Dear Community Members,

In recent weeks, we have seen an increase in internet and phone scams and attacks. These attacks and scams have been taking the form of fake job offers, fake checks, and fake requests for information.

We need you to be aware of this problem, be vigilant with your personal information, and help us all work together to make sure scammers and hackers are not successful. In order to stay up to date on the latest scams and threats, and for advice on how to stay safe on the internet; please visit the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) IT Security website. You can also subscribe to the DoIT security feed.  

Subscribe to DoIT Security Feed

Protecting Yourself

If an offer seems too good to be true, it likely is. 

• Scammers often impersonate someone when making fake offers. When you receive an offer, verify it is legitimate by directly contacting the person or company who appears to have sent it. For example, call a company using contact information from their website. Do not reply directly to emails.
• Scammers often forge the "from" address in their malicious email messages to make it appear to come from a UMBC email address. For offers that appear to come from members of the UMBC community, directly call or email the person making the offer after looking them up in the UMBC Directory.  
• Some scammers are now sending their fake offers and malicious messages through SMS text messages, not just through email. No matter how you receive the messages, if they seem too good to be true, verify if the message is legitimate by contacting the alleged sender directly.  
• UMBC sends many official messages through myUMBC Personal Posts, which are more secure than email. You can authenticate a myUMBC Personal Post by checking to see if you have a corresponding myUMBC notification. 
• Please forward suspicious messages to security@umbc.edu and ask for verification. We will verify any offer for you.  

Additional things to remember:

• Never provide your confidential information (credit card number, social security number, driver's license number, passport number, etc.) to anyone via email, text message, or a web page. 
• No legitimate job offer will ever require you to send money or to buy things with your own money.
• If you receive a check you were not expecting, be suspicious, especially if the sender asks you to deposit a check and then send money or purchase items. Also, UMBC will never email you a check. For additional information, please review the Federal Trade Commission's website on fake check scams.

Working Together to Help UMBC

• Report suspicious activity to security@umbc.edu. Don't assume that something is obvious or someone else will report it; always report anything suspicious. Forwarding the scam or attack to UMBC DoIT Security allows us to notify the rest of the community and track the trends of what is hitting our campus. When forwarding malicious email to security@umbc.edu, including the full email headers will speed up our ability to respond.
• If you get a suspicious message, check for information about scams on the DoIT IT Security website and to subscribe to the article feed. Once subscribed, you will receive articles in your inbox as they are published. For more information, check out our FAQ: How to Subscribe to DoIT IT Security Notices and Articles.

Thank you for helping our community fight back against the scammers and attackers.

Mark Cather, Chief Information Security Officer, Division of Information Technology

For Christopher Tong, discovering clues hidden in texts documenting history’s most devastating floods isn’t just about the promise of making social, cultural, and political change. It’s also a personal journey inspired by generations of his own family.

In July of 2021, the city of Zhengzhou, China, had more than seven inches of rain in one hour, flooding subway train cars filled with commuters and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate.

Around this time Christopher K. Tong, an assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was surrounded by materials he had collected during his trip to the People’s Republic of China at the Hubei Provincial Archive in Wuhan and from the No. 2 Historical Archive in Nanjing, the national repository for Republican-era government documents. He was translating and analyzing historical, government, and personal documents regarding two major environmental disasters in China during the 1930s: the Yangzi River and Yellow River floods.

Nearly a century ago, the communities surrounding the third- and sixth-longest river systems in the world experienced the most severe flooding in modern China’s history, inundating thousands of miles of land, killing millions of people, and leading to extensive disease and famine.

Witnessing the coverage of the Zhengzhou flood, and watching the past and present intersect, was an extraordinary moment for Tong. Live, minute-by-minute social media posts gave insight into the catastrophic experience. By contrast, the floods from the 1930s did not have such personal coverage. First-person accounts tended to be handwritten letters and only some reached audiences beyond their villages, allowing for a select few, in cities far away from the areas most impacted, to understand what was happening on the ground.

