This book analyzes narratives written by several European American, Chinese American, and “Americanized” Chinese women who lived in Hong Kong and Macao for substantial periods of time during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their narratives constitute an archive of memoirs, diaries, letters, journalistic essays, fiction, interviews, and film. The study highlights the diverse ways in which the cross-cultural encounter led women to re-envision their sense of national identity. It pays particular attention to links between national, gender, and ethnic identities, cultural myths and ideologies, and historical context. It is, however, the Chinese man quoted above rather than an American woman...

From the earliest years of the Sino-American encounter, women helped to shape and then communicate “American values” beyond geographical boundaries of the nation. The three acts referred to in the title represent three case studies and types of cultural encounters that took place in the nineteenth century and that foreshadowed what followed. Harriett Low narrates aspects of women’s lives within the merchant community of Macao, and Henrietta Shuck bridges the gap between Macao and Hong Kong, offering a glimpse into early Protestant missionary encounters in both places. Macao is an important precursor to Hong Kong in this story of American...

In her memoir China to Me, Emily “Mickey” Hahn recounts her mother’s frequent pleas to her daughter to return to America and “settle down.” In her mind, Hahn composes the exasperated response she wishes she could send: “I’m in the middle of a book; I’m in the middle of a magazine; I’m in the middle of China! I’ll come back when it’s time, and when there’s something for me to do there.”¹ Perplexed that her mother couldn’t “believe I belong here just as much as if I were married to a man with a job out here,” Hahn declares, “I...

In the decades following the end of World War II, Hong Kong was a safe harbor for refugees fleeing the political turmoil on the Chinese mainland, a hot bed of ideological protest of various types (pro/anti-Communist, pro/anti-Kuomintang, pro/anti-colonial), an R & R post for US military personnel fighting in Korea and Vietnam, a site of rapid industrialization, commercialization, and transport, and a Cold War perch from which to view events in China. Andrew Whitfield writes that by 1960 Hong Kong had also “become the eyes and ears of America’s cold war containment strategy in the Far East.”¹ As the US...

In the two decades prior to resumption of Chinese sovereignty, many Americans “made themselves at home” in Hong Kong.¹ By 1997, there were approximately 40,000 US passport–holders living in the territory; an indeterminate number of whom were Hong Kong Chinese residents seeking a bit of security in case they needed to make a quick exit after the “handover.” Nearly 1,000 American firms or institutions were doing business in Hong Kong, which had become the United States’ thirteenth largest trading partner.² More noticeable was a diffuse American presence (discussed briefly in the last chapter), continuing to manifest itself in various...

The narratives considered in this study prove that there is no such thing as a “typical American woman.” Yet there are threads of connection. All of the texts enrich our understanding of the ways in which notions of gender and national identity are shaped, in part, by the cross-cultural encounter, albeit in highly individual ways. In addition, each story within this diverse archive attests to both the plasticity and the rigidity of American national identity across time and place. In Macao, young Harriet Low’s defensive rhetoric seems rooted, to a certain extent, in her own insecurities. Yet, by the end...