Hapa Girl
A Memoir
Publication Year: 2007
In the mid-1960s, Winberg Chai, a young academic and the son of Chinese immigrants, married an Irish-American artist. In Hapa Girl ("hapa" is Hawaiian for "mixed") their daughter tells the story of this loving family as they moved from Southern California to New York to a South Dakota farm by the 1980s. In their new Midwestern home, the family finds itself the object of unwelcome attention, which swiftly escalates to violence. The Chais are suddenly socially isolated and barely able to cope with the tension that arises from daily incidents of racial animosity, including random acts of cruelty.
May-lee Chai's memoir ends in China, where she arrives just in time to witness a riot and demonstrations. Here she realizes that the rural Americans' "fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety, of the unknowable future compared to the known past were the same as China's. And I realized finally that it had not been my fault."
Published by: Temple University Press
Cover

1. The Wearing of the Green
I’ll begin where I’m happiest, or most clueless—either adjective could be equally appropriate. I’m a child, eight, maybe nine, years old, living in the suburbs, part of the megalopolis twenty-five miles outside New York City, where my father is chair of the Asian Studies...

2. The Sexy Artist Meets the Boy from New York City
One of the rumors floating around town in South Dakota, as people began to speculate about my parents, was that my father was a white slaver. He must have somehow kidnapped my mother and forced her to marry him. Why she didn’t just up and leave, since she...

9. The Little Things
At first, it was the little things that began to drive my father crazy. Not the big ones, not the staring or the shooting, if you can imagine, but the mundane, everyday details. For example, the food. He’d forgotten this aspect about life away from New York, how people...

11. My Last Confession
I thought I could make up for my sins by going to confession with my mother before Christmas.My mother loved everything to do with going to church, including confession. It was like a trip to the dentist, that same clean, sparkling feeling afterward, a shiny, unstained...

13. The Fall of the Prince
That June, my father left for Harvard to attend a summer institute for university administrators, as he’d originally planned to do before his resignation, and the rest of us stayed on the farm. At first, we were all optimistic. My mother was confident that my father would find a...
Photo gallery follows page 104

15. The Nights of Many Prayers
By midsummer we’d packed up everything in the house and decided to move to northern California, where my mother had a job interview.My father had not as yet had any firm job offers, but he was not yet panicked. My mother was feeling a little nervous about her...

16. What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Years later, after I’d left home, I used to joke with my brother that if our parents had only seen Deliverance instead of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, our lives would have been entirely different. Looking back, I could see the signs that said “Don’t move to this place!” as...

17. Stephen King High
Then came high school. The violence of the high school was legendary in our town, and starting in eighth grade my brother and some of his friends took up weight lifting in preparation. They felt that a year of concentrated effort might give them the edge they would need to survive freshman...

21. The Fine Art of Denial
When I was an adult and had moved away from home, we used to argue about South Dakota, my father and I. “People were racist against Asians,” I’d say. “That’s not true. There’s no racism against Chinese in America today. Look at all the successful and rich Chinese in this country!” “What about us? What about our dogs? People killed them in the...

22. The Lone Apache
One night I heard my brother’s motorcycle racing up the driveway, spewing gravel. It was late, I should have been in bed asleep, but I had insomnia and was always awake now. My father was gone to Chicago or there’d have been hell to pay, he’d shout at Jeff for coming...

23. My Mother’s Irish Gang
By the time I was seventeen, I had fallen into despair. I was only a year away from college, a year away from escaping, but I was so tired. I kept a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol in my dresser drawer. My way out, I called it. If things got any worse, I planned to take them all and...

24. China’s Revolutions
It was China that changed my life and gave me the perspective I needed to regain my confidence. After I graduated from high school, my father and I took a trip to China for a family reunion. For him it was an emotionally taxing experience, particularly when he discovered that his mother’s family...

27. The Family Trees
As I began writing our story, I found myself unexpectedly living at midlife with my father, and in Wyoming. I had left my snug apartment in San Francisco (right on the 1-California line, exactly halfway between the two Chinatowns, twenty minutes in four directions to...

Acknowledgments
I have changed the names of all my junior high and high school classmates. My mother’s dear friend, Mary Imelda Lynch, is named in full, as I believe this is what they both would have wanted. Public figures’ real names are used throughout. In writing this book, I found a number...
E-ISBN-13: 9781592136179
Print-ISBN-13: 9781592136162
Publication Year: 2007
OCLC Number: 166420839
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Hapa Girl