From Time Magazine
Issue April 23, 2001

Eurasian Invasion
A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Diverse backgrounds and
multicultural heritages are making Eurasians the poster children for
21st-century globalization. Why are they the right mix?
BY HANNAH BEECH

Russel Wong for TIME

MTV Asia's Tata Young, left, Hong Kong actress Maggie Q, middle, and
Malaysian veejay Asha Gill are hot property
 
  The Forgotten Angels: Amerasians of Angeles City live in racial
purgatory
 
  Stuck in the Middle: A third-generation Amerasian still feels
in-between
 
We all know that fusion is hot, sizzling, more caliente than a salsa
beat. It's that multiculti urge that propels us to douse a hamburger
with teriyaki sauce or buy an Armani jacket with a Nehru collar. Such
marriages of East and West are a harmless intermingling of cultures: a
war never started by adding a dollop of wasabi to potato chips or a
bindhi to Madonna's forehead.

But blending people is more dangerous. The world generally prefers its
citizens in their own neat categories: Chinese, Japanese, Siamese.
They represent the sanctity of our nation-states, our flags, our
soccer teams. After all, if you're not one or the other, what are you?
If you're, say, half Asian and half Western, where do you belong? Are
you a banana: yellow on the outside and white inside? Or an egg: white
on the outside and yellow inside? Or are you, as proclaimed by that
most swirled of celebrities Tiger Woods, a "Cablinasian"—a
Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian smattering of everything, a global
progeny of an increasingly global world? And what is that, anyway?

Once, not so long ago, no one wanted to be Tiger Woods. Especially
Tiger, with his cafE-au-lait complexion and American serviceman
father. Today, Eurasians are the flavor du jour, not only in the U.S.,
where mixed-race citizens personify the American melting pot, but even
more so in Asia, where race-conscious policies are often encoded in
law. In Indonesia, where until recently ethnic Chinese were barred
from writing in their own script, the hottest celebrities are indos,
or mixed-race folks like actors Karina Suwandi and Ari Wibowo. In
Bangkok, where the local skin trade has spawned a multitude of luk
kreung, or half-children, the once-despised offspring now control an
estimated 60% of the entertainment industry. And in Hong Kong, where
the local movie business is in a slump, the one great hope isn't white
at all, but a mix of white and yellow. Fetching young Eurasian actors
like Maggie Q and Karen Mok crowd the screen, and through the wonders
of global distribution (and video piracy) appear everywhere from the
deserts of Tunisia to the shores of the Solomon Islands. "Who better
to personify the diversification of Hong Kong movies than a Eurasian
actor," says Bey Logan, a local film executive. "It's a face that
everyone can identify with and accept."

Fusion is in, not only as an abstract fashion concept, but in that
most grounded of realities: mixed-blood people who walk, talk, and
produce even more multiracial progeny. Most strange of all, these
hybrids are finding themselves hailed as role models for vast masses
in Asia with no mixed blood at all. "When I think of Asia, I don't
necessarily think of people who look like me," says Declan Wong, a
Chinese-Dutch-American actor and producer, "But somehow we've become
the face that sells the new Asia."

So maybe Asia's Eurasian craze is driven by the theories of that
whitest of white men, economist Adam Smith. As the world gets smaller,
we look for a global marketing mien, a one-size-fits-all face that
helps us sell Nokia cell phones and Palmolive shampoo across the
world. "For any business, you can't think locally anymore," says Paul
Lau, general manager at Elite Model Management in Hong Kong, who has
built up a stable of Eurasians for his internationally minded clients.
"At the very least, you need to think regionally. Ideally, you should
think globally." A global image helps sell products, even if no one
but Filipinos would ever want to buy duck-fetus eggs or Thais the most
pungent variety of shrimp paste. Yanto Zainal, president of Macs909, a
boutique ad agency in Jakarta, used all indos for a campaign for the
local Matahari department store chain. "The store wanted to promote a
more cosmopolitan image," he says. "Indos have an international look
but can still be accepted as Indonesian."

