"LITTLE FUJIAN (FUKIEN)"
123
Sunday is the most convenient time for a temple visit during a six-day work week although the temples, run by individuals as a profit-making business, are open every day. On Sundays, especially before noon, one can find the more popular temples jammed with Fujianese all providing offerings, burning incense and making supplications for help or blessings. The worshippers are overwhelmingly female and are all Southern Fujianese, and as more people arrive in Hong Kong from Fujian the numbers that go to temples are constantly rising. For the past ten to fifteen years, though, their average age has also been rising; most worshippers readily acknowledge the reluctance of younger people to go to the temples for formal worship.
Yet for middle-aged Fujianese women, especially those who came to Hong Kong in the mid-1950s, the temples serve as one of the few places available to women to get together and share their problems and thoughts with each other. Anxious over events they have little control over (such as business earnings abroad) and worried about the health and welfare of husbands and families hundreds of miles away in the Philippines and in Fujian, the women come to secure blessings and protection for their families. It is no wonder that middle-aged Fujianese women are the mainstay of the traditional religious tradition in Little Fujian. The comfort and support of the other women there, though, is often as important as that derived from the spirits.
This woman-to-woman bond is a key one in male-deficient Little Fujian and can also be seen in the common practice of a woman and her children sharing a flat with other such households. Such joint ventures are usually undertaken only with women from the same locality in Fujian. As such the pattern is also representative of the heavy reliance on "tong-xiang” (lit. "same district," but more broadly, one's fellow ethnics) to help one adjust to Hong Kong life and to make life a bit more pleasant. Close friends are almost invariably all “tong-xiang”, and even in places of work or recreation where groups are ethnically integrated in the spatial sense there exists informal friendship networks that are substantially ethnically enclosed. Lunch-hours and work schedules are often arranged around these groupings as workers "re-segregate” to eat and work with their ethnic-mates. The Fujianese do not see this as discrimination or unusual; they consciously acknowledge their separateness and explain it by proclaiming:
"LITTLE FUJIAN (FUKIEN)"
123
Sunday is the most convenient time for a temple visit during a six-day work week although the temples, run by individuals as a profit-making business, are open every day. On Sundays, especially before noon, one can find the more popular temples jammed with Fujianese all providing offerings, burning incense and making sup- plications for help or blessings. The worshippers are over-whel- mingly female and are all Southern Fujianese, and as more people arrive in Hong Kong from Fujian the numbers that go to temples are constantly rising. For the past ten to fifteen years, though, their average age has also been rising; most worshippers readily acknow- ledge the reluctance of younger people to go to the temples for formal worship.
Yet for middle-aged Fujianese women, especially those who came to Hong Kong in the mid-1950s, the temples serve as one of the few places available to women to get together and share their problems and thoughts with each other. Anxious over events they have little control over (such as business earnings abroad) and worried about the health and welfare of husbands and families hundreds of miles away in the Philippines and in Fujian, the women come to secure blessings and protection for their families. It is no wonder that middle-aged Fujianese women, are the mainstay of the traditional religious tradition in Little Fujian. The comfort and support of the other women there, though, is often as important as that derived from the spirits.
This woman-to-woman bond is a key one in male-deficient Little Fujian and can also be seen in the common practice of a woman and her children sharing a flat with other such households. Such joint ventures are usually undertaken only with women from the same locality in Fujian. As such the pattern is also representa- tive of the heavy reliance on "tong-xiang” (lit. "same district," but more broadly, one's fellow ethnics) to help one adjust to Hong Kong life and to make life a bit more pleasant. Close friends are almost invariably all “tong-xiang”, and even in places of work or recreation where groups are ethnically integrated in the spatial sense there exists informal friendship networks that are substantially ethnically enclosed. Lunch-hours and work schedules are often arranged around these groupings as workers "re-segregate” to eat and work with their ethnic-mates. The Fujianese do not see this as discrimination or unusual; they consciously acknowledge their separateness and explain it by proclaiming:
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