Tuesday, March 5th, 7:30 pm – Forbidden Love: Chinese & White Mixed Families in the 19th Century. With interracial marriage increasingly common in America today, how much do we know about the past histories of mixed families in an earlier era? When the first Chinese immigrants came to this country in the 19th century, some fell in love and married American women. Some of these mixed families settled here, and others in China. What kind of obstacles and reception did they face in a time when interracial marriage was largely taboo, on both sides of the Pacific?
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mma J. Teng is the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943, published by the University of California Press.