Channel V, the Asia-wide music television channel, was one of the
first to broadcast the message of homogenized hybridism. "We needed a
messenger that would fit in from Tokyo to the Middle East," says
Jennifer Seeto, regional sales marketing manager for the channel,
which began beaming its border-busting images in 1994. Star veejay
Asha Gill personifies the global look. When asked what her ethnic
heritage is, Gill, a Malaysian citizen, simply shrugs. "Oh, who
knows," she says. "I'm half Punjabi, mixed with some English, a little
French and dribs and drabs of God knows what else." The 29-year-old
speaks crisp British English, fluent Malay, and a smidgen of Punjabi.
She grew up in a Kuala Lumpur neighborhood that was mostly Chinese,
attended an English-speaking school and was pals with Malay and Indian
kids. Gill's Channel V show, broadcast in English, has a strong
following in Malaysia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. "I'm
Hitler's worst nightmare," she says. "My ethnicity and profession make
me a global person who can't be defined in just one category."

Fashionistas love the new Eurasian world. Top Asian modeling agencies
can't stock enough mixed-blooded girls, and many have begun scouting
for Eurasian models in Europe and the U.S. to bring back East. One of
the top imports is 20-year-old Maggie Q, a Vietnamese-American who
grew up in Hawaii. "When you look at Maggie, you see the whole world
in her face," says film executive Logan, who cast her in the hit flick
Gen-Y Cops. "She sells because she appeals to everyone." The publisher
of Indonesia's top-selling women's magazine, Femina, says a cover with
an indo on it sells two to three times more copies than one with a
purely local model. "Indonesian women see these girls as exotic but
not exactly threatening," says Widarti Goenawan, publisher of the
popular weekly. "It is an ideal to which they can aspire." Certainly,
an approachable exoticism fuels many Eurasian models' careers. Devon
Aoki, a half-Japanese and half-American concoction, has captivated
London and New York catwalks with her woodblock-print features and
long limbs. In Hong Kong, Ankie Lau, a half-German and half-Chinese
model, wins clients because her Eastern features mix with a Western
spontaneity. "The ability of Eurasian models to let go in front of the
camera is very appealing to advertisers," says Elite Model's Paul Lau.
"Asians tend to be more nervous expressing their emotions."

Tata Young certainly knows how to let loose. Back in 1995, when she
broke into Thailand's entertainment industry at the age of 15, the
pert half-Thai, half-American singer was on the forefront of the
Eurasian trend. Today, the majority of top Thai entertainers are luk
kreung. Now 20, Young is the first Thai to sign a contract with a
major U.S. label, Warner Brothers Records (owned by AOL Time Warner,
parent company of Time), which she hopes will elevate her into the
Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera pantheon. Back at home, Young has to
contend with a gaggle of luk kreung clones who mimic her brand of
bubble-gum pop. The hottest act now is a septet called,
less-than-imaginatively, Seven, and three out of seven are of mixed
race.

The luk kreung crowd tend to hang tight, dining, drinking and dating
together. "We understand each other," says Nicole Terio, one of the
group. "It comes from knowing what it means to grow up between two
cultures." But the luk kreung's close-knit community and
Western-stoked confidence sometimes elicits grumbles from other Thais,
who also resent their stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The
ultimate blow came a few years back when Thailand sent a blue-eyed
woman to the Miss World competition. Sirinya Winsiri, also known as
Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American
for the coveted Miss Thailand spot. "Luk kreung have made it very
difficult for normal Thais to compete," gripes a Bangkok music mogul.
"We should put more emphasis on developing real Thai talent." The
Eurasians consider this unfair. "I was born in Bangkok," says Young.
"I speak fluent Thai and I sing in Thai. When I meet Westerners, they
say I'm more Thai than American." Channel V's Asha Gill senses the
frustration: "A lot of Asians despise us because we get all the jobs,
but if I've bothered to learn several languages and understand several
cultures, why shouldn't I be employed for those skills?"

