The long history of ‘Eurasian’ identity
In 2001, a Time magazine story heralded a “Eurasian Invasion” in the United States, symbolized by multiethnic celebrities such as golfer Tiger Woods and model Li Jiaxin. People of mixed Asian and Western descent, the piece stated, had become “the poster children of globalization” at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps, although as MIT historian Emma Teng chronicles in a new book, relationships and marriages between Westerners and Asians constitute a far older and richer phenomenon than is usually recognized. The issue of Eurasian identity was already a matter of discussion among public intellectuals in the 19th century, and became more common by the first decades of the 20th century.Consider the case of Mae Watkins, an American who in the early 1900s met Tiam Hock Franking, a Chinese youth, at Ann Arbor High School in Michigan. As students at the University of Michigan they married, and in so doing, stepped...