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My Chinese Marriage
In 1907, a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins met nineteen-year-old Tiam Hock Franking of Amoy, China, while attending high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their growing love intensified later while both were students at the University of Michigan, where Mae studied Latin and German and Tiam prepared for a career in international law. Because of the legal and social restrictions in the early 1900s, interracial relationships such as theirs were bitterly and publicly discouraged. Nevertheless, despite opposition to their relationship from both their families, Mae and Tiam married and later moved to China. There Mae raised three children, taught college English, and helped Tiam with his own teaching and legal work. And, by her own conscious choice, Mae also succeeded in becoming a proper Chinese wife and daughter-in-law. Working from interviews with Mae Franking and from material contained in Franking's original manuscript, Katherine Anne Porter ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient. Asia published My Chinese Marriage as a four-part series, and subsequently Duffield and Company published it unchanged in book form. Mae Franking's original manuscript was lost, so there can be no direct comparison between Franking's manuscript and Porter's work. This annotated edition contains the full text of My Chinese Marriage as it appeared in Asia. In addition, the Franking's granddaughter, Holly Franking, provides a narrative account of Mae's life, as well as private letters and contemporary newspaper clippings (the marriage was deplored by racist editors in Ann Arbor and Detroit). This previously unavailable material will enable KatherineAnne Porter scholars to assess her stylistic and fictional contributions to the text.
120 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 22, 2018
I found this book at Gutenberg not long before I left Mexico to relocate back in Arizona. I had added it to my Lists and didn't think much more about it in all the rush of moving. Then in November my doctor loaned me his copy of his uncle's memoir titled Monsoon Season. While reading about Uncle's college days, he mentions this book because he was dating the author's daughter at the time. So I thought I would read it as my first Gutenberg title of this new phase of my life. I set the book up to read on December 9 but with other chores and settling in projects going on, I haven't had the energy to spend much more time than absolutely necessary on the computer.
But I've finally finished it, and I was surprised at how many things in Mae's story resonated with my own life. But I was also left with unanswered questions about the author and of course What Happened Next in her life after the final page here.
The book was actually ghostwritten by Katharine Anne Porter and published in 1921. I could not find many details about Mae Franking herself, with the Amazon blurb for the book giving me more information than Wiki could. But that blurb said that both families (and society as a whole) were opposed to the marriage on racial grounds. Part of this comes through in the first chapters, but according to Mae, her parents were always supportive and accepting of the relationship.
Also the amazon blurb says that Mae met her future husband Chan-King Liang while she was still in high school, but in the book itself she was a freshman in college when he became a roomer in the neighbor's house. But she was both attracted to and repelled by his race, and constantly admitted that she felt there was too much of a gap between their cultures to ever allow her to enter into a relationship with him. When their relationship had progressed to the point where he wished to kiss her, she could not accept the kiss, not because she did not want A Kiss, but because he was Chinese. I often wondered how she could have such an attitude if her parents had been as supportive as she says they were. (She finally did permit the first kiss but only because while walking in town one day she heard rude comments other people made as they passed by and she felt pity for him. This is as bad a reason to share a first kiss as fear of 'Chinese-ness' is to reject one!)
Anyway, they did marry and since his plan had always been to return to China and try to help his country step more into the modern world, they eventually moved to Shanghai. They had a son by this time, and even though Chan-King's family had wanted him to marry the girl of their choice as arranged many years before, the in-laws ultimately met and accepted Mae. She was enchanted by China, stating on her arrival that she had a sense that she remembered the area even though of course she had never been there before. She and her husband forged a strong bond that, even though there were times when he would be what was to me too pushy, seemed to show that they were equal partners in their relationship, and she was certainly happy.
She spoke about interracial marriage, something far less common in those days than in these supposedly more enlightened times. I decided that no rules could be made about intermarriage. It was an individual problem, as indeed all marriage must be. So, when a young girl from home wrote to me for advice, believing herself in love with a Chinese classmate, and concluded, "You, Mrs. Liang, must settle the question for me," I answered, as I should not have done a year earlier: "That is a question that you two alone are competent to settle. No one can advise you safely, for a mistake either way may result in lifelong unhappiness. But I might venture to suggest that love strong enough to stand the test of intermarriage does not seek advice. It is sure of itself."
And yes, that is how it should be. Love is love, you will find your All, your Everything at some point in life, and if you are from two different countries, you must have the courage and faith to dare to love anyway. At least to TRY. Maybe that is why this book touched me more than I expected it to. My husband is a citizen of Mexico who cannot cross into the States and I have been living in 'his' country for eight years to be with him. I love it there, and would never have left if Life hadn't had other plans. Now I am here to accompany my mother into her 90's, but the bond between my husband and myself will never be broken. We just hope that in our next lives we will at the very least be born in the same country. There would certainly be less government red-tape to deal with then!