The jealous sniping angers many who suffered years of discrimination
because of their mixed blood. Eurasian heritage once spoke not of a
proud melding of two cultures but of a shameful confluence of
colonizer and colonized, of marauding Western man and subjugated
Eastern woman. Such was the case particularly in countries like the
Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, where American G.I.s left thousands
of unwelcome offspring. In Vietnam, these children were dubbed bui
doi, or the dust of life. "Being a bui doi means you are the child of
a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier," says Henry Phan, an
Amerasian tour guide in Ho Chi Minh City. "Here, in Vietnam, it is not
a glamorous thing to be mixed." As a child in Bangkok during the early
1990s, Nicole Terio fended off rumors that her mother was a
prostitute, even though her parents had met at a university in
California. "I constantly have to defend them," she says, "and explain
exactly where I come from."

Ever since Europe sailed to Asia in the 16th century, Eurasians have
populated entrepots like Malacca, Macau and Goa. The white men who
came in search of souls and spices left a generation of mixed-race
offspring that, at the high point of empire building, was more than
one-million strong. Today, in Malaysia's Strait of Malacca, 1,000
Eurasian fishermen, descendants of intrepid Portuguese traders, still
speak an archaic dialect of Portuguese, practice the Catholic faith
and carry surnames like De Silva and Da Costa. In Macau, 10,000
mixed-race Macanese serve as the backbone of the former colony's civil
service and are known for their spicy fusion cuisine.

Despite their long traditions, though, Eurasians did not make the
transition into the modern age easily. As colonies became nations,
mixed-race children were inconvenient reminders of a Western-dominated
past. So too were the next generation of Eurasians, the offspring of
American soldiers in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, luk kreung were not
allowed to become citizens until the early 1990s. In Hong Kong, many
Eurasians have two names and shift their personalities to fit the
color of the crowd in which they're mixing. Singer and actress Karen
Mok, for example, grew up Karen Morris but used her Chinese name when
she broke into the Canto-pop scene. "My Eurasian ancestors carried a
lot of shame because they weren't one or the other," says
Chinese-English performance artist Veronica Needa, whose play Face
explores interracial issues. "Much of my legacy is that shame." Still,
there's no question that Eurasians enjoy a higher profile today.
"Every time I turn on the TV or look at an advertisement, there's a
Eurasian," says Needa. "It's a validating experience to see people
like me being celebrated."

But behind the billboards and the leading movie roles lurks a
disturbing subtext. For Eurasians, acceptance is certainly welcome and
long overdue. But what does it mean if Asia's role models actually
look more Western than Eastern? How can the Orient emerge confident if
what it glorifies is, in part, the Occident? "If you only looked at
the media you would think we all looked indo except for the drivers,
maids and comedians," says Dede Oetomo, an Indonesian sociologist at
Airlangga University in Surabaya. "The media has created a new beauty
standard."

Conforming to this new paradigm takes a lot of work. Lek, a pure Thai
bar girl, charms the men at the Rainbow Bar in the sleaze quarters of
Bangkok. Since arriving in the big city, she has methodically
eradicated all connections to her rural Asian past. The first to go
was her flat, northeastern nose. For $240, a doctor raised the bridge
to give her a Western profile. Then, Lek laid out $1,200 for plumper,
silicone-filled breasts. Now, the 22-year-old is saving to have her
eyes made rounder. By the time she has finished her plastic surgery,
Lek will have lost all traces of the classical Thai beauty that
propelled her from a poor village to the brothels of Bangkok. But she
is confident her new appearance will attract more customers. "I look
more like a luk kreung, and that's more beautiful," she says.

