Chinese America and the Multiracial Family

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States on 2011-01-10 01:49Z by Steven

Chinese America and the Multiracial Family

Chinese American Forum
Special Edition (June 2004)
pages 15-19

Amy Klazkin

This week my husband and I sold our second car. We live in the city, and we don’t need two, so we listed the car on an internet forum and got lots of responses. The first and most enthusiastic was from a young woman named Meilin Gee. She said she would come over at 2:00 on Sunday to see the car and give it a test drive. Without even thinking about it, we had constructed a mental picture of what someone named Meilin Gee would look like, when, at two sharp, the doorbell rang. We opened the door and saw a young, attractive, intelligent, and friendly African American woman: Meilin Gee. She doesn’t look it, but her dad’s Chinese.

This is the changing face of America. Where I live, we use the Hawaiian term hapa for mixed-race people. When I walk down the street with my Chinese daughter, who does not look even a tiny bit like me, people in San Francisco usually assume that my husband is Asian and she is hapa. She attends the Chinese American International School, where a third of the kids are hapa. Contrary to the stereotype that only Chinese American women marry whites, about half of the biracial kids at her school have white moms and Chinese dads. Some mixed-race kids look Caucasian, others look Asian, others look mixed. But what all the children learned way back in preschool is that kids and parents don’t have to match visually. And that’s been a wonderful thing for my daughter, because it normalizes multiracial families and creates an environment of acceptance for difference within a family as well as within a community…

Read the entire article here.

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