The Eurasian Face

[Mr S]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MA15Ad01.html

BOOK REVIEW
Not so special
The Eurasian Face by Kirsteen Zimmern

Reviewed by Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - If you believe that Eurasians are a special breed of beautifully exotic people to be gawked at on your coffee table, then Kirsteen Zimmern's The Eurasian Face is the book for you. For just US$25, you can enjoy, and share with your friends the 70 black-and-white portraits that Zimmern, a photographer of Chinese and Scottish ancestry, has taken in Hong Kong and Singapore, along with her accompanying interviews of these people.

The subjects are old and young, teachers and students, bankers and barristers, musicians and athletes, children and their parents; the only thing this swath of humanity has in common is their



Eurasian heritage, and the premise for Zimmern's 140-page portrait gallery seems to be: Isn't that wonderful!

And maybe it is. Too bad this largely empty photographic exercise, published by Hong Kong's Blacksmith Books and launched last month at a restaurant in the city's trendy Soho district, presents no real evidence of Eurasian mystique besides its publisher's enthusiastic affirmation of its pervasive influence.

Indeed, the Eurasian story, once a narrative of stigma and discrimination - much like other mixed-race histories - is a gripping and complex one, but you won't learn much about that from Zimmern's snapshot approach, which only grazes the surface of the lives of those she has photographed and interviewed and presumes that readers will simply be enthralled by the inherent exoticism of the 70 faces she has captured, most of them in full-page, 8-by-12-inch (20-by-30-centimeter) headshots.

It doesn't help that many of these faces, like the stories that go with them, are strikingly ordinary. In the end, Zimmern's book may actually work against her presumptuous premise. Looking at her photographs and reading the interviews that have been transcribed in both English and Chinese, readers could easily conclude that Eurasians aren't so special after all. Maybe they are just like you and me.

In her own story, however, which is one of those featured in the book, Zimmern tells us that not a day passes in her native Hong Kong without her fielding multiple queries about her looks, her accent and her ethnic background.

"This tango occurs several times a day," writes the barrister, whose maiden name is Lau, "and mostly I just accept it as part of my day-to-day existence ... There are times when I feel bored and weary of it and other times where I feel downright indignant about having to justify my belonging to Hong Kong and, further yet, my ethnicity."

But those moments of pique are rare and, like everyone else in this book, Zimmern is a happily adjusted mix of Asian and European ancestry: "For me, being Eurasian is incredibly positive. It is empowering, liberating and lends a rich dimension to my everyday existence.

I honestly would not choose to be any other way." While Zimmern's personal history - which runs over two pages and 2,000 words - is the longest and most detailed in the book, it nevertheless provides only a sketchy outline of her life: her childhood romps through rural Hong Kong with her Chinese cousins, her love of things Western (especially British) once her English-language education kicked in, the challenges her dual heritage has presented in her adult life and, finally, her ability to manage these challenges and at the same time feel very special about who she is and where she is.

Zimmern's tale - and her book as a whole - makes the Eurasian experience sound far too easy. Readers are supposed to believe that her 70 shallow portraits happily reconcile races and cultures that have a tormented history of conflict and hatred. While that may feel good, it doesn't feel right.

By far, the most interesting portrait in the book is that of Liam Fitzpatrick, a senior writer for Time magazine who works in Hong Kong. The Fitzpatrick interview begins: "I was born at a time when the mere sight of Eurasians could still provoke violence." He then goes on to describe the riots of 1967 in colonial Hong Kong, inspired by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution across the border, and the jeering mob of leftists who called his Cantonese mother "a foreigner's whore" as she drove with him through the city's Central district.

Fitzpatrick also evokes the squalid poverty of Hong Kong during his youth - "the seething ghetto" that he could observe from the officers' quarters for the Royal Hong Kong Police, who employed his Irish father, and the "homeless families ... sleeping on the discarded boxes that our groceries had been delivered in."

Like Zimmern, although he was fluent in Cantonese, Fitzpatrick turned into an Anglophile during his secondary school years in the British system. But, even while immersed in a British education, he kept his Asian pride, organizing dance parties for his schoolmates whose drawing-card theme was "Eurasian Nation". Meanwhile, his Eurasian friends agonized over which half of their identity they were supposed to embrace.

Somewhat puzzlingly, however, the Fitzpatrick interview concludes with him dismissing the identity crisis that Eurasians of his generation experienced as an amusing reminiscence for him today.

"I'm having," he says, "what the cliche calls a 'wry smile' as I remember this, because what I truly love about being Eurasian now is how unimportant it is in an era when every other person being born is of mixed race . . . I rejoice that what was once so life defining has become so irrelevant."

That seems a strange thing to say in today's Hong Kong, whose population of more than seven million is 95% Chinese and whose ethnic minorities continue to be discriminated against - in education, in employment and in government policy in general. What is irrelevant at Time magazine's Hong Kong office may still be quite important in the teeming city beyond those friendly confines.

But at least Fitzpatrick's interview is honest and provocative, even if it leaves the reader with questions that neither he nor any of the other subjects of Zimmern's book are prompted to answer. And there are other engaging portraits here that also cry out for greater attention and detail - for example, the story of Burton Westerhout, a retired procurement specialist in Singapore whose ancestry is rich mix of Dutch, Portuguese, Goan, English and Chinese blood.

He recalls how the colonial government in Singapore depended on the Eurasian community for their English-language skills while at the same time snubbing Eurasians socially and barring them from their recreation clubs. But it seems Westerhout is just getting started with his story when it's time to turn the page and move on to the next portrait.

The same can be said for another Singaporean, retired school teacher Catherine Zuzarte, who has compiled a dictionary for the endangered language of Kristang, a Creole-Portuguese patois that once flourished among Eurasians in Malacca. Her story also shuts down long before it's over.

There are many interviews in this book that are so brief and substanceless that they never really seem to begin. Jessica Ho, the Hong Kong student whose youthful face graces the book's cover, offers 300 words of generalizations about the "exact" balance she has achieved in her life between her Chinese and British heritage, concluding: "I see the world as a human nation, not individual nations."

Another Hong Kong student, Mei Ming Leung, has even less to say. "I'm laid back and adaptable," she assures us. "I have never had a problem with my identity; this is just me."

The cliches abound and, again, it all seems too simple and too easy - both the lives that are glossed over and the book that glosses over them. Zimmern's portraits, unfortunately, are only skin-deep.

The Eurasian Face by Kirsteen Zimmern, Blacksmith Books (January 16, 2011). ISBN-10: 9889979993. Price US$24.95, 160 pages.

Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing@netvigator.com

[Kunold]

Yea I like that look Central Asians can have a Asian face and light hair and eyes its very exotic, Ied like to go to Kazakhstan or some other Central Asian country, don't hear much about these places but maybe their just difficult to date,I heard FSU countries can be like this?

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