A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii, 331 pp. (Illus.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-27627-7.
Border crossings of many kinds flow through this highly readable, interdisciplinary exploration of miscegenation and mixed-race individuals on their journeys between the United States, Canada, Great Britain, China and Hong Kong during a century of particularly fraught Sino-American relations. Emma Teng dissects variations in theories and practices regarding racial mixing, which were influenced by local contexts and power structures, social practices, socioeconomic class, paternal and maternal descent, size of Eurasian population, physiognomy, and individual choices and adaptations. She probes the porosity of racial lines ideologically, institutionally, socially and economically to demonstrate that past interpretations of miscegenation—perhaps the ultimate transgression of racial boundaries—and the resulting biracial descendants were understood not only as violations of nature and thus portents of civilizational decline, but also as vehicles for managing unavoidably hybrid societies and economic activities and even as vessels for merging and thereby enhancing the superior traits of different races with the additional possibility of eventually eliminating inferior attributes. Although such views tended to be held more by Chinese theorists of race, they nonetheless demonstrate that contemporary celebrations of hybridity bear roots in early twentieth-century social science.
This approach enables Teng to dexterously track the many impossibilities of imposing absolute racial segregation through legal and institutional practices, projects undone by the messiness of competing theoretical conceptions of racial difference, the unevenness of lived experiences, and the contingent nature of individual self-representations and identity claims. As illustrated by the author Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton of a Chinese mother and British father in England, census counts that acknowledged only one race failed to account for biracial subjects, as did citizenship and immigration restrictions adhering to competing principles of jus solis, jus sanguinis, or dependent citizenship, in which women assumed the status of their husbands. Although she chose to identify as Chinese both socially and professionally, while her sister Winnifred gained fame as the Japanese Eurasian author Onoto Watanna, Sui nonetheless occasionally encountered and took advantage of opportunities to pass for white even as she gained visibility in representing the experiences of Chinese and Eurasians. In Sui’s case, as with many other mixed race individuals, physical appearance and social presentation proved an unreliable guide to ancestral origins.
Teng systematically engages with anthropologist Melissa Brown’s observations that ethnic identities emerge more from social experiences than from ancestry or shared culture (78, 224) in processes that allow individuals to negotiate between generally accepted orders of racial and ethnic signification which then constrain individual identity claims more so than any inherited, essentialized, bundle of racial or cultural traits. When racial and ethnic contexts shift, individuals can make new identity claims. By mining the details of family histories, Teng reveals the different ways in which vectors such as class could shape Eurasian claims regarding being Chinese or European. Thus Mae, the Euro-American wife of Tiam Hock Franking, a Chinese student and then official, represented herself as aspiring to the role of dutiful Chinese wife during their residence in China with his family. Location and varying social practices also shaped options for Eurasians. Despite the tremendous respect enjoyed by Yung Wing of the Chinese Educational Mission (1872–1881) and his wife Mary Kellogg, a descendant of Plymouth Puritans, their sons’ generation confronted the hardening of racial lines and anti-Chinese sentiments, with the passage of Chinese exclusion leading them to choose to pursue careers in China. In Hong Kong, however, Sir Robert Ho Tung chose to identify as Chinese, probably to enhance his standing and economic opportunities despite his evidently Europeanized appearance. Within Chinese circles, Sir Ho Tung could advance further than among the more discriminatory British, while in Shanghai, the Eurasian community was sizable enough to establish its own school and comprise its own community. In predominantly Chinese places such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, where racial boundaries were less absolute, Eurasians gained some advantage by acquiring bicultural abilities that could be used to bridge and negotiate between Chinese and Western worlds.
Theoretical considerations of hybridity also varied across time and place and ranged from Louis Beck’s warnings based on the criminal career of New York’s George Appo during the 1890s, the contrasting views of Robert Park’s students Herbert Lamley and Wu Jingchao, to reformist leader Kang Youwei’s assertions of the evolutionary potential for racial mixing in the grand text One World Treatise. Social Darwinism was the most influential conceptual framework, although Chinese intellectuals also drew upon long-standing Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian principles that held out practices of “barbarian management,” providing for cultural adaptation as a means of incorporating disparate populations. Racially, Chinese views of difference hardened with the twentieth-century emergence of nationalism based on claims of Han racial origins.
The specificity of Teng’s emphasis on discourse and individual trajectories does not provide broader historical contexts such as demographic and other kinds of quantitative contexts. Readers must rely on Teng’s reassurance that the case studies presented do in fact reflect a full range of possible experiences and encounters of Eurasianness. However, the scrupulousness and depth of Teng’s readings of the lives of her representative Eurasians produces nuanced insights that illuminate many contexts and options for operating at the interstices of monoracial conceptions of society. In its transnational scope and multilingual archives, this volume is a highly persuasive and insightful accounting of Eurasian lives and possibilities.
Madeline Y. Hsu
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
pp. 845-847