Chinese Youths Tiptoe Into Christianity

Celebrating Christmas for the first time this year, 13-year-old Xiao Li Guo is still exploring what the day is about. "A time when people get together, um, and maybe care about each other?" the soft-spoken, lanky boy said with a shrug.

Born in China, Xiao Li moved to the District when he was 4 and was raised on folk religion and Buddhism. That meant praying to spirits, lighting incense and marking moonlight festivals his grandparents observed in the Shaw apartment where he lived with them and his mother, who is agnostic.

But this fall, like many children of families trying to make ends meet, Xiao Li wound up in a church-run social program. It took him ice skating and swimming on the weekends while his family worked at restaurants in Chinatown. Saturday outings quickly led to Sunday school, and this weekend he went to a Christmas party and Christmas church services for the first time. He even learned "Deck the Hall," which he had only heard in snippets on television.

For most children in the United States, Christmas rituals are both familiar and familial, but the opposite is true for Xiao Li. He is part of a group of young Chinese Americans living in and around Chinatown who are celebrating independently of their non-Christian families.

Initially attracted to the Chinese Community Church in Northwest Washington for its social services, the youngsters -- known as "Club Nine to 12" because of their ages --are part of a national wave of Chinese Americans exploring Christianity. Nearly one-third of Chinese Americans attend church, compared with the fraction who did 50 years ago. The number of Chinese Christian churches in the Washington region has risen dramatically to at least 30, according to G. Greg Chen, director of the District's Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs.

In the past, many Chinese immigrants came to the United States with bias against Christianity. But in the United States today, Chinese Christian churches make proselytizing a priority.

Some of the church club kids were steered there by parents eager for support. But others say their families aren't pleased about them abandoning long-held family beliefs. Ying Ci Zhao, whose 11-year-old son, Da-Zhi Yu, is part of the club, said through a translator that she supports it.

"I've noticed that a lot of the kids who go to church come back better behaved," she said. It makes sense, she said, that children raised in the States will adapt the majority's beliefs. Their family has a small Christmas tree, but only Da-Zhi goes to church.

Although Chinese Christians are becoming more common, Chinatown has only one such church: the Chinese Community Church. It was the first Chinese church in the region when it opened in 1935, and the founding pastor was threatened with death by local Chinese, Chen said.

Most of the Washington region's 100,000 Chinese live in the suburbs, but Pastor Charles Koo said he and the evangelical, nondenominational congregation feel committed to being an inner-city church. They want to reach the "unchurched" Chinese who live in Chinatown, near the brick church at Fifth and I streets NW.

"We pray about it. But our commitment is here because we believe God wants us here," Koo said. Ethnically Chinese, he grew up in a Buddhist family in Malaysia and Australia and remembers his parents' displeasure with his interest in Christianity.

Xiao Li heard about the church through a cousin, who told him about Garrett Wong, a 21-year-old pied-piper-type who packs the kids into his dilapidated 1991 white Nissan Sentra and ferries them to parks and ice-skating rinks and to church. A University of Maryland graduate who grew up on Capitol Hill, Wong has gone to the church on and off since he was a boy. Wong was the one who took five of them to the church one night last week for a noodle dinner, where they giggled as they gave their impressions of Christmas.