“The Zhengzhou floods confirmed for me how important environmental humanities research is and how this scholarship sheds light on society and politics,” says Tong, who compares the impact of the floods to the impact the Dust Bowl of America’s Great Depression had on American society and politics. This deep research into the political—and personal—nature of environmental disasters like these has won Tong recognition among humanities scholars, social scientists, and policy analysts alike.

The Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies recently awarded Tong one of 11 prestigious Early Career Fellowships in China Studies, providing funding for an academic year of research, writing, and curriculum development to help meet the needs of China studies in the 21st century. Tong will use this time and rich material to write his book on ecological consciousness and political representation in modern China.

“One of the goals of my book is to offer readers resources to ‘think with China’ on shared concerns such as ecological crises, human rights, and animal advocacy,” says Tong. “I see my work as contributing to cultural diplomacy and what people in the policy world call ‘China literacy.’”

Silent all these years

Historical and literary narratives of the Yangzi River and Yellow River floods tend to shift between focusing on facts and offering a political party’s explanation. The events are inevitably understood within the larger framework of building a national identity, especially the revolutionary history of the People’s Republic of China.

“Official narratives generally serve to build national unity, but there are always gaps and discrepancies in these narratives. It’s about whose voices are missing in the official narratives and why,” says Tong. “Unfortunately, people forget these voices over time, and my project is to recover them.

Wanting to delve into the archives on the floods to see what histories emerged, Tong first had to secure access to the archives. With access granted and the assistance of a Fulbright grant and Nanjing University, between 2018 and 2019 Tong spent 10 months in China analyzing thousands of documents written in classical and modern Chinese. In the archives, amongst letters written by survivors, correspondence between county officials and provincial and central governments lists of survivors at refugee camps, maps, logistical documents, and photos never before studied, was one of many untold stories:

“There are those who try to rescue their parents, but die in the water…There are those who hold their wives and children by the hand, but end up drowning together…[and] families that manage to escape on a single raft, but sink in the middle of the current.”

This excerpt of a rare petition letter written by a village representative was in the archives and mirrored accounts throughout the archives that spoke of death and survival. These voices, silent for decades, were not a story of revolutionary action as many histories of modern China would imply. What Tong unearthed bears witness to the lived experience of rural communities focused on repairing and managing loss. They sought help from government officials, relief workers, each other, and were more civically engaged than previously thought.

“Sometimes these efforts are not given enough consideration in disaster narratives and national histories,” says Tong. “But I believe them to be important as building blocks of proto-democratic practices.” He hopes it will inspire the reconceptualization of Chinese literature and history in the early 20th century.

Kirk Denton, professor emeritus of Chinese literature at the Ohio State University and a mentor to Tong through UMBC’s Eminent Scholar Mentoring Program, gave Tong important feedback based on his own research on the representation of historical memory in Chinese and Taiwanese museums. Over the years, Denton has witnessed the evolution of Tong’s work.

“I was heartened to see a young man mature into such an accomplished scholar,” says Denton, who notes that Tong’s work “is at the forefront of the environmental humanities.”

Jessica Berman, professor of English and director of UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities, says that as a scholar of comparative literature, “Christopher uses the core methods of textual analysis, critical theory, and intellectual history to bring out the ramifications of cross-cultural environmental thinking between China and the U.S. in the early 20th century.”

“The climate crisis is often portrayed as something serious that happens over time, like global warming,” says Tong. “However, with the Dust Bowl in the U. S. and floods in China, these disasters were fast and extreme and often contributed to immediate shifts in public sentiment and the government’s capacity to govern.”

Windows to the past

For Tong, the interconnectedness of his work is both personal and professional. His interest in 20th‑century China and Hong Kong stems from his maternal grandmother’s stories about her life in mainland China in the early 20th century.

“My maternal grandmother and her sibling were artists. She went to an art academy in China briefly during W WII and was the director of a clothing company in Hong Kong after the war. One of her sisters was a film star in Hong Kong who acted opposite a young Bruce Lee in the film Thunderstorm in 1957,” he says.

He remembers learning about his great‑great‑grandfather, Jiang Kong yin, a government official and well‑respected member of the gentry during the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in China. Jiang helped with the transition from the Qing dynasty to the Republic of China (ROC). Tong’s maternal grandfather learned English early because he was from one of the founding families whose fortune was tied to British Hong Kong. This was especially useful during WWII when he worked for Allied forces in southwestern China with Chinese aviators and the Flying Tigers, U. S. volunteer aviators who fought against Japan.

