When I look back over the years I see myself, a little child of scarcely four years of age, walking in front of my nurse, in a green English lane, and listening to her tell another of her kind that my mother is Chinese.
“Oh Lord!” exclaims the informed.
If the narrator is to be trusted on her memory and her honesty, this opening scene should be horrifying to all. Not just because of the explicitly improper display of racism in front of a child about her own mother, but because it suggests that a child as young as four can remember with clarity certain traumatic conversations. Take a look around the next time you hear people saying inappropriate things around children and determine a course of action. The idea that kids remain too young to be affected by hurtful things may possibly extend to an age beyond which it is necessarily true. Certain that seems to be the case in this recollection. If, that is, the narrator is to be trusted on both accounts. No immediately reason exists for doubt.
“Les pauvres enfants…Chinoise, Chinoise.”
Six kids, all the under age of eight. A British father and Chinese mother still in their twenties. The family is arriving at a hotel in Canada and the immediate reaction is not one of outright hostility like back home or across the border in America. The Canadians are more…Canadianesque…in their manifestation of racism. As the narrator generously describes things, it is curiosity tempered with kindness. The reaction, nevertheless, seems something other than ambiguous: those poor children. Chinese.
“The Chinese in America owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to Sui Sin Far for the bold stand she has taken in their defense.”
Not all quoted material in the memoir is a negative recollection or a manifestation of racial intolerance. Of course, in this particular example it would be just plain odd. But after being exposed to incident after incident of misguided cultural bias and ignorant ethnic stereotyping, a typical reader may share the exultation experienced by the author to finally find someone who has something nice to say about her. Or even something just not downright callous.
Fundamentally, I muse, people are all the same. My mother’s race is as prejudiced as my father’s. Only when the whole world becomes as one family with human beings be able to see clearly and hear distinctly.
It is a sincere expression of tolerance and understanding, but not one necessarily based on a full judgment of experience. This musing occurs midway through the text and though written at a later point, its placement seems to be with the intent that these are feelings and opinions held at a certain time. Later, how, the author will somewhat contradict herself. Actually, she will directly contradict, but then explanation is more ambiguous than the assertion: “People, however, are not all alike.” The contradiction and the willingness to admit to it is a subtle acknowledgment, it appears, that people can change and mold and alter their earlier views. And that is an expression of hope that is based on judgment.
