The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [63]
In the South, where Chinese men married white, black, Indian, or Creole women, the ethnicity of offspring was fluid. Their descendants chose to be “white” in certain settings, and “colored” in others; for them, race was not socially mandated, but was rather an individual choice. Lucy Cohen interviewed the grandson of a Chinese settler whose multiracial heritage permitted him access to stores with “Whites only” signs—but who also fit himself into the “Mexican/ Indian” category, so he could “pass for what he wants.” Cohen also met the mixed-race granddaughter of a Chinese immigrant who recounted that some of her family members passed for white, either denying or forgetting their heritage, while others retained the memory of their Chinese ancestry. The granddaughter recalled the day her son was called a “nigger” by a distant relative who was even darker-skinned than he was. “That made me angry, and I told him: ‘My daddy and your daddy are first cousins, you half-white b—. Our grandparents were Chinese and Creole.”
What was the range or depth of emotions these descendants experienced as they came of age? Were some happy with their ability to defy racial pigeonholing—to be accepted by more than one ethnic group? Or were they tormented by a lifelong confusion over identity? Only hints of their feelings can be traced. One of the first to document the psychological turmoil of the mixed-race Asian in America was Edith Maud Eaton. Born in England in 1865, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother, Eaton grew up in Canada and later moved to the United States, where she wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far. An early pioneer of Chinese American literature, Eaton wrote not only about the struggles of the Chinese in the United States against white hostility, but also of her own conflicted feelings about being half-Chinese. Her books are a poignant blend of racial pride, celebration, and despair. In the autobiographical Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, published in 1909, she wrote:
I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most stolid and insensible to feelings of all races, yet I look back over the years and see myself so keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live. Mother tells us tales of China. Though a child when she left her native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to the story of how she was stolen from her home. She tells us over and over again of her meeting with my father in Shanghai and the romance of their marriage. I glory in the idea of dying at the stake and a great genie arising from the flames and declaring to those who have scorned us: “Behold, how great and glorious and noble are the Chinese people!” Whenever I have the opportunity I steal away to the library and read every book I can find on China and Chinese. I learn that China is the oldest civilized nation on the face of the earth and a few other things. At eighteen years of age what troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority.
“Why is my mother’s race despised?” Eaton agonized, in a question that was to be shared by generations of other mixed-race children. “I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rumblings of Hatred
Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multiethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic