networks of Little Fujian, the Fujianese of North Point without doubt live in such a social reality.
A quick analytical divorce between the concepts of “neighborhood" and "community” is also imperative; “ethnic neighborhood” (or "ethnic sub-neighborhood” if need be) should refer to a spatially segregated or clustered resident population while “ethnic community”...