Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 by Emma Jinhua Teng (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 by Emma Jinhua Teng Alison Marshall Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 By Emma Jinhua Teng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Emma Jinhua Teng is T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations, and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, at MIT. The Harvard University–trained professor’s first book, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese colonial travel writing and pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), was based on her doctoral dissertation on colonial history and narratives of the China-Taiwan relationship. Professor Teng’s new work, Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943, adopts customary historical methods and approaches to explain and translate written accounts of mixed race cultures and experiences. In the Prelude, Teng self-identifies as the “child of Chinese-English” intermarriage, and through this and other auto-ethnographic threads, in addition to some life story research and fieldwork, she ventures beyond conventional narratives, and shines a light on mixed race Eastern and Western experiences and terrains. Eurasian begins in 1842, a year that marked the conclusion of the First Opium War, and the beginning of large scale Christian mission work in China and Hong Kong as well as mid-century Chinese migration to the West. In the 1880s the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enacted racist legislation limiting Chinese immigration. Eurasian ends in 1943, the year of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion act and the end of the Exclusion Era (1882–1943) in the United States. Chinese marriages to Europeans during this era are well documented and understood. Intermarriage, though reviled by many Europeans and Chinese, was a vehicle for inching oneself closer to Whiteness and the modern global standard of colonial Christian acceptability. Divided into three parts, and eight chapters with individual prologues, Eurasian has an innovative transpacific focus that develops out of John Kuo Wei Tchen’s, Mary Lui’s and Henry Yu’s foundational work on Asian identity and interracial marriage in the United States. It seeks to complicate and trouble assumptions about the colour line, focusing on hybridity that “holds the promise of moving us beyond the old identity politics of white and black, colonizer and colonized, toward a boundary-less future where indeterminacy, in-betweenness, and ambivalence reign supreme” (254-255). Part One, “Debating Intermarriage,” sets the scene. In this primary section Teng focuses on multiple and sometimes surprising reactions to and/or acceptance of early high-society Chinese-Western intermarriage. Here, we learn about the fairytale union of Yale University–educated missionary and naturalized citizen Yung Wing and New England society’s Mary Louise Kellogg in 1875. Part Two, “Debating Hybridity,” counters the romantic and celebratory narrative of the Yung-Kellogg union, foregrounding the story of George Washington Appo, a pickpocket in 1890s New York with Chinese and Irish heritage. This “Eurasian as Problem” section offers a compelling example of the “ambivalence [that] made the Eurasian a locus of anxiety and desire in an age of increasing global interpenetration and migration” (88). Chapter Four moves the reader’s gaze out of elite North American society across the Pacific Ocean and into similarly privileged though Chinese realms during the late Qing dynasty and the later Republican era. In China, Hong Kong and the United States, Eurasians usually went to the best schools, spoke English and were Christians. Here scholarship by writers such as Tang Caichang, Kang Youwei, Wu Tingfang, Zhang Jingsheng and Yi Nai demonstrated that while Chinese cleaved to various Western, Chinese nationalistic and/or Neo-Confucian miscegenation discourse and thereby rejected mixed race offspring, others favoured the Eurasian as the “eugenic ideal” (130). Teng adds: “Perhaps the hybrid’s very ambiguity is one reason the figure of the Eurasian has remained compelling for certain Chinese intellectuals… as a Westernized Chinese or as a Sinicized Euro-American” (133). In this chapter, and throughout the book, I questioned the merits of an approach that sought to blur the colour line by focussing on the binary unions of mostly English-speaking Christian Europeans and wealthy educated Chinese. Speaking personally...