Word: chai
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...mostly. The 1960s civil rights movement had swept away official racism in the U.S., along with the last anti-miscegenation laws. But word had evidently not yet reached the Chais' corner of South Dakota-a bleak, windswept realm of farming and ranching, where rising interest rates and falling prices for agricultural goods were pushing many of their neighbors toward bankruptcy. "My father didn't realize that he was moving his family into a region whose economic base was, in fact, being devastated," says Chai. That economic anxiety, plus growing unrest among Native Americans on nearby Indian reservations, only deepened...
...drive-by shooters were somehow never caught. When the Chais decided to flee Vermillion, they could not sell their house because no local bank would write a mortgage on it. So they stayed. By the time Chai was a teenager, Vietnam veterans would sidle up to her on the sidewalk to talk about hookers they had known in Southeast Asia. "I had given up trying to fit," she says. "I was merely trying to survive...
...Chai retreated to her studies. "Only losers without boyfriends needed to get A's," she writes of her peers' reverence for learning. She escaped to college in Iowa, but during a junior year abroad at Nanjing University, race again intruded: she stumbled into the city's 1988 riots that were sparked by false rumors about African students misbehaving. The incidents proved to be an epiphany. Chai discovered that her South Dakota neighbors' 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...
...Hapa Girl (the adjective is a Hawaiian word for mixed race) is published by Temple University Press. Why the book did not find a commercial publisher is a mystery. The writing is vigorous, and Chai's descriptions of the murderous winters and corrosive boredom of the Great Plains are compelling. Besides, Chai is hardly an unknown: The Girl from Purple Mountain, the World War II family history she co-authored with her father, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. Could it be racism, stalking the hapa girl once again...
...More likely, Chai's book suffers from a surfeit of coming-of-age memoirs by Asian Americans, as well as a blessed obsolescence: China's diaspora has largely fared well in the U.S. since Chai was a girl. Her father even tells her, "There's no such thing as racism against Chinese. You just don't know how to get along with people...