A 15-year-old from Los Angeles spends the summer at her mother's childhood home on an island off the coast of England, where she bonds with a mysterious horse.
In 2001, a Time magazine story heralded a “Eurasian Invasion” in the United States, symbolized by multiethnic celebrities such as golfer Tiger Woods and model Li Jiaxin. People of mixed Asian and Western descent, the piece stated, had become “the poster children of globalization” at the turn of the millennium.
Perhaps, although as MIT historian Emma Teng chronicles in a new book, relationships and marriages between Westerners and Asians constitute a far older and richer phenomenon than is usually recognized. The issue of Eurasian identity was already a matter of discussion among public intellectuals in the 19th century, and became more common by the first decades of the 20th century.
Consider the case of Mae Watkins, an American who in the early 1900s met Tiam Hock Franking, a Chinese youth, at Ann Arbor High School in Michigan. As students at the University of Michigan they married, and in so doing, stepped into a legal minefield. While intermarriage between whites and Chinese was allowed in Michigan at the time, a 1907 U.S. law removed American citizenship from women who married foreign nationals. So the couple moved to China in 1914, although technically, China prohibited marriages between Chinese students abroad and foreign women.
The couple’s oldest child, a son born in the United States, had American citizenship. But their two younger children, born in China, could not gain American citizenship until the 1940s. And Mae Watkins Franking, for her part, accepted her new national and ethnic identity, which she described in a ghostwritten memoir published in the 1920s.
Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943