Thursday, September 30, 2004

• Eurasian identity explored

  JC

  Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides by Vicky Lee, explores the lives of three Eurasian memoirists.

   

  'Eurasian' is a term that could have many different connotations, during different periods in colonial Hong Kong, and in different spaces within the European and Chinese communities. Eurasianness could mean privilege, but also marginality, adulteration and even betrayal. Eurasians from different socio-economic sectors had very different perceptions of their own ethnicity, which did not always agree with their externally prescribed identity. Being Eurasian explores the ethnic choices faced by Hong Kong Eurasians of the pre-war generation, as they dealt with the very fluidity of their ethnic identity.

   

  In this original study of Hong Kong Eurasian women memoirs, Lee looks at how, collectively, these women's stories cross two world empires, and a social and political matrix that occupied the entire energetic twentieth century. Alert to race, gender, and national issues, Lee views Eurasian identity in Hong Kong as a marginal, situational, unfixed construction in which family and social conditioning play out with contingent circumstances and subjective choices to produce remarkable female lives. A valuable contribution to overlooked yet intriguing personal histories.' - Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

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