Tong also listened to the stories of his paternal grandfather who worked for an American company in Hong Kong after WWII. His paternal grandmother came from a peasant family and joined her siblings in the U.S. Her siblings ran a Chinese restaurant in Bakersfield, California. This side of Tong’s family eventually moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where his uncles would later work for the U. S. military. California has been home to most of Tong’s family since the late 1960s.

“I’m proud that my research not only broadens scholarship in the humanities,” shares Tong, “but it is also a way to maintain my connection to my family history and imagine what it was like for them to live through those periods.”

Mirrors

Tong’s work also holds space for voices missing in the humanities and the environmental movement. “Ecological thought draws heavily on European and North American traditions. Non-Western cultures are often viewed as derivative or marginal,” explains Tong. “Women, people of color, and disabled people are also underrepresented as contributors to environmentalism and animal advocacy.”

He remembers how his family often didn’t feel comfortable using green space, and when they did, people often assumed they were tourists. “Before COVID, I was visiting my grandmother and went for a hike in Muir Woods,” north of San Francisco, says Tong. “People asked me where I was from and were surprised to hear I grew up in the Bay Area.” The times when they did feel comfortable, when they enjoyed spending time outdoors, those experiences were memorable and inspired his career path.

Tong hopes to spur more inclusion and representation in the humanities. The STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) have benefited from the talents and scholarship of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, he says, but the humanities have not had equal representation. As an Asian American with Hong Kong roots, Tong has often been the sole person of color or Asian American in classes and conferences. Often, he is mistaken as the “tech-person” or assumed to be in a STEM field, he explains.

Tamara Bhalla, an associate professor of American studies and affiliate faculty in the Asian Studies program, works with Tong on the board of the UMBC Asian and Asian American Faculty and Staff Council (AAAFSC). She says, “Chris has been a tremendous leader…He has brought his expansive intellect and global knowledge to bear in his approach to leadership in AAAFSC.”

Part of this work means going beyond the classroom. Tong participated in a series of talks at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco on the theme of “After Hope.” His project helped raise awareness of Chinese-language literature in the context of Asian American history and addressed the pandemic, immigration policies, and what wellbeing means. He includes poetry found on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay where Chinese immigrants were detained in the early 20th century because of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

“We’re an important part of the conversation on culture, politics, and history in American society,” he says. He wants to be one of the people that students can look to and think, “I can also pursue this path and have a career in academia in a humanistic field.”

Last year’s flood in Zhengzhou was one of many extreme weather events in China that summer. Many cities and villages in various provinces were bombarded by the floods, killing hundreds and displacing millions.

The New York Times reported on the different accounts given by government officials, meteorologists, and on social media, including those trapped in the flooded subway, wading in the water, leaving their homes, and taking care of the dead while also dealing with COVID-19.

In the meantime, Tong has documents that remain to be analyzed in hopes they will unveil more voices and bring further clarity to China’s environmental history and its future.

“The climate crisis affects everyone every where in some way. It’s the most important issue of our generation,” says Tong. “It affects every domain of knowledge production.”

* * * * *

Header Image: A scene from the Yangzi River in China. Photo by Dong Zhang on Unsplash (2017). All other photos shared by Tong.

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Michael Hassett and Chiara Collette first met each other in 2014 at the Los Angeles International Airport before boarding a 17-hour flight to the Kingdom of Tonga in the middle of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Hassett applied to the Peace Corps hoping to be placed in Eastern Europe focusing on rural development. As a certified teacher, Collette didn’t have a specific country in mind. She was more interested in being able to teach. 

Both were placed in Tonga in teaching positions. Little did they know that this shared placement would permanently intertwine their personal and professional lives. In 2018, the couple got married and co-founded an internationally recognized nonprofit, Friends of Tonga—which earned a 2021 Literacy Award from the Library of Congress. Since then, Hassett and Collette have used their literacy educational tools and public policy skills gained at UMBC, and connections in Tonga to support the island nation they have come to love. 

