Missionary Position:
Sex, Politics, Money and Faith in China today.

Here is China shocked into the 21st century. Big screen TVs, cell phones, hair mousse, condos, poodles, gated communities, colorful dresses, and AIDS coexist with broken Buddhas, ancient libations, ghosts, past lives, Confucian relics resurfaced after decades of frenzied banishment. Missionary Position offers glimpses of How to Be Chinese, now that instructions from the Little Red Book no longer apply. China is both superficial and plastic as well as profoundly righteous and moralistic. It is a society hanging on for dear life as it continues to shape its own culture at breakneck speed while holding on to its traditions lest they be buried or a skyscraper built upon them.

Bright Lights
China is in the fast lane, ignoring every speed limit. Cities spread like a cartographic contagion. For the past 30 years, China's economy is fueled by the largest migration the world has ever seen: An estimated 140 million rural Chinese have already left their homes, and another 45 million are expected to join the urban workforce in the next 5 years. Most have gone to factory towns along the coast, but in recent years migrants have been increasingly drawn to cities in the interior, where there's less competition for jobs.

Smog, Not Fog
With this rapid and huge urbanization, China is becoming the most polluted place on earth (16 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China). In the larger cities, I rarely saw a blue sky, the air was hard to breathe and my face was covered in fine black soot at the end of each day.

People Power
The Chinese people I encountered more than made up for this pollution in my extensive travels throughout China. I found them to be utterly delightful: smiling, friendly, open, helpful, hard working and curious. My trip was all about people: the Chinese I encountered and the 50 American Pilgrims I accompanied who returned to China to explore the ghosts of their past by visiting their familial sacred spaces. They are direct descendants of American Missionaries who worked in China in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries until Chairman Mao took over. I photographed all over China working from north to south: Bejing, Nanking, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Jindenzeng, Lushan, Yichang (Three Gorges Dam), Wuhan, Guangzhou, Guilin, Yangshoa, and then back to Bejing.

Made In China
We all leave childhood behind and go forward into an uncertain future. But I began to wonder what it meant for these Americans to go home. The stories I heard on this pilgrimage always circled back to ideas of identity and the perception of one’s place in the world. The photographs follow some of these Americans back to China, in search of their homes, guided by the “double vision” that’s shaped their lives. This is a journey they feel compelled to make, even if the reality is a mixture of disappointment and revelation. In a China that’s being ripped down faster than anyone can measure, these Americans with a peculiar attachment to China are there for connection, both physical and personal. And I was there to try to understand what part of me is similarly tied to a country I once knew little about: Japan.

Onward, Christian Soldiers
When they praise the Lord, they close the windows. In a packed classroom in China's southern Henan province, 35 young Christians stand behind their desks singing the Hallelujah prayer. These students have pledged the next three years of their lives to this illegal seminary, one of the many run across China by members of the Chinese Protestant underground. Tucked away in a two-story apartment donated by a fellow believer, these future preachers study, eat and sleep together, girls in one room, boys in another. If the students want to leave the school, they must do so one or two at a time, at night, so as not to make the neighbors suspicious. They often go weeks without venturing outdoors. After the last Hallelujah, they open the windows.

Their faith doesn't come without sacrifice. One 24-year-old woman bursts into tears when she talks about her little brother, whom she hasn't seen in months. "It's OK," says the former migrant worker, jutting out her chin as she struggles to regain her composure. "I'm with Jesus." The sadness leaves her face when she talks about her future plans. She wants to travel to rural villages across China to convert others to her faith. Or, she says, wide-eyed, "Maybe I'll go to an Arab country."

JC Superstar
All across China, more and more people are turning to Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. The numbers have been growing for years, encouraged by the personal freedoms that have slowly accompanied the country's economic reforms. Protestantism—and especially evangelicalism—appeals to many Chinese in rural areas that have been left out of China's economic miracle. Now China has at least 45 million Christians, the majority of whom are Protestant, according to Chinese academics. Western observers say the numbers are much higher. Dennis Balcombe, a preacher from California who has made hundreds of mission trips to China since the late 1970s, and Western researchers put the number at closer to 90 million.

East to West
Either way, the movement now has a momentum of its own. Centuries after Westerners flocked to the Middle Kingdom in search of souls, Chinese missionaries have taken over from their Western mentors and are proselytizing directly. And for the first time, they are making serious plans to spread the good word beyond their borders. "I wouldn't be surprised if Christianity has grown faster in China than anywhere else in the world in the last 20 years," says Daniel Bays, a historian of Chinese Christianity at Calvin College in Michigan.

Mass Appeal
The religious upwelling presents a serious challenge to the Chinese Communist Party, which still allows only atheists in its ranks and has always viewed religion, especially Western-imported Christianity, as a potential source of dissent. The government forbids evangelicalism and requires Christians to worship in officially sanctioned churches, but is struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing numbers. Already there are about 6 million members of the official Roman Catholic Church and 15 million Protestants. But because of government limits, there's a severe shortage of clergy and churches. In Beijing alone, people pack the 100 existing official churches, overflowing into basements to watch sermons on closed-circuit television. Two new churches the city recently broke ground on—the plans have been in the works for six years—will hardly fill the gap, officials admit.