The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [202]
And then there is Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain, whose great-great-grandfather, a Chinese herbalist, came to America in 1867. With her freckles, pale skin, and red hair, See does not look Chinese, but she has many stories to tell about her Chinese ancestors on the western frontier. Even though her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all white, Lisa See grew up culturally Chinese, spending much of her childhood in her family’s antique store in Los Angeles Chinatown. As an adult, she was astonished to find that others did not view her as a Chinese American. “Many of the Chinese people I interviewed talked about Caucasians as lo fan and fan gway, as white people, ‘white ghosts,’ ” See wrote. “Often someone would say, by way of explanation, ‘You know. She was a Caucasian like you.’ They never knew how startling it was for me to hear that, because all those years in the store and going to those wedding banquets, I thought I was Chinese. It stood to reason, as all those people were my relatives. I had never really paid much attention to the fact that I had red hair like my [maternal] grandmother and the rest of them had straight black hair ... Though I don’t physically look Chinese, like my grandmother I am Chinese in my heart.”
Once the rare exception, multiethnic Americans like Cy Wong and Lisa See are rapidly becoming the norm. Between 1969 and 1989, the number of children born to Chinese-Caucasian couples more than tripled. In 2000, scholars estimated that there were some 750,000 to 1 million multiracial Asian Americans in the United States.71
Mixed-race Americans of Chinese heritage have also achieved celebrity status, pushing the issue of their ethnicity into the spotlight. Tiger Woods, the world-famous golfer, has described himself as “Cablinasian” to embrace his white, black, Indian, Thai, and Chinese roots. And in Hollywood, a growing number of stars—Keanu Reeves, Russell Wong, Meg Tilly, Kelly Hu, Tia Carrere, and Phoebe Cates among them—are part Chinese.72
While some racially mixed Americans have retained their Chinese culture, others have taken on a brand-new identity. Many children of white-Chinese unions are now calling themselves “Hapa,” a word that originated in Hawaii to describe the children of white merchants and native Hawaiians. Later, it referred to those with half-white, half-Japanese heritage, and now it is commonly used to describe all mixed-race people of some Asian ancestry. Hapa organizations have proliferated on college campuses such as Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Washington. Indeed, Hapas are now coming into their own as a political force and a burgeoning social movement: Hapa conferences, a Hapa magazine (MAVIN), and Hapa social clubs. Universities even offer courses in Hapa history.
As Hapas grow in number, they are asserting their freedom to celebrate the richness of their heritage, as are other multiethnic individuals. In the year 2000, for the first time in American history, the U.S. government permitted people to acknowledge their mixed-race heritage on the census by checking more than one box. When Cy Wong filled out his census form, he drew arrows to three boxes to emphasize his black, Chinese, and Native American lineage, and then wrote “Tri-ethnic and American” in the margin.
These trends provoke new questions: What is racial identity? Who gets to decide it? The government? The experts? Or the people themselves?
Though some find it convenient to see race as solid blocs of humanity, easily organized and controlled by bureaucracies on the basis of shared interests, the reality of individual