Kenneth Guest

Ken Guest (BA Columbia U.; PhD City University of New York) teaches courses on immigration, religion, China, and New York City. Fluent in Chinese, he is author of God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (NYU Press 2003); four leading US textbooks, including Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age (WW Norton 2024) now in 4th Editions; and myriad other articles and papers.

The Wallet, both history and memoir, explores Ken Guest’s family’s engagements with missionaries, colonialism, independence movements and war in India, China, and the Philippines, 1925-1945, including three years in a Japanese World War II concentration camp. Exploring intergenerational impacts of trauma and resilience, the project maps stories and strategies for asserting humanity and meaning in the face of extreme violence and hate, tools essential to escaping today’s pandemics of chaos and war.