A few blocks away from Rainbow Bar, a local pharmacy peddles eight
brands of whitening cream, including Luk Kreung Snow White Skin. In
Tokyo, where the Eurasian trend first kicked off more than three
decades ago, loosening medical regulations have meant a proliferation
of quick-fix surgery, like caucasian-style double eyelids and more
pronounced noses. On Channel V and mtv, a whole host of veejays look
ethnically mixed only because they've gone under the knife. "There's a
real pressure here to look mixed," says one Asian veejay in Singapore.
"Even though we're Asians broadcasting in Asia, we somehow still think
that Western is better." That sentiment worries Asians and Eurasians.
"More than anything, I'm proud to be Thai," says Willy McIntosh, a
30-year-old Thai-Scottish TV personality, who spent six months as a
monk contemplating his role in society. "When I hear that people are
dyeing their hair or putting in contacts to look like me, it scares
me. The Thai tradition that I'm most proud of is disappearing."

In many Asian countries—Japan, Malaysia, Thailand—the Eurasian craze
coincides with a resurgent nationalism. Those two seemingly
contradictory trends are getting along just fine. "Face it, the West
is never going to stop influencing Asia," says performance artist
Needa. "But at the same time, the East will never cease to influence
the West, either." In the 2000 U.S. census, nearly 7 million people
identified themselves as multiracial, and 15% of births in California
are of mixed heritage. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the
Oscar-winning kung fu flick, was more popular in Middle America than
it was in the Middle Kingdom. In Hollywood, where Eurasian actors once
were relegated to buck-toothed Oriental roles, the likes of Keanu
Reeves, Dean Cain and Phoebe Cates play leading men and women, not
just the token Asian. East and West have met, and the simple boxes we
use for human compartmentalization are overflowing, mixing, blending.
Not all of us can win four consecutive major golf titles, but we are,
indeed, more like Tiger Woods with every passing generation.

With reporting by Simon Elegant/Kuala Lumpur, Robert Horn/Bangkok,
Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

http://www.pathfinder.com/time/
 

From Time Magazine
Issue April 23, 2001

The Forgotten Angels
Whether sired by G.I.s or sex-touring retirees, the Amerasians of
Angeles City live in racial purgatory
BY HANNAH BEECH/Angeles City

When Robert Roydall Reese was 14 years old, his mother gave up and
kicked him out. He was, she said, uncontrollable, too much like his
father—too black. Robert's father is named John Roydall Reese. He is
from West Virginia. That is all Robert knows about him. That is all he
knows about the man that made him too black.

Throughout the Philippines, there are tens of thousands of children
who are like Robert, and tens of thousands more who are too white.
They are called multo, or ghost, if they are light-skinned, and kulot,
or curly-haired, if they are dark. A nickname that applies to both
groups is Babay na sa, or Bye-bye to daddy. In all, there are 52,000
mixed-race children nationwide, most the unwanted offspring of Western
men and Filipina prostitutes. Some, like 16-year-old Robert, live on
the streets, surviving on handouts and sniffs of mind-numbing glue.
"They are born in shame," says Agnes Espiritu, a women's and
child-rights activist based in Angeles City, home to what was once
Clark Air Force Base, one of the the U.S.'s largest facilities in Asia
before being returned to the Philippines in 1991. "They can't hide
their history because it is printed so clearly on their faces."

Nowhere in the Philippines are there more mixed-race children than in
Angeles. For decades, young American recruits wandered the girlie bars
that proliferated outside the base. Many soldiers never knew about
their unexpected progeny; others accepted them and nurtured families,
especially if they were stationed in Angeles for several years. (Even
after returning home, many continued sending money for their support.)

But when Clark closed in 1991, everything changed. By the mid-'90s,
the town began marketing its nubile wares on the Web, offering
two-week, $1,700 sex tours to American and European men hankering for
young flesh. Touted one website: "Recreational sex is the sport of
choice. You can get loaded and laid regardless of your age, weight,
physical appearance, interpersonal skills, wealth or social class."
Viagra reinvigorated business, too: by 1999, the visiting population
of Angeles had shifted from young American G.I.s to boozy retirees,
few of whom felt like supporting instant families. Unfortunately, the
girls they liked best were the ones most likely to get pregnant:
callow Catholic girls from the countryside with little knowledge of
birth control. The population of unwanted mixed-blood children
continued to grow.

