In Pursuit of Escaping Bitterness – Improving the Selves Among Fuzhounese in Manhattan’s Chinatown

Abstract

This ethnographic research studies the Fuzhounese diasporic community from rural and urban Fuzhou in Manhattan’s Chinatown, who deploy strategies in the use of language, labor, and artistic-cultural practices like Min opera to advance themselves and flourish as individuals and as a community within the larger Chinese diaspora in New York City. It examines the personal narratives of an ongoing hardship or bitterness in the metaphorical sense and how they manage to overcome it.