Mixed Race in Asia

Past, Present and Future

Zarine L. Rocha, Farida Fozdar, Zarine L. Rocha, Farida Fozdar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351982474
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mixed racial and ethnic identities are topics of increasing interest around the world, yet studies of mixed race in Asia are rare, despite its particular salience for Asian societies.

Mixed Race in Asia seeks to reorient the field to focus on Asia, looking specifically at mixed race in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and India. Through these varied case studies, this collection presents an insightful exploration of race, ethnicity, mixedness and belonging, both in the past and present. The thematic range of the chapters is broad, covering the complexity of lived mixed race experiences, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixedness.

Adding significant richness and depth to existing theoretical frameworks, this enlightening volume develops markedly different understandings of, and recognizes nuances around, what it means to be mixed, practically, theoretically, linguistically and historically. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and other researchers interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Sociology and Asian Studies.

Part I
China and Vietnam

1 ‘A class by themselves’

Battles over Eurasian schooling in late-nineteenth-century Shanghai

Emma J. Teng

Introduction

The contemporary multiracial movement in places such as the US and Britain has often focused on the demand for recognition of ‘mixed’ identities that fall outside of or supersede the dominant monoracial/monoethnic categories, with their roots in binary modes of understanding race. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the new generation’s ‘flexible identification’ is markedly different and is moreover gaining state recognition, with a number of countries now including ‘multiracial’ or ‘mixed’ identifications in updated racial classificatory frameworks. Yet, the degree to which recognition of mixed identities actually challenges established structures of racial binaries and dominant notions of racial purity remains an open question. Indeed, historical examples suggest that the mere fact of recognition, in and of itself, cannot be equated with empowerment.

One question taken up by this volume is why recognized collective identities for those of ‘mixed’ heritage historically emerged in some sites in Asia – Anglo-Indians in India, Eurasians in Singapore, and Peranakans in Southeast Asia – but not in others. Cedric Dover (1937) early on also raised this issue in noting that Sino-European ‘half-castes’ in colonial Hong Kong largely identified with the Chinese population, but in Shanghai were conversely merging into the ‘cosmopolitan’ foreign community.¹ These different outcomes suggest the specificity of the socio-political conditions that support collective identities, and prompt us to further query the degree to which such identifications are empowering. How have those of mixed heritage in Asia historically navigated systems of racial classification and hierarchy in order to make claims for rights and recognition? In order to probe these questions, this chapter examines two episodes in the history of schooling for Eurasians in nineteenth-century Shanghai in relation to efforts to define Eurasians as ‘a class by themselves’. As this history reveals, institutional recognition of distinct identities for those of mixed heritage does not necessarily lead to empowerment or inclusion, but may actually reinforce their marginalization within established racial structures.

A class by themselves?

In September 1870, advertisements recruiting pupils for a new school in Shanghai’s International Concession began to appear in the North-China Herald. The notice promised students an education based on the English Home Schools curriculum, Chinese tutoring, and ‘maternal care exercised over the manners and habits of the Scholars’ (Bonney, 1870, p. 213). Prospective students were advised that European dress and food were preferred, but pupils who wished to maintain their Chinese dress could take their meals at a separate table. Although the advertisement suggested the school was ‘for Chinese Children’, in fact, it was specifically intended for Eurasians, chiefly defined in this context as the children of European fathers and Asian mothers. The notice soon attracted attention, and on September 19, 1870, the first boarder entered the institution that would become known as Shanghai’s ‘Eurasian School’.

The school was founded by American missionary Catharina Van Rensselaer Bonney (1817–1891), with the backing of prominent Anglo-American business and missionary figures (Bonney, 1875, pp. 522–523; Teng, 2013, pp. 147–148). The need for such an institution had been discussed for some years within Shanghai’s International Settlement, with the North-China Herald calling for a solution to an emerging ‘problem’ – what to do with the growing numbers of Eurasian children, those who could not be sent ‘Home’ for schooling, but lacked local opportunities other than the ‘native’ schools. The foreign community had a duty, the newspaper argued, to provide adequate training for these children, lest they be permanently handicapped by their mixed parentage. Such training, the school’s founders argued, was best provided in a separate school, as had been done elsewhere in Asia:

There are many reasons for dealing with Eurasian children as a class by themselves, at least during the earlier years of their education; and it has always been felt that, wherever such children exist in considerable numbers, schools for them are a necessity….