Meanwhile, I wonder whatever happened to our author after the major changes that she suffered through at the end of the book. How did she cope? What did she do? I don't suppose I will ever know, but I do know that at least at the end of the book she no longer had any negative thoughts about China and the Chinese people, and she swore eternal love for Chan-King.
But I've finally finished it, and I was surprised at how many things in Mae's story resonated with my own life. But I was also left with unanswered questions about the author and of course What Happened Next in her life after the final page here.
The book was actually ghostwritten by Katharine Anne Porter and published in 1921. I could not find many details about Mae Franking herself, with the Amazon blurb for the book giving me more information than Wiki could. But that blurb said that both families (and society as a whole) were opposed to the marriage on racial grounds. Part of this comes through in the first chapters, but according to Mae, her parents were always supportive and accepting of the relationship.
Also the amazon blurb says that Mae met her future husband Chan-King Liang while she was still in high school, but in the book itself she was a freshman in college when he became a roomer in the neighbor's house. But she was both attracted to and repelled by his race, and constantly admitted that she felt there was too much of a gap between their cultures to ever allow her to enter into a relationship with him. When their relationship had progressed to the point where he wished to kiss her, she could not accept the kiss, not because she did not want A Kiss, but because he was Chinese. I often wondered how she could have such an attitude if her parents had been as supportive as she says they were. (She finally did permit the first kiss but only because while walking in town one day she heard rude comments other people made as they passed by and she felt pity for him. This is as bad a reason to share a first kiss as fear of 'Chinese-ness' is to reject one!)
Anyway, they did marry and since his plan had always been to return to China and try to help his country step more into the modern world, they eventually moved to Shanghai. They had a son by this time, and even though Chan-King's family had wanted him to marry the girl of their choice as arranged many years before, the in-laws ultimately met and accepted Mae. She was enchanted by China, stating on her arrival that she had a sense that she remembered the area even though of course she had never been there before. She and her husband forged a strong bond that, even though there were times when he would be what was to me too pushy, seemed to show that they were equal partners in their relationship, and she was certainly happy.
She spoke about interracial marriage, something far less common in those days than in these supposedly more enlightened times. I decided that no rules could be made about intermarriage. It was an individual problem, as indeed all marriage must be. So, when a young girl from home wrote to me for advice, believing herself in love with a Chinese classmate, and concluded, "You, Mrs. Liang, must settle the question for me," I answered, as I should not have done a year earlier: "That is a question that you two alone are competent to settle. No one can advise you safely, for a mistake either way may result in lifelong unhappiness. But I might venture to suggest that love strong enough to stand the test of intermarriage does not seek advice. It is sure of itself."
And yes, that is how it should be. Love is love, you will find your All, your Everything at some point in life, and if you are from two different countries, you must have the courage and faith to dare to love anyway. At least to TRY. Maybe that is why this book touched me more than I expected it to. My husband is a citizen of Mexico who cannot cross into the States and I have been living in 'his' country for eight years to be with him. I love it there, and would never have left if Life hadn't had other plans. Now I am here to accompany my mother into her 90's, but the bond between my husband and myself will never be broken. We just hope that in our next lives we will at the very least be born in the same country. There would certainly be less government red-tape to deal with then!
Meanwhile, I wonder whatever happened to our author after the major changes that she suffered through at the end of the book. How did she cope? What did she do? I don't suppose I will ever know, but I do know that at least at the end of the book she no longer had any negative thoughts about China and the Chinese people, and she swore eternal love for Chan-King.
April 27, 2022
1920
I found this book, by accident, on Librivox, and listened to it. Fascinating. [Not, however, well read.]
I will want to buy the book to read it more carefully, preferring this later [1991/2005] annotated edition [blurb below].
Mae Franking's My Chinese Marriage
by M.T.F., Mae M. Franking, Katherine Anne Porter, Holly Franking (Editor), Givner (Foreword)
Amazon secondhand:
Hardcover, Annotated Edition, 120 pages
Published December 2nd 2005 by University of Texas Press (first published October 1991)
Original Title : Mae Franking's My Chinese Marriage: An Annotated Edition
ISBN029275132X (ISBN13: 9780292751323)
"*Katherine Anne Porter* ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient."
[Katherine Anne Porter was born in Texas.]
