Eurasian : mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 / Emma Jinhua Teng.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Teng, Emma.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chinese Americans--Ethnic identity--History.

Chinese Americans.

Chinese American families--Social conditions.

Chinese American families.

Interracial marriage--United States.

Interracial marriage.

Social conditions.

Ethnicity.

History.

Chinese Americans--Ethnic identity.

United States.

Chinese Americans--China--Ethnic identity--History.

Chinese American families--China--Social conditions.

Interracial marriage--China.

Chinese Americans--China--Hong Kong--Ethnic identity--History.

Chinese American families--China--Hong Kong--Social conditions.

Interracial marriage--China--Hong Kong.

China--Hong Kong.

China.

Physical Description:

xvii, 331 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2013]

Summary:

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and "Eurasian" often a derisive term? In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and the claims set forth by individual Eurasians concerning their own identities. Teng argues that Eurasians were not universally marginalized during this era, as is often asserted. Rather, Eurasians often found themselves facing contradictions between exclusionary and inclusive ideologies of race and nationality, and between overt racism and more subtle forms of prejudice that were counterbalanced by partial acceptance and privilege. By tracing the stories of mixed and transnational families during an earlier era of globalization, Eurasian also demonstrates to students, faculty, scholars, and researchers how changes in interracial ideology have allowed the descendants of some of these families to reclaim their dual heritage with pride. Book jacket.

Contents:

A Canton Mandarin weds a Connecticut Yankee : Chinese-western intermarriage becomes a "problem"

Mae Watkins becomes a "real Chinese wife" : marital expatriation, migration, and transracial hybridity

"A problem for which there is no solution" : the new hybrid brood and the specter of degeneration in New York's Chinatown

"Productive of good to both sides" : the Eurasian as solution in Chinese utopian visions of racial harmony

Reversing the sociological lens : putting Sino-American "mixed bloods" on the miscegenation map

The "peculiar cast" : navigating the American color line in the era of Chinese exclusion

On not looking Chinese : Chineseness as consent or descent?

"No gulf between a Chan and a smith amongst us" : Charles Graham Anderson's manifesto for Eurasian unity in interwar Hong Kong

Coda : Elsie Jane comes home to rest

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780520276260

0520276264

9780520276277

0520276272

OCLC:

823473395