At Checkpoint, a tin-roof shantytown next to the entrance to the
former base, those young Catholic girls have had to grow up quickly.
Melinda Basilan started working the strip stage at the Tahitian Queen
when she was 16 years old. Now, she has two children. Stephanie is
three, and her father is English. John Michael is two; his father is
an American from Georgia. The Yank has promised to visit in May, but
no one in the dirt alley is holding his breath. Checkpoint is filled
with mothers waiting for fathers who never come back.

Next door, 14-year-old Jaime Adriano is waiting, too. He was only two
months old when his mother abandoned him, overwhelmed by the prospect
of raising an Amerasian child on her own. Jaime lives with a foster
family, sleeping in a coffin-sized bedroom where he keeps his hip-hop
clothes and prized hair gel. Neighbors whisper that his foster father
beats him, but there is nowhere for the 14-year-old boy to go. School
is out for the former honor-roll student: his foster father recently
lost his job and Jaime's $10 tuition was the first expense to be cut.
"I'd like to go to America," he says. "You can go to school, even if
you're black and poor."

Back when Clark was open, Amerasian children of servicemen did have a
chance to go to the U.S.—if their mothers could prove paternity. While
that didn't happen too often, the occasional success story gave others
hope, and they bombarded the U.S. embassy in Manila with citizenship
applications. Older Amerasian girls traded on their
exotic-but-familiar looks to marry serving soldiers, later settling in
prosaic places like Oklahoma City and Fort Wayne. But with the base
gone, so are the servicemen and the link to American passports. Few of
the Europeans or Americans who descend on Angeles these days stay long
enough to leave more than a vague sense of identity—and sometimes a
souvenir baby. Four-year-old Helen, with her dirty blond hair and pink
cheeks, could be half-American, half-English or half-Australian. "I
can't tell the difference between all those accents," says her mother
Julie. "But I think his name was Scott. Is that an American name?"

Ollie Barge has an American name, but not much else. She never knew
her parents, having been raised by a foster mother. When her college
was flooded by mud slides from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991,
the school relocated and Barge couldn't afford the commute. She tried
getting work at the garment factories now prospering on the former
base. But each time she carefully combed back her curly hair and went
for an interview, the managers turned her away. Only a handful of
mixed-race Filipinos have landed jobs at Clark Special Economic Zone,
where thousands of other locals have found work. "My father served at
this base," complains Barge, 23. "But I cannot work there. The
Filipinos say 'go to America.' The Americans say 'get a job in your
own country.'"

Discrimination affects the half-black children most deeply, but the
lighter-skinned Eurasians suffer also. Other students know these kids'
mothers are probably prostitutes, and schoolyard taunts reflect that
open secret. "I don't want them talking bad about my mother," says
Bryan Enders, an 11-year-old whose American father died of cirrhosis
of the liver two years ago. "But I can't say anything, because they
will beat me up." Even the teachers sometimes pitch in, blaming the
biracial students for fomenting classroom dissent. "They act up more
than others," says Juanita de la Cruz, who has five mixed-race
students in her elementary school class. "I think it's because their
blood is all mixed up. They feel most comfortable hanging on the
streets with other Amerasian kids."

In fact, most of the Amerasian children avoid the sleazy lanes where
their mothers sold themselves to their fathers. "When I see a Western
man with a Filipina girl, I feel sick," says 19-year-old Paul
Calumpiano, who is half-American. "But I can do nothing but throw
stares at the man's back." Others, though, have no choice but to
return to the bars teeming with retired American postal workers and
overweight German laborers. Mixed-race boys can find work as deejays,
bouncers or, if they're tall, play for a local basketball team.

