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As a child, one of the first things I learned was the difference between a Chinese person, a Han, and everyone else. The definition of a Chinese person, whether in modern times or thousands of years ago, has always been contrasted against the “foreign barbarian.” Moreover, it went without saying in my family that being Han was not something that could be learned or acquired through acculturation. A white person—no matter how fluent in Chinese, no matter how long he had lived in China—could never be Han. My mother spoke frequently of the magnificence of China's five-thousand-year history and the superiority of Chinese culture. She also talked about the “purity” of Chinese blood and what a shame it would be to dilute it. In my native Hokkien dialect, the height of insult is to describe someone as tzup jeng—literally, “of ten breeds;” the closest English equivalent is probably mongrel.

In fact, the idea that there is a “pure” Han bloodline defining a “pure” Han people is not only a great myth, but a relatively recent one. Who has counted as Chinese throughout China's long history is far more complicated than is usually acknowledged. But I didn't know any of this as a child. Still, I always had trouble applying the concept of “foreign barbarian mongrel” in America. Everyone seemed to be of mixed ancestry; my best friend in Indiana was Scottish-Irish-English-Dutch-German. And what about the heroic GIs who liberated the Philippines? Were they barbarians? If so, perhaps being a barbarian wasn't so bad.

Conveniently, there was no time for analyzing these questions. Instead, my father issued edicts, such as “You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body,” which he declared when I was four. When it came time to apply to college, my father announced that I was going to live at home and attend Berkeley (where I had already been accepted), and that was that—no visiting campuses and agonizing choices for me. Disobeying him, as he had disobeyed his family, I forged his signature and secretly applied to a school on the East Coast I had heard people talking about. When I told him what I had done—and that Harvard had accepted me—my father's reaction surprised me. He went from anger to pride literally overnight. He was equally proud when I later graduated from Harvard Law School and when his next daughter graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School. He was proudest of all (but perhaps also a little heartbroken) when his third daughter left home for Harvard, eventually earning her M.D./Ph.D. there.

Just before entering college, I visited China for the first time. My family and I spent the summer of 1980 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. At that time, China was a backward Communist country, reeling from decades of xenophobic isolation and the anti-intellectual purges of the Cultural Revolution. Chengdu, once known as The Brocade City for its magnificent silks, was a concrete, Mao-suited eyesore. Our host, the president of the Engineering and Technology Institute, appeared to be an uneducated peasant. At our welcome banquet, he sprayed a fusillade of watermelon seeds from his mouth directly onto the sticky restaurant floor. Afterward, my mother wept. Was this all that remained of the Middle Kingdom's magnificent civilization?

A lot has happened in the last quarter century—to the world, to China, to the United States, to my family. Despite my father's draconian injunction, I ended up marrying a Jewish American. Today, my father and my husband are the best of friends, and my parents could not dote more on their mixed-blooded, Mandarin-speaking American grandchildren.

First and foremost, this book is a tribute to America's tolerance, which, for all its imperfection, drew my parents to this country and allowed my family to flourish, to change on our own terms, and to become Americans. At the same time, it is a study of power—colossal power—and the conditions that allow some societies to attain and maintain it. At yet a different level, this