Word: dakotas
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HELEN MIRREN, Oscar-winning star of The Queen, would rather break bread with Nic Cage than dine (by invitation) with the Queen of England. What could be more important than royalty? asks hipster travel guide JAUNTED, rhetorically. South Dakota! That's where Mirren is filming a National Treasure sequel. SCORE...
When May-Lee Chai first moved to the tiny South Dakota town of Vermillion, she was amused to find that her family could stop traffic just by walking down the street. "Cars and pickups slowed, sometimes in both lanes, and the passengers turned to stare out the windows," she recalls. At first she thought that the Chais, as strangers, were natural objects of curiosity to their new neighbors. "I didn't know then, because I was 12, that they were staring because they had never seen a Chinese man with a white woman before...
...Chai's father, Winberg Chai, was a respected professor of Asian studies whose own parents had left Taiwan for New York when he was a boy. He married Carolyn Everett, a beautiful California artist and, in 1979, accepted a vice presidency at the University of South Dakota. It was an opportunity to move his young family from the crime and crowding of greater New York to the healthier and supposedly friendlier air of rural America. As for race, writes his daughter, "we had imagined the segregated past was just that, past...
...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...
...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 that it had not been my fault...