Faculty Authors

Yang on Chinese in US

September was a good month for Fenggang Yang, known as Andy to American friends. He joined USM's sociology department as an assistant professor of sociology and his book, "Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities," was published by Penn State Press.

A native of China who came to the U.S. in 1989, Yang chose as his dissertation topic the problem of identity construction among Chinese immigrants who converted to Christianity. "How do Chinese Christians in the United States integrate conflicting identities of being Christian, Chinese and American?" he asks in his book. "When the East and the West meet in a Chinese Christian church, what happens to the distinct cultural and religious traditions?"

Yang was teaching world religions in the Philosophy Department at the People's University of China in Beijing before he came to the U.S. as a visiting research scholar at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was intrigued by the sharp growth in conversion to Christianity by Chinese in post-Cultural Revolution China and by Chinese immigrants in the U.S. and intended to spend his year at the Catholic University gathering material for teaching a course on Christianity back home in China, where books on Christianity were scarce.

A visit to a Chinese Christian church in Washington, D.C., which was to become the focus of his ethnographic study of Chinese Christianity, and the government's response to the student uprisings in China that year changed his plans.

After the Tiananmen Square demonstration and suppression, Yang decided to stay on in America and explore the role of Christianity in the assimilation process for Chinese in the U.S. and the problems this posed in terms of ethnic identity. He enrolled in the master's program in sociology at the Catholic University -he already held a master's degree in philosophy from Nankai University in Tianjin, China- and ultimately earned his Ph.D. there in 1997.

He discovered that there were very few scholarly studies of Chinese Christians in America. His preliminary research showed that, while Chinese churches in the U.S. went back to the 1850s, most of the growth had been since the 1960s. The number of conversions had shot up in recent years: "since 1989...large numbers of mainland Chinese students and scholars studying in the United States began to flock into Christian churches," he says in his book. Some surveys in large metropolitan areas have reported more Chinese Americans identifying themselves as Christians than as followers of traditional Chinese religions like Buddhism.

By 1994, Yang found, there were nearly 700 Protestant Chinese churches in the U.S., founded mostly by immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong. These were typically evangelical, non-denominational churches. He visited all 20 of the churches in the D.C. area, as well as churches in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, Houston and San Francisco. While these churches provided context for issues he wanted to explicate, he decided to focus on one church which he felt was typical in size and tensions in the congregation, and do an in-depth study that would draw out the complexities of the identity issues. Having joined the congregation of his study church, the Chinese Christian Church of Greater Washington, D.C., Yang himself had identity issues as both participant and observer.

This church, like most, had experienced conflicts and a schism, a process which he discovered was characteristic of Chinese immigrant churches because of the tensions in adapting to the American culture. Many immigrants, he explained, experience downward mobility to a lower socioeconomic status than they had in their native countries. In addition, Chinese immigrants come to the U.S. from countries with very different economic and political cultures -mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong. As a result, misunderstandings and competition for status can be intense within a church.

After earning his Ph.D., Yang worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston, participating in their project on Religion, Ethnicity, and New Immigrants Research, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. During his graduate years, he received dissertation fellowships from the Louisville Institute of Protestantism and American Culture and from the University of Chicago's "New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project." He also won awards from the Catholic University.

His plan for future research is to study why there was such a huge growth in Christianity in China since the 1970s. The first missionary arrived in China in 1807, but by the time of the Chinese revolution in 1949, less than one percent (400,000) of the Chinese population had converted. Then the practice of religion, especially foreign religions, was banned, but Christianity, as an underground religion, had grown to more than 1 million followers. Since Mao's death and the loosening of restrictions on religion, Christianity has grown even more in China. Yang, who returned to China in 1994 and in 1997, hopes to get government permission to visit China again in 2000 and begin his research on the causes of this growth in conversions.

Elgersman Lee on slavery

Maureen Elgersman Lee, assistant professor of history and faculty scholar for the African-American Archives, published her first book, "Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica" (Garland Publishing, Inc.). The book, a published version of her dissertation, is a comparative study of Black slave women in Canada and Jamaica, both part of the British empire but with different climates, geographic features and practices of slavery.

In Canada, Lee found, slavery was urban-based and primarily domestic labor. Women slaves worked in Canadian homes as cooks, cleaners, and laundresses, and sometimes supplied child care as well.

Her research indicates there were more Black men than women in Canada. Male slaves in Canada worked in domestic service, too, but also in the fisheries and the fur trade.

While there were an estimated 5-6000 slaves in Canada, in Jamaica, a single sugar plantation might have as many as 300-350 slaves. The numbers of men and women slaves were fairly equal in Jamaica, but women had the additional role of reproductive labor, to produce more slaves. But Lee found that Black women slaves in Jamaica had few children. Planters were bewildered that despite efforts to improve the diet and labor of women, they still weren't reproducing rapidly. Lee's research suggests that diet and disease rendered many women infertile, and the abuse some women received as children damaged their internal organs.

In Canada, the population of free Blacks grew in size after 1793, when the governor of Ontario said no new slaves could be brought in. Canada abolished slavery in 1834.

Lee received her master's and doctorate from Clark Atlanta University. She is now researching the history of the African-American community of Bangor.

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