RACISM ISN’T JUST A CAUCASIAN THING
This week a writer and teacher named Kate Clanchy found herself in hot water when some of the writing in her 2019 memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, came to the attention of the leftwing cancel-culture crowd. The memoir tells of the thirty years she spent teaching the children of working-class parents in British public schools. Among her grievous offenses was having described some of her Asian students as having “slanted eyes” or “almond-shaped eyes.” This, apparently, was enough to get Clanchy labeled a racist. This is ironic, because Clanchy herself is a staunch liberal and her book was awarded the Orwell Prize, which honors political writing, generally from the left. Though well received by most of the readers who commented on it at Amazon.com, the book generated some blowback upon publication from readers who found it too darn liberal. One reader called it, “left wing propaganda from a very self-satisfied authoress.”
I’m not sure why almond-shaped eyes are considered a derogatory trait. I’ve never seen the description used disparagingly in a book. Indeed, in many books written by Chinese authors you will find characters whose eyes are described as “almond-shaped.” Consider, for instance, the work of Ching Yun Bezine. She is the author of several excellent novels about Chinese immigrants to America. The best of these are the trilogy that comprises Children of the Pearl, Temple of the Moon, and On Wings of Destiny. These books, all of them published in the early 1990s, form a sweeping multigenerational epic of the Chinese immigrant experience in America. The Children of the Pearl follows four Chinese teenagers as they leave behind their small town alongside China’s Pearl River and make their way to The Land of the Golden Mountain, which is what Chinese peasants called America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of these immigrants is a young man named Quanming. His brother was beheaded by local Chinese government officials for advocating human rights. The girl he loves, the beautiful young Kao Yoto, broke his heart by marrying another man. With nothing left to live for in China, he decides to set out across the Pacific and find his fortune in America. Here, in part, is how Bezine describes Kao Yoto early in the novel: “a pale heart-shaped face with two dark, slanted almond eyes.” Later, of the same character, Bezine writes: “She looked at him with her slanted almond eyes, and her bow-shaped mouth curled up into a smile…”
Ching Yun Bezine was born in Ching-dau, near Beijing, in 1937. When the Communists took over China in 1949, she migrated with her family to Taiwan. In 1960 she earned a law degree from a Taiwanese University. She also wrote a handful of successful novels for a Taiwanese publishing house, but she was paid little for them. Having been forced by her parents into a marriage she didn’t want, she migrated to America, hoping to escape the oppression of her arranged marriage. Eventually she did manage to escape that first marriage and enter into a more successful one to an American academic named Frank Bezine. And by the time the 1990s rolled around her mastery of English was so complete that she was able to write long, complex historical novels in a non-native tongue. She wasn’t just a Chinese-American author, she was a Chinese-born American author. It’s not likely that she possesses any anti-Asian racism.
John Ball (1911-1988) was a Caucasian American but he wrote frequently and sensitively about people of other races. His best known book is In The Heat of the Night, the 1965 novel that was the basis for the groundbreaking 1967 Norman Jewish film of the same name which introduced the character of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a black cop from Philadelphia who finds himself investigating a murder in the deep south, where his efforts are hampered by racism and other prejudices (suspicion of northerners, suspicion of the well-educated, etc.). In all, Ball wrote seven novels about the exploits of Virgil Tibbs, but he also frequently wrote about Asia and Asians. In his 1975 novel The Winds of Mitamura, Ball wrote about two young American scholars, a white male and a Black female, who travel to a small rural town in Japan to study the culture there. While in Mitamura, Peter Storm falls in love with a young Japanese widow named Midori. Ball describes her as having “almond eyes.” It is clearly meant as a compliment. Later in the book, Marjorie Saunders, the Black woman, falls in love with a Japanese artist named Toshi. When Marjorie talks to Toshi about the possibility of marriage, Toshi warns her, “Marjorie…many people don’t like Japanese, some even hates us. Millions think we are subhumans because our eyes are different.” Ball was clearly aware of the prejudice many Westerners feel towards Asian eyes, and he condemns it here. Like every other writer I’ve ever seen use the term, Ball uses “almond eyes” without intending it as an insult.
