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
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