Sheets of Scattered Sand

Cantonese Protestant Christians in Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area and Hong Kong have often been painted as a single bloc: migrants carrying Chinese culture and church life across the Pacific, sometimes opposing same-sex marriage, sometimes nurturing a new democratic awareness. Justin K.H. Tse, drawing on research in all three places, lets members of these communities speak for themselves, and they describe something far less tidy. They call themselves sheets of scattered sand, politically divided and ideologically fragmented, held together mainly by a shared tension with the secular world.

Tse focuses on the Pacific Rim era of skilled migration and multicultural optimism, before the rise of Chinese nationalism in 2012 and the Hong Kong protests, which makes his study a valuable prequel to those later stories. A thoughtful, illuminating read for anyone interested in diaspora, faith and the politics of belonging.