Community building

Hassett, M.P.P. ’17, Ph.D. ’19, public policy, lived in the village of Fahefa on the main island of Tongatapu. Collette, M.A. ’21, TESOL, lived in the village of Ta’anga, on the outer island of ‘Eua part of an archipelago made of 170 islands. 

Working and living alongside their community members and fellow teachers, they helped design and implement programs to further develop students’ English speaking, writing, and reading skills. As the second official language of Tonga, students are expected to master English and complete their high school entrance exams in English. 

Hassett remembers within the first two months a parent asked if he could tutor her high school-aged son. He agreed to begin that very night.  “As I waited, I heard the pigs and chickens run across the yard and smelled the wafting smoke of cooking fires in the air,” he remembers. Then he heard people yelling in Tongan. ”Before my eyes, my one student expanded into a crowd of high school kids from around the village, all bearing plates of food, fresh fruits, vegetables, and bread,” he says. Their parents began running out of their houses to ask if he could tutor their children, too? His one-on-one tutoring session evolved into a weekly night class.

One of Collette’s favorite teaching memories was working with 3rd and 4th-grade students on a career interest project. “Students created life-size cardboard cutouts of their heads and hands and decorated them according to the profession of their choice. “They wrote and memorized speeches explaining their career choice,” says Collette. “Students then presented their speeches to their parents while wearing their ‘professional outfits.’” 

And similar to Hassett’s unexpected evening tutoring class, Collette developed a friendship with the principal at the primary school where she worked, offering help as he worked towards his bachelor’s degree in education from the University of the South Pacific remotely. 

Through these experiences, Collette and Hassett forged strong friendships and partnerships giving them a great sense of connection across all sectors of the Tongan community beyond their Peace Corps experience.

At the same time, their friendship evolved into a relationship. They started dating and continued long-distance while Hassett traveled after he completed his service and when they returned back to the United States until they relocated to Baltimore together so Hassett could matriculate into UMBC’s Public Policy program as a Shriver Peaceworker. Collette became a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools and Anne Arundel County Public Schools eventually enrolling in UMBC’s M.A. TESOL program. 

Tongan allies

Focusing on their graduate degrees did not replace the bond that had grown between themselves and the people of Tonga. In 2018, cyclone Gita hit Tonga with over a hundred mile per hour winds causing the most damage in 60 years. They were not aware of any other U.S. non-profits directly working in Tonga that were not religiously affiliated. Equipped with their skills from the Peace Corps and UMBC, along with their community-engaged connections, the pair co-founded Friends of Tonga with Peace Corps colleagues, friends in the nonprofit and development community, and members of the Tongan community.

One such member is Tu’amelie Mahe, the principal Collette used to work with. He now serves as education officer for school grant and asset management at the Ministry of Education and is the current program manager for Friends of Tonga. There are also Tongan’s in New Zealand participating. “From the perspective of a New Zealand born Tongan, being a part of Friends of Tonga allows those Tongans, who are a part of the diaspora, to actively participate in charity work that directly benefits Tonga,” says Neomai Maka, a high school teacher in Auckland, New Zealand. Her parents originate from the villages of Fua’amotu and Tatakamotonga in Tonga.

What began as reactive disaster relief support work, grew to become a proactive Peace Corps model community supporting Tongan-identified initiatives like education resources, English language skill development, and building cyclone safe schools. 

“I am a friend of Tonga. I’m not Tongan. I can’t speak on their behalf,” shares Hassett. “I am not interested as a white man in telling Tongans what to do or what they need. I can be an ally and I can support them and champion the causes that they tell us they need help with.”

Weathering the storm

Later that year, they returned to Tonga for both their honeymoon and their Sapate Uluaki, a wedding celebration. Hassett’s host family, the Fainga’a family, planned this celebration weaving Hassett and Collette deeper into their Tongan community. 

During this visit, Friends of Tonga was asked to help rebuild the kindergarten that had been destroyed by a category four cyclone earlier in the year and had been operating out of a tent ever since. Collette and Hassett had lived through Cyclone Ian and Kofi in January and March 2014 respectively and witnessed the damage caused by bands of heavy rain, strong winds, and flash flooding.  

