Stephen Yang was born in 1911 in Chongqing, Sichuan,[2] and raised by parents of the Quaker faith (Religious Society of Friends).

In 1922, he lived at the Friends Middle School on the campus of the West China Union University in Chengdu, cofounded by American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, American Methodist Episcopal Mission, Canadian Methodist Mission, and Friends' Foreign Mission Association.

[4] In the late 1940s, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia for their residency training, where they spent several days at Pendle Hill Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation with Anna and Howard Brinton, who had visited them in Sichuan in 1944.

[5] Yang spent one year (1970–1971) in prison during the Cultural Revolution.

After retiring from the West China Medical University, he had continued working as a mentor to English teachers sent by British Quakers to teach at the university.