(First Yearly Report, 1871, p. 772)

Nearly three decades after the school’s founding, the issue of Eurasian education once more surfaced as a ‘problem’ for the settlement, with the perfunctory expulsion of Eurasian pupils from the Shanghai Public School in February 1897. Quite remarkably, given the earlier conviction of the necessity for separate education for Eurasians, the ratepayers of the International Settlement voted overwhelmingly in favour of reinstating their rights to attend this ‘high-class’ public school. This controversy, dubbed the ‘Eurasian battle’, made dramatically evident the tension between exclusionary practices and inclusive impulses that Ann Stoler has theorized as one of the fundamental ‘tensions of empire’, at work in semi-colonial Shanghai (Stoler, 1997, p. 199). It further demonstrates that whereas demographic changes in Shanghai between 1870 and 1897 prompted some expatriates to draw a tighter line against the racially ‘mixed’, Eurasians nonetheless proved able in this case to defend their claims, largely through the advocacy of powerful white men, undermining attempts to relegate them to the ‘Eurasian School’.

Juxtaposing these two episodes in the history of the schooling of Shanghai’s Eurasians, this chapter examines evolving Anglo-American discourses on the city’s ‘Eurasian Problem’, and education as an arena for delineating, and re-delineating, their place in the highly fraught racial hierarchy of late-nineteenth-century Shanghai. As David Pomfret has argued, across Asia in European colonies such as Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Singapore, ‘European [colonial] elites reworked civilising projects and reimagined racial intermediacy through the lens of childhood’ (Pomfret, 2016, p. 276). The struggles over Eurasian schooling in Shanghai demonstrate the parallels in this semi-colonial milieu, where the [hyper] visible emergence of Eurasian children similarly raised ‘difficult questions of moral responsibility in empire’ (Pomfret, 2016, p. 249). Through an examination of debates on schooling, this chapter aims to elucidate the rhetorical grounds on which the struggle for Eurasian inclusion, in an era of racial exclusiveness, could be waged within the inner circles of power. To use the words of Audre Lorde: is it possible for the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 1984, p. 110)? Whereas Stoler’s analysis of the ‘tensions of empire’ focused on the legal treatment of mixed race in French and Dutch colonies, I seek to understand the dynamic of exclusion/inclusion beyond the strictly juridical arena, and in a setting that was not, strictly-speaking, colonial. I argue that whereas the movement for the Eurasian School built on commonplace stereotypes of Eurasians as objects of rescue – orphans or ‘gutter children’ – the later Public School controversy demonstrated the successful contestation of these stereotypes in favour of Eurasian ‘respectability’, and the mobilization of [elite] Eurasian claims through recourse to Anglo-American discourses of rights, justice, fair play, and dependent citizenship. I further contrast the maternalistic discourses evident in advocacy for the Eurasian School with the emphasis on paternal care and affiliation in negotiating a place for Eurasians at Shanghai’s Public School.

The founding of Shanghai’s Eurasian school

Although the Eurasian population in Shanghai had been expanding since the 1840s, when Shanghai was first established as a Treaty Port, for decades no special provision was made for their schooling. By the late 1860s, however, the North-China Herald alerted readers to a looming ‘problem’ that could be ignored no longer. As an editorial cautioned in 1869: ‘One of the most important questions, and one that is daily thrusting itself before us into greater prominence, is that of the position of Eurasians’ (‘Eurasians’, 1869, p. 69). The paper warned that a ‘Eurasian Problem’, akin to that in India, was on the horizon.