“We jumped in,” says Collette. The logistical challenges of building a school were great. They reached out to their friend who is the CEO of Schools for Children of the World. “It was a true collaborative effort between architects and engineers familiar with building schools in countries prone to hurricanes, the Tongan Ministry of Education, and community members,” says Hassett. Via a string of Facebook calls with engineers and architects, Tongan’s first cyclone and hurricane-resistant building was created. This one structure now functions as a school, community center, a shelter, and a place to house emergency supplies. The need for these types of structures was evident and a key factor in continuity of education and services.

Sustainable English language learning

Collette began working on assisting teachers find resources to improve English reading, writing, and speaking skills to increase student’s access to high school and further education opportunities. The obvious answer might have been increasing access to English language books but, with students spread over 170 islands, a central library would only give access to students living near the library. Books that are donated are often not aligned developmentally or content-wise. Buying books, transporting them, and managing the wear and tear caused by tropical and extreme weather makes a physical library costly and unsustainable.

The answer was not in the past but in the future. Wi-fi reaches most of the islands allowing at least one family member the use of a smartphone. A resource that is bound to grow makes digital resources sustainable. With permission from authors and volunteer readers, Collette developed a digital video library of English language beginner, intermediate, and advanced books. 

Today, the library has 85 books that teachers, parents, and students can download using very little data. The theories and best practices gained during her TESOL master’s program, guided Collette in developing an English language learning curriculum for teachers and parents to use in tandem. “A video library meant rural students who didn’t have access to English language materials could download a file and share it with friends and family,” says Collette. 

Collette and Hassett note that UMBC “is baked into all of our programming.” Joby Taylor, Ph.D. ’05, language, literacy, and culture, director of the Shriver Peaceworker Program, along with fellow Peaceworkers read many of the stories in the read-aloud program. Lauren Hamilton Edwards, assistant professor of public policy, is also guiding them in their strategic planning process. 

Dear Tonga

Reading was only part of the puzzle needed to improve English language skills. Students needed more practice writing in English for their high school entrance exam. Collette designed a penpal program between Tongan students and students in the U.S. The written conversation became a way to learn about other cultures, practice sentence structure, and purposeful communication needed in school and in jobs. 

“The results of a curriculum specifically for Tongan English language learners is exactly what the teachers, the Ministry of Education, and Friends of Tonga hoped it would be,” says Hassett. “Based on an analysis I did, the high school entrance exam scores increased by 10%.” 

The Library of Congress took note and awarded Friends of Tonga, one of only 14 recipients globally, with a 2021 Literacy Award for “their implementation of highly successful practices in literacy promotion… and in recognition of the need for the international community to unite in achieving universal literacy.”

This was only the beginning. As an early childhood educator, Collette began searching for opportunities to assist the Ministry of Education and teachers to create a PreK-K program. 

Then the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022, followed by a tsunami. The eruption lasted for 11 hours and devastated homes across the archipelago.

A Strong Network

The volcano completely disconnected wi-fi service, blanketed Tonga with ash, toppled homes, and contaminated rain water collection points. Hassett and Collette did not hear from their Tongan community for weeks. Thankfully, Friends of Tonga is made up of community members in Tonga as well as in New Zealand allowing a close point of contact to provide information, identify needs, and provide direct support. Through their networks, they were able to hear that the cyclone proof school was not affected by the volcano or the tsunami.

Friends of Tonga funded $15,000 to The Civil Society Forum of Tonga, a Tongan-led and Tongan driven NGO, and fundraised $9,000 for the Mainstreaming of Rural Development Innovation Tonga Trust. The funding is helping to provide water, sanitation, hygiene services, and assist farmers with harvesting crops damaged by the tsunami before they spoil. The food is being given to the communities that were evacuated from outer islands.

“The work that began a decade ago as Peace Corps volunteers was intentionally driven to build strong, long lasting, community, and personal relationships,” shares Hassett, the 2021 recipient of UMBC’s Distinguished Service Alumni Award. “We created a strong infrastructure of people and resources that has made it possible for us to support Tongans right now more than ever before.”