"In 1907, a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins met nineteen-year-old Tiam Hock Franking of Amoy, China, while attending high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their growing love intensified later while both were students at the University of Michigan, where Mae studied Latin and German and Tiam prepared for a career in international law. Because of the legal and social restrictions in the early 1900s, interracial relationships such as theirs were bitterly and publicly discouraged. Nevertheless, despite opposition to their relationship from both their families, Mae and Tiam married and later moved to China. There Mae raised three children, taught college English, and helped Tiam with his own teaching and legal work. And, by her own conscious choice, Mae also succeeded in becoming a proper Chinese wife and daughter-in-law. Working from interviews with Mae Franking and from material contained in Franking's original manuscript, Katherine Anne Porter ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient. Asia published My Chinese Marriage as a four-part series, and subsequently Duffield and Company published it unchanged in book form. Mae Franking's original manuscript was lost, so there can be no direct comparison between Franking's manuscript and Porter's work. This annotated edition contains the full text of My Chinese Marriage as it appeared in Asia. In addition, the Franking's granddaughter, Holly Franking, provides a narrative account of Mae's life, as well as private letters and contemporary newspaper clippings (the marriage was deplored by racist editors in Ann Arbor and Detroit). This previously unavailable material will enable KatherineAnne Porter scholars to assess her stylistic and fictional contributions to the text. "
I found this book, by accident, on Librivox, and listened to it. Fascinating. [Not, however, well read.]
I will want to buy the book to read it more carefully, preferring this later [1991/2005] annotated edition [blurb below].
Mae Franking's My Chinese Marriage
by M.T.F., Mae M. Franking, Katherine Anne Porter, Holly Franking (Editor), Givner (Foreword)
Amazon secondhand:
Hardcover, Annotated Edition, 120 pages
Published December 2nd 2005 by University of Texas Press (first published October 1991)
Original Title : Mae Franking's My Chinese Marriage: An Annotated Edition
ISBN029275132X (ISBN13: 9780292751323)
"*Katherine Anne Porter* ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient."
[Katherine Anne Porter was born in Texas.]
"In 1907, a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins met nineteen-year-old Tiam Hock Franking of Amoy, China, while attending high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their growing love intensified later while both were students at the University of Michigan, where Mae studied Latin and German and Tiam prepared for a career in international law. Because of the legal and social restrictions in the early 1900s, interracial relationships such as theirs were bitterly and publicly discouraged. Nevertheless, despite opposition to their relationship from both their families, Mae and Tiam married and later moved to China. There Mae raised three children, taught college English, and helped Tiam with his own teaching and legal work. And, by her own conscious choice, Mae also succeeded in becoming a proper Chinese wife and daughter-in-law. Working from interviews with Mae Franking and from material contained in Franking's original manuscript, Katherine Anne Porter ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient. Asia published My Chinese Marriage as a four-part series, and subsequently Duffield and Company published it unchanged in book form. Mae Franking's original manuscript was lost, so there can be no direct comparison between Franking's manuscript and Porter's work. This annotated edition contains the full text of My Chinese Marriage as it appeared in Asia. In addition, the Franking's granddaughter, Holly Franking, provides a narrative account of Mae's life, as well as private letters and contemporary newspaper clippings (the marriage was deplored by racist editors in Ann Arbor and Detroit). This previously unavailable material will enable KatherineAnne Porter scholars to assess her stylistic and fictional contributions to the text. "
July 5, 2022
i really enjoyed this book--even though the self-sacrificing acceptance of "a woman's role" was soul-crushing. but it was also understandable in its context. and therefore, sensible. it was sweet and it was quite wonderful and who knew so many white US women had married Chinese students in the early twentieth century? well, perhaps not sooo many. but hey, more than five, for sure...
November 9, 2020
Lovely story about interracial marriage at the beginning of the 20th century. Written in 1921. The couple meet in University where Tiam is an exchange student from China. Later on they get married and the reader is brought to Shanghai and rural China to visit the Tiam's family. Interesting read about cultural differences and customs at the time.
May 7, 2020
(read in Jomtien, Thailand)
November 8, 2023
Nothing earth shattering
June 17, 2021
Well, this was probably not the same book I read in that, it is "My Chinese Marriage" by Katherine Anne Porter. I saw no sign of the real name of the subject until I Googled the book for more information. (My book for Kindle is free and nowhere does mention that it is a biography with the names changed.) But I found it entrancing. The book begins in or around the collapse of the last dynasty in 1912.
What I loved most is the details about relationships, family life, manners and rituals as well as descriptions of clothing, furniture, etc. How an extended family of means conducted daily life was fascinating to me.
If you have a continued interest such as that do read "Two Years in the Forbidden City" by Princess Der Ling. This fills in the details of life in the palace before dynastic collapse.
What I loved most is the details about relationships, family life, manners and rituals as well as descriptions of clothing, furniture, etc. How an extended family of means conducted daily life was fascinating to me.
If you have a continued interest such as that do read "Two Years in the Forbidden City" by Princess Der Ling. This fills in the details of life in the palace before dynastic collapse.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews