Samuel ChaoUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Samuel C. Chao is a senior studying Psychology and Religion.

His thesis, tentatively titled “Chinese American Christian Voices in the Chinese Exclusion Era (1882-1943),” aims to uncover the experiences of Chinese American Christians during a period of pronounced anti-Chinese discrimination in America. This project asks, how did Chinese Americans attempt to overturn religious and racial stereotypes? How did they accept or reject Christianity in a distinctly Chinese American way? By leveraging the newspaper articles, pamphlets, speeches, and sermons of Chinese American religious figures such as Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, Ng Poon Chew, and Jee Gam to answer these questions, this project considers how Chinese American Christians used their faith to make sense of their lives. Ultimately, this project seeks to understand how Chinese American theologies, worldviews, and perspectives from this period may provide a usable past for us today, given ongoing debates about race, immigration, and religion in contemporary America. Indeed, Exclusion era Chinese American Christians left behind an important legacy for people to understand today.