For years, much of the fiction published by Chinese-Americans was written by the likes of C.Y. Lee (best known for The Flower Drum Song) and Diana Chang (her 1956 novel, The Frontiers of Love, is widely regarded as the first ever written by a Chinese American woman), people who were born and/or raised in Asia before migrating to the U.S. These authors understood that racism was a two-way street. Their Asian characters tended to possess anti-Caucasian bigotry that is proportional to the anti-Asian bigotry of their Caucasian characters. Nowadays, however, most Asian-American authors – Celeste Ng, Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Gail Tsukiyama, Julie Otsuka, etc. – tend to be American born, possessing little actual experience of everyday life in China or Japan or Vietnam. Their novels tend to focus on Asian-Americans dealing with prejudice in the U.S., a perfectly legitimate topic for discussion. But the proliferation of these novels has led some readers to believe that prejudice is a one-way street, directed only at non-Caucasians. Reading the works of Asian-born writers like C.Y. Lee and Chin Yung Bezine will cure you of this misperception.
In Children of the Pearl, Asian characters regularly refer to Caucasians as “white devils,” “white pigs,” “barbarians,” “ghosts,” and worse. Caucasian women are called “white whores,” “white cows,” and “devil girls.” The Asian characters in Children of the Pearl talk about Americans with the same kind of racism that Americans of the era talked about the Chinese. Kao Yoto tells Quanming, “The white devils have transparent flesh, yellow hair, and blue eyes. They eat raw meat and walk around half-naked most of the time. We Chinese…must never put ourselves in the company of those who aren’t truly civilized!” Elsewhere, a young Chinese immigrant named Meiping yells at her Caucasian lover, “You white devils know nothing about tradition! You’re all barbarians.” One Chinese woman is described by Bezine as having “the look of a porcelain doll.” If a white American male had written such a description he’d likely have been accused of racism. Bezine’s novel complicates the drearily woke contemporary view about Caucasians writing about other races (they should stay in their own lanes and not write about non-white characters). Bezine, born and raised in China, writes about slanted eyes and yellow skin without any malice or racism towards her characters. She describes one Chinese-American characters as “a greasy-faced man.” Were a Caucasian author to describe an Asian that way, he’d be automatically accused of racism. Bezine knows that there are unpleasant Asians just as there are unpleasant Caucasians, and she isn’t afraid to say so. Many of the complaints leveled at novels like James Clavell’s Shogun and Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun – i.e., that they contain a lot of unpleasant Asian characters – could just as easily be leveled at Children of the Pearl. But I doubt that Bezine is a racist. She just believes in depicting her characters, whether Caucasian or Asian, as real people, warts and all.
C.Y. Lee was born in Xiangtan, China, in 1915. He was educated there and then moved to the United States in 1943, when he was 28 years old. He is best remembered now as the author of the novel The Flower Drum Song, which inspired a popular Broadway musical and Hollywood film. C.Y. Lee knew well what anti-Asian racism in America looked like, and he wrote about it in his work. But he also knew what anti-Caucasian racism in Asia looked like, and he wrote about that too. His second novel, The Land of the Golden Mountain, tracks the ups and downs of a handful of Chinese who immigrate to California during the early years of the Gold Rush. On the boat across the Pacific, one of his characters, Mai Mai, catches her first glimpse of a white man. Here’s how Lee describes her previous knowledge of Caucasians:
She had never seen a foreigner before, although she had heard stories about “foreign devils.” They were supposed to be pale-skinned monsters who grew colorful hair on their chests and arms, and ate raw meat with knives and prongs like the ancient barbarians.
The Chinese also have many misperceptions about American Indians in Lee’s novel. Having heard them called “redskins,” Mai Mai, upon spotting some at Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, “was disappointed that they were not crimson.” Her companion, Four-Eyed Dog (a name given to him by the Chinese, not the Americans), “explained that it was because they did not eat enough human heads.” Mai Mai and her companions have somehow gotten the impression that Indians take the scalps of their enemies in order to eat them. The book is full of people who make ignorant assumptions about cultures they know little about. One Chinese character warns another not to drink cow’s milk, believing that it is what puts so much hair on the chests of white men.
For many decades we got Asian-American novels from writers who knew both Asia and America intimately. Those books were filled with depictions of both anti-Asian racism and anti-Caucasian racism. But, though I have read dozens upon dozens of novels in which characters were described as having “almond-shaped eyes,” I’ve never once seen it used as an insult. It took the SJW crowd to make an racist insult out of what had always before been simply an innocuous term of description, like “Roman nose” or “bee-stung lips.”