Chinese Father Research Articles

ALBERT CHAN, S.J. 1915–2005

About 400 miles north of Lima, Peru, is the town of Pacasmayo, with its current population of about 30, 000. Located on a large bay on the Pacific seaboard, the town became an important seaport from the mid-nineteenth century onward since agricultural products came from outlying interior towns for export by sea. The son of a Chinese father involved in export trade and a Peruvian mother, Albert Chan was born in Pacasmayo on January 25, 1915. As a young child he became bilingual in Spanish and Cantonese. His father insisted that he develop his Chinese studies further so he was sent to Hong Kong where he was graduated from Wah Yan College in 1934. On July 30 of that year he entered the Society of Jesus as a member of the Province of Ireland since the Irish Jesuits had been earlier assigned the mission in Hong Kong. For his two years of novitiate and a year of classical studies Chan was sent to Novaliches, in the Manila region of the Philippines. He returned to Hong Kong in 1938 for another year of classical studies. He spent the three-year period of philosophy studies in the Philippines (Novaliches and then Baguio). He was sent to Wah Yan College Hong Kong where he taught from 1942 to 1945. His first year of theological studies was at Zikawei (Xujiahui), then located near Shanghai. Because of the changing circumstances in China, Chan was sent to Dublin, Ireland for his last years of theology where he was ordained on July 30, 1947. He came to the United States in 1949 at Pomfret Center, Connecticut for the final year of Jesuit training.

A novel connexin 26 compound heterozygous mutation results in deafness.

Mutations of the gap junction beta 2 (GJB2) gene coding for the protein connexin 26 account for up to 50% of nonsyndromic sensorineural hearing loss (NSHL), with specific mutations associated with distinct ethnic groups. A biracial family with nonsyndromic sensorineural deafness consistent with autosomal recessive inheritance was examined for connexin 26 (Cx26) mutations. Prospective observational study. A family consisting of a Caucasian mother and a Chinese father with two of six children affected by NSHL was examined for Cx26 mutations. Peripheral blood lymphocyte DNA was used to amplify by polymerase chain reaction the Cx26 coding region, followed by mutation detection enhancement gel screening and complete sequencing. Phenotypic characterization using audiometric testing was completed for all children and both parents. The two affected children were found to be compound heterozygotes for Cx26 mutations, displaying a previously unreported combination of 35delG and 235delC. The parents were each unaffected heterozygotes consistent with their ethnic heritage, specifically, the Caucasian mother a 35delG heterozygote and the Chinese father a 235delC heterozygote. Connexin 26 mutations account for a significant proportion of NSHL worldwide, with specific mutations linked to distinct ethnic groups. Genetic analysis of a biracial family with NSHL revealed a novel 35delG/235delC compound heterozygous state in phenotypically affected children. These results highlight the usefulness of Cx26 mutation screening for genetic counseling and suggest that the 235delC mutation is present in China as it is in Japan and Korea.

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times. The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914. Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the "yellow peril" literature in vogue at the time but with an insider's sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era. "Superbly researched, thoughtfully reasoned, and beautifully written. . . . Will be the foundation for all future work on Sui Sin Far." -- Elizabeth Ammons, author of Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century

A MELUS Interview: Diana Chang

Diana Chang is a native New Yorker, but she spent her early childhood in China, raised by her Eurasian mother and Chinese father. She returned to New York, where she attended high school and then Barnard College. After graduation, she worked full-time as an editor in book publishing. She lives presently in Manhattan and Water Mill, Long Island, New York. Of herself Diana Chang says: feel I'm an American writer whose background is Chinese. The source of my first and fourth novels was Chinese but exoticism can stand in the way of the universal that I strive for in my themes. Therefore, since I write fiction in English and am living my life in the United States of America, I've often subsumed aspects of my background in the interest of other truths and recognitions. I believe an abiding interest in character and emotion informs all my work, not only because the relationships, situations, and problems I write about arise out of the character of my protagonists, out of their personalities, but also because I seem preoccupied a lot with identity, with selfness. In a poem called Allegories, Diana Chang expresses one of the dominant themes in Asian American writing as well as in her own: the urge to relocate, to reshape the self. As a child, she says in the poem, she was translated from one culture to another, misplaced and found again. That re-discovery of the self is very important for writers, she believes. Reading through her work, one can see in Diana Chang an Americanization modified by memories of a distant but potent Chinese past. The tensions between these memories and her daily reality in a drastically different culture and language have created complex and rich fields of reference in Diana Chang, and perhaps have permitted her to transcend the limitations often associated with literature. She is the author of six novels: The Frontiers of Love, (1956, 1994), A Woman of Thirty (1959), A Passion for Life (1961), The Only Game in Town (1963), Eye to Eye (1974), and A Perfect Love (1978). Her three volumes of poetry are The Horizon is Definitely Speaking (1982), What Matisse is After (1984), and Earth Water Light (1991). The Frontiers of Love, originally published by Random House, was reissued in the spring of 1994 by the University of Washington Press in a softcover trade edition, with a new introduction by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Most of this interview was conducted before an audience at the Hatch-Billops Archive in the Soho district of New York City. Interviewer: Let's begin, Diana, with a general question to establish some necessary distinctions. How is being any different from being African American or Spanish-American? Diana Chang: From time to time I ponder that question. It's a little hard for me to answer because, obviously, I have never been Chicano or Latino. I don't know their culture, nor have I read much about it. However, I feel very close to African Americans, and I've read everybody from Toni Morrison to Ralph Ellison to John Williams to Wesley Brown John and Wesley are friends of mine). African Americans are Americans who seem to me have contributed so much to this culture, politically and artistically, in every sphere. They've exercised the Constitution for all of us. In fighting for their own rights, they have fought for everyone else's, including mine. Being a woman is an elusive identity and a confusing one, even to myself. I feel that I am a minority person, but as a writer I know that sometimes I don't write ethnic work, that often my imagination takes me to other situations, themes and voices. My imagination frequently doesn't seem to belong to me. Rather, I belong to it and wherever it takes me, I go. People tend to see Chinese-American as a single category, but of course, like everyone else, we are different from one another. …