The ‘Eurasian Problem’ was produced in British India from the 1780s onward as racial hierarchies became increasingly rigid, and the liminality of Eurasians disrupted the notional divide between Europeans and ‘natives’, colonizers and colonized. Impoverished Eurasians reduced to living like natives, or perhaps compelled to turn to begging, prostitution, or petty crime, were considered a blight on white prestige, and many feared disgruntled Eurasians would become a source of unrest. By the late nineteenth century, anxieties over the Eurasian Problem had spread across Asia, with various local permutations (Dover, 1937; Saada, 2012; Stoler, 1997). As Ann Stoler notes, racial mixing in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies was ‘conceived as a dangerous source of subversion’ and ‘seen as a threat to white prestige, an embodiment of European degeneration and moral decay’ (Stoler, 1997).

As I have argued elsewhere, the ‘Eurasian Problem’ exposed a fundamental contradiction in the status of Eurasians, who were despised and feared, on one hand, but also desired, needed, and partially privileged, on the other. Insofar as Eurasians embodied the crossing of the colour line, they were regarded as threatening or potentially destabilizing to the racial hierarchies of the era. At the same time, Eurasians were also regarded as indispensable to the degree that they served to stabilize imperialist interests by bridging racial distance and playing the role of intermediary (Teng, 2013).

Alluding to this intermediary role, the North-China Herald conceded that Eurasians in India had partially ‘bridged over the gulf between Europeans and natives’, but warned that ‘their anomalous position between the two races, belonging as it were to neither and in a manner despised by both, has developed a mixed breed, wanting in the best qualities both of Europeans and Hindoos’ (Eurasians, 1869, p. 69). The Herald thus invoked scientific notions of hybrid degeneracy to cast Eurasians as objects of intervention.

Scientific theories of hybrid degeneration lent legitimacy to colonial representations of Eurasians as biologically, mentally, and morally inferior (Stepan, 1991; Teng, 2013, p. 95; Young, 1995). As Dr H. N. Ridley declared in a paper on the ‘Eurasian Problem’ in 1895:

Taking the race as a whole they are weak in body, short-lived, deficient in energy and feeble in morals. Even a little admixture of native blood seems to result in an individual who possesses the bad qualities of both races.

(Ridley, 1913, p. 54)

In this manner, scientific discourses on hybrid degeneration gave credibility to the long-standing cultural taboos against miscegenation.

Whereas the notion of racial degeneration featured in the Herald’s characterization of the ‘Eurasian Problem’, it primarily identified social, and not biological, factors for their ‘stunted growth’. The Herald blamed boarding schools placing Eurasians and ‘Europeans of pure blood’ together for this stunting, as Eurasians were daily reminded of their subordinate status and subjected to the ‘depressing stigma of [their] birth’. The only solution was to remove Eurasians from such environments, unleashing their potential for ‘perfectly free, unconstrained and manly development’ (Eurasians, 1869, p. 70). If an elaborate argument was made to justify the segregation of Eurasians from ‘Europeans of pure blood’, it was taken for granted that they required rescue from detrimental Chinese influences. Consigning Eurasians to the care of Chinese mothers and to Chinese schools, the paper argued, was to relinquish ‘any prospect of making civilized men and women of them’ (Eurasians, 1869, p. 70). Thus, whereas Eurasians were on one hand subjected to segregation and exclusion, the inclusive notion that Eurasians were of ‘their own blood’ also prompted Europeans to assert a special sense of duty toward them. The paper called on Shanghai’s expatriate community to establish a separate school for Eurasians, as the only feasible solution. In keeping with the assumption that China was ‘home’ for the mixed population, it proposed that Eurasians be civilized through a European education, but also taught Chinese, thereby training them as valuable intermediaries to advance Anglo-American interests: ‘we would be raising up an intermediate race as a civilized link between Foreigners and Chinese, and we would have the satisfaction of doing our duty, and of introducing among the Chinese a valuable civilizing influence’ (Eurasians, 1869, p. 70). With this idea of a ‘civilized link’, the problematic ‘anomalous position’ of Eurasians is transformed into the positive and productive notion of an ‘intermediate race’ that could bridge ‘over [the gulf] that separates the two races’. Yet, such an intermediate race would only be valuable under Western guidance:

… is it not well that we should direct the lives of the intermediate race that is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: mixed race in Asia
• Part I China and Vietnam
• Part II South Korea and Japan
• Part III Malaysia and Singapore
• Part IV India and Indonesia
• Afterword
• Index