Becky Yang Hsu

ABOUT BECKY YANG HSU

Becky Yang Hsu studies the social relationships that people understand as natural and ordinary, with a particular interest in moral understandings, social practices, and religion. This interest has been shaped by experiences as an immigrant in America and seeing different sides of what is taken for granted. It is also the perspective that underpins Hsu’s work as a sociologist studying happiness and mourning in China. At Georgetown University she teaches the sociology of religion and guides senior thesis research in the Department of Sociology, and as a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for  Religion, Peace & World Affairs. She makes her home in northern Virginia on the lands of the Patawomek, Tauxenent, and others with her partner Edward and their two children. She is willing to try any food at least once and enjoys playing tennis.

"Becky Yang Hsu Breaks Down How Culture Defines Happiness" The Optimist Project with Yara Shahidi podcast (March 5, 2025)

Just published, check it out! The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China (February 11, 2025)

RESEARCH INTERESTS

I study the social relationships that people take for granted as natural and ordinary. My research is at the intersection of the sociology of religion, institutions, and the sociology of culture. I am interested in questions about practices, rituals, social interactions, and social ties.

My first book, Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines microfinance programs in rural China by focusing on how people thought about their debts in relation to their social ties and social standing. In the program designs, people were expected to repay debts when they had financial incentives. In short, I found that people repaid their debts to close family and friends, especially when they knew they needed the money. I also found that those with higher economic and political status were able to avoid repaying debts to the state because local administrators needed their help.

My second published volume, The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2019), a contributed volume that I edited with Richard Madsen, is about definitions of happiness in urban China and the ways that people go about pursuing it. In the introduction, I bring up questions about how culture and social context influence definitions of happiness. I examine young adults in chapter 2, finding that they tie their assessment of their own happiness to their parents. Chapters by Lang Chen, Deborah Davis, James Farrer, Richard Madsen, and Jay Chih-Jou Chen examine the history of xingfu, weddings, food, social workers, and activists.

My third published volume, The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community China (Columbia University Press, 2025), a contributed volume I edited, examines acts of association and self-organizing in Chinese society. In a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control, those emerging from family structures are given some leeway. I discuss in the introduction how examples in China show how civic action may not make sense when attempting to understand it in terms of a public-private divide. In chapter 7, I examine the preparation of burial clothes as a form of coordination that addresses problems experienced at a challenging moment in individuals' lives. Chapters by Yunxiang Yan, Richard Madsen, Teresa Kuan, Yichen Rao, Lynn Sun, and Goncalo Santos look at advocacy organizations, the social imaginary of political economy, psychological counseling courses, internet addiction camps, social media, and medical decision making.  

My current research seeks to understand what people do when someone dies. In China, most people visit the graves of their parents once or twice a year, for the rest of their lives, to tidy ("sweep") it, bring gifts, and talk. I approach grave sweeping in China from various angles, including canonical social science, early Chinese texts, participant observation, interviews, survey data, and through the lens of its recent history. Grave sweeping is a case that pushes the boundaries of what is understood as a social tie because it has the features of other social ties: participants spend time with ancestors in the ritual, feel close to them, and participants feel that there is some reciprocal exchange of help. Thinking about grave sweeping from  the lenses of the psychology of bereavement, I wrote a paper on how the ritual leads people to both maintain and relinquish their bonds to the deceased with Roman Palitsky, published in SSM-Mental Health.  I have also written on the topic of grief and  "grieving well" with Joseline Lu, who was my student as an undergraduate sociology major at Georgetown, published in the Routledge History of Happiness.