But for a poor, young girl in Angeles, there is little to trade on
except her body. Northern European men prefer the darker-skinned
Amerasians, while the Japanese go for lighter skin. Jewel, 18, plies
the streets in front of Splash, Lollipop and Confetti's, where drunken
men amble with a girl in one hand and a San Miguel beer in the other.
She's never met her American father, but her mother says he had a scar
on his left calf. So every time Jewel meets a middle-aged American,
she checks his leg, just in case. "I don't know what I will say if I
meet him," she says, pulling the hem of her pink leather skirt down
her thighs. "But I think I will say: 'Hello, I am your daughter.
Welcome again to Angeles. We call it the city of Angels.'"
==========================

Stuck in the Middle
A third-generation Amerasian still feels in-between
BY LISA SEE

In 1871 my great-grandfather Fong See, an illiterate peasant, left his
village in southern China for Sacramento, California, in search of his
father, who had disappeared during the building of the
transcontinental railroad. At about the same time, Letticie Pruett's
family crossed America in a covered wagon and homesteaded in Oregon.
By the late 1890s, after years of manual labor, Fong See owned the
Curiosity Bizarre, which manufactured underwear for brothels. Letticie
had run away from home and ended up in Sacramento. When no one would
hire a single, uneducated woman, she drifted into Chinatown and the
Curiosity Bizarre, where she begged Fong See for a job. He hired her,
one thing led to another, and they decided to get married.

It was against the law in California and many other states for Chinese
and Caucasians to marry. It was also against the law for Chinese to
own property in California, and unlawful at the federal level for
Chinese to become naturalized citizens. These laws had grown out of
the so-called "Driving Out," when Chinese had literally been driven
from Western towns—when they weren't hung, shot, burned or stabbed by
members of the white community, who had no fear of retribution because
Chinese could not testify in court against Caucasians. What started as
informal harassment was formalized with the Exclusion Act of 1882,
which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and led to even more
institutionalized racism.

But with a contract marriage drawn up by a lawyer, my
great-grandparents set out to achieve the American Dream. Fong See and
Letticie raised five mixed-race children and ran five antique stores
in southern California. Fong See became the patriarch of Los Angeles
Chinatown. He was the first Chinese in the U.S. to own an automobile
and was one of the few Chinese to do business with the white community
by selling props to the nascent film industry and antiques to
customers like Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite these successes, Fong See's
four sons—all American-born citizens—had to go to Mexico to marry
their Caucasian fiancés.

Drop down another two generations. I am only one-eighth Chinese, with
red hair and freckles. People often ask me where I fit in and how I
define myself. My answer has to do with where I grew up and what I saw
around me. Fong See had four wives, as Chinese traditional codes
dictate for men with great wealth and prowess, so the Chinese side of
my family in Los Angeles numbers close to 400, with only a handful
that look like me. It's been 130 years since my
great-great-grandfather left China, and we've become educated, changed
our way of dress and lost our Cantonese. But there's a deep core that
connects to our peasant ancestors.

Many small rituals in my daily life mirror what I experienced as a
child. I tell my sons to put only what they're going to eat on their
plates, and I still pick at their discarded chicken bones. When they
want comfort food, I cook them rice. (Shortly after going to college,
my older son called to announce happily that the girls next door had a
rice cooker.) When my younger son boasted that he'd told his chemistry
teacher to stop checking her e-mail during class, I made him go back
the next day with a gift of a perfect orange and an apology.

I do look different, and nothing will ever change that or people's
reactions. At my baby shower, some friends mistook my father, a
professor, for a Chinese waiter. I've had Chinese Americans and
Chinese-in-China talk about me as though I weren't there: "I had a
cousin from the south who looked like her, but her hair is
disgusting." On book tours, Caucasians will often ask point-blank,
"Why would you choose to be Chinese when you have all the privileges
of being white?" Given my family and the era in which I grew up, I
don't know that I had a choice.

The last of America's miscegenation laws were overturned in 1965.
Intermarriage is common, and if you walk into a classroom today, it's
impossible to tell a child's exact race, or what race or ethnicity he
or she may identify with. You certainly can't with my own sons, who
are only one-sixteenth Chinese and otherwise Irish, English, Scottish,
Spanish, Russian, German, Austrian and Polish. I tell them it's up to
them to choose their own identities—just so long as they marry nice
Chinese girls. They think I'm kidding. I'm not, really. Who, I wonder,
is going to cook them their rice?

http://www.pathfinder.com/time/