‘The China Blonde Threat’

The Jakarta Post   |  Wed, 01/23/2008 10:23 AM  |  Life

Racism was part of May-lee Chai’s daily existence as a teenager growing up in small-town America. Almost 30 years on, the writer fears that racism is gradually returning to the American landscape. 

           

I remember the way my family and I could stop traffic just by walking down the sidewalk. Cars and pick-up trucks in both lanes would slow, the drivers craning their necks to get a better look at us. I was 12 and we’d just moved from New York City to a rural community in America’s Middle West. I thought people stared because we were new to town.

At first it was funny. My parents used to make jokes. My father smiled slyly and said to my mother, “Of course, they’re staring. They think Catherine Deneuve has come to town.”

My mother struck a movie star pose, hand on hip, another behind her head.

My brother and I giggled.

Then people started driving by our house to stare. It began to feel creepy, this attention we garnered. We weren’t movie stars after all. We were just an ordinary family. The first time someone drove by and shot at our house in the middle of the night, I was terrified. Then men started driving by during the daylight hours, shooting and shouting racial slurs.

Then the first of our dogs was killed and left for us to find in the driveway. I don’t remember how many months had passed by this point. All I remember now is that the staring and the shouting and shooting weren’t funny at all, and my parents stopped making jokes.

What I didn’t know when I was twelve was that in our small town in South Dakota, no one had ever before seen a Chinese man with a white woman, and a blonde at that! I didn’t know that people found our family offensive. I didn’t know that this kind of racism was deeply rooted in America’s history and popular culture.

My parents met and married in a college town in Southern California. My father, the new political science professor from New York City, met my mother, the sexy artist, on a tour of the campus. Five months later they were married.  The next year I was born.  It was 1967, the year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the last of America’s anti-miscegenation laws.

By the time my parents met in California, they assumed that racist prejudice about mixed marriages was something relegated to America’s past. It was a historical thing. A Southern thing. Not something that would affect us.

And it didn’t, until we moved to the Midwest at the dawn of the 1980s, to a town of five thousand people, 1,300 miles from New York City. A town where the local television station refused to air The Cosby Show, which featured an affluent African-American family and which was generally the top-rated comedy series in America. A town where no law enforcement officer ever prosecuted the shootings at our house or the killings of our pets. A town desperately trying to keep the outside world from entering its borders.

Over the years, five of our dogs were shot, their bodies left in our driveway. My dog Ernestine was murdered in an especially brutal manner. She was chased down in a field, struck by a pick-up truck, and then the driver backed up over her head. We could follow the tire tracks in the mud, tell exactly where the pick-up had left the road to chase her down and kill her.

In the meantime, my parents received hate mail. I was called every conceivable slur. My brother fought to stay alive -- literally, with his fists -- every day of our time in this purgatory.

And mysteriously, after my father resigned his position as vice president for academic affairs at the local university and took a new job elsewhere, no bank would ever issue a loan to anyone who tried to buy our house. And so we were stuck in this place, year after year after year.

I couldn’t understand why people didn’t let us simply leave, since they seemed to find our presence so offensive. I didn’t realize then that they wanted to punish my father, in particular, for being a “Chinaman” who didn’t know his place. (Yes, people used that 19th century term, Chinaman, frequently. That and a few other c-words that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.)

Who was this man who thought he could have a job bossing white men around? Who was this uppity man with his beautiful blonde wife and those horrible mixed children--the living proof that he and my mother had indeed had sex? They were going to show him who really had power in our town.

My father and I used to argue when I was an adolescent, stuck on our farm, resenting my life.

“People here are racist,” I’d say.

“There’s no such thing as racism against Chinese!” my father shouted, as if he shouted loud enough, he could make his words come true. Then he added, “You just don’t know how to get along with people.”

Later, as an adult, I came to realize the pain my father was experiencing, the pressure he felt trying to provide for us, the guilt of having moved us to this place. As a man born in Shanghai in 1932, he’d been taught it wasn’t polite to talk about race. And he didn’t want my brother and me to curtail our expectations for ourselves because of racism.

But sometimes, I have found, we really do need to talk about race. Especially when you’re a kid and people are shooting at your house, killing your pets and calling you names to your face.

We need to talk about history, and the fears of miscegenation that the media continually fan. After the American Civil War, when the Ku Klux Klan first formed and began lynching black men, the press willingly went along and accused the victims of attacking white women. And when Japan’s rising economic clout in the 1980s and early 90s first became noticeable in the U.S., why did the Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun become a bestseller? Its plot: Japanese men didn’t just want to beat America economically, but they also wanted white women -- to rape and murder! Why didn’t the media call that blatantly racist and stupid?

Some historians and journalists blame all these attacks over the years on economic competition. They claim that cheap labor (be it black, Asian or today, Mexican) drives down white Americans’ wages, and thus racist acts occur. How logical, right?

However, I wonder if there isn’t a deeper fear involved. A fear that underneath our skin, we aren’t that different. That yes, many of us might fall in love, form families and prove that humans are humans, and racial markers are not signs of anyone’s innate superiority or innate inferiority. Fear of an equal planet, I call it.

Eventually when I turned 18, I was able to leave South Dakota to go to college. I chose the most liberal college I could find, and thus I made my escape. But my family had to stay in that town for two more years, when finally our carpet cleaner won the Iowa State Lottery and bought our house. No need for a bank loan, he plunked down cash. It was $10,000 less than what my parents had paid for our farm, despite all the improvements they’d made to the property, but they sold it.

“How many more people are going to win that lottery and buy our house?” my mother argued. “This is God’s will.”

Now decades have passed and I’ve even written a book about these experiences, but sometimes my memories still haunt me.

Recently across America, nooses have begun appearing, hung from the back of pick-up trucks, from trees, even from the doorknob of a Columbia University professor’s office in New York City.

Some pundits in the media dismiss these symbols of racial hatred and fear as nothing more than “copycat racism”. As if to say: there were TV reports of nooses hung in a small town in Louisiana recently, so other people have started hanging nooses because . . . what? It’s become trendy, like a fashion statement? Because people don’t really mean it?

 “Come on, America! Heads out of the sand!” I want to shout. 

Fortunately for me, I’m not a scared and confused 12-year-old anymore. I’m an educated, published, 40-year-old woman, and I’m no longer easily silenced.

Whether or not we’re ready for the discussion about why racism persists in a nation as diverse as the U.S., I’m not going to keep silent.

America, world, it’s time to talk about race. Hear me roar!

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.