华裔女子蔡小姐的经历揭示,许多美国白人可以接受白人丈夫加非白人妻子的组合,却无法接受白人女子嫁给非白人男子所组成的婚姻。这是一种什么心理呢？
“我早已放弃了融入(美国)的念头，只是想努力地生存下来！”—— Hapa Girl

  When May-Lee Chai first moved to a small town in South Dakota, she was amused to find that her family could stop traffic just by walking down the street. “Cars slowed, and the passengers turned to stare out the windows,” she recalls in Hapa Girl, her memoir of growing up half-Chinese in America. At first she thought that the Chais, as strangers, were natural objects of curiosity to their new neighbors. “I didn’t know that they were staring because they had never seen a Chinese man with a white woman before.”
  Chai’s father was a respected professor of Asian studies whose own parents had left Taiwan for New York when he was a boy. He married a beautiful California artist and 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 New York to the healthier and supposedly friendlier air of mid-western America. 
  However, their new neighbors did more than stare. Over the next years the Chais were insulted and ostracized. Their house was shot at from passing cars, and their pet dogs were gunned down on the lawn. Her father quit his job because of the many narrow-minded people in his university. “There were many people who wanted my father to suffer,” Chai writes.
  Though the 1960s civil rights movement had swept away official racism in the U.S., word had not yet reached the Chais’ corner of South Dakota, where rising interest rates and falling prices for agricultural goods were pushing many of their neighbors toward bankruptcy. That economic condition deepened a long-standing anger with outsiders and nonwhites. The drive-by shooters were somehow never caught. By the time Chai was a teenager, “I had given up trying to fit,” she says. “I was merely trying to survive.”
 “Hapa” is a Hawaiian word for mixed race. A critic once said that, “Hapa Girl is a reminder that Americans cannot have too many reminders of the un-American things they do when they’re afraid.”

Ⅰ. Words
memoir 回忆录
vice presidency 大学副校长职位
supposedly adv. 想象上，按照推测
insult  v. 侮辱
例：swallow an insult 忍受侮辱
 sit down under insults 甘受侮辱
ostracize /'6str=saIz/ v. 排斥，放逐
official racism 合法的种族歧视
interest rates 利率
bankruptcy /'b79kr2ptsI/ n. 破产
fit v. 融入
survive v. 生存
race n. 种族
Ⅱ. Expression
(1) un-American things: “非美国”的事，即同美国文化和理念不相符合的事。在本文中指的是“种族歧视”。美国一向自我标榜为“民族的大熔炉”，宣扬“自由”和“平等”，但作者的遭遇却与此形成了鲜明的对比。
(2) can not have too many: “还需要更多”，注意这个表述，中国学生不习惯这种表达方式，很容易误解。
例：You cannot be too careful. 你一定要非常小心
Ⅲ. Culture
 “hapa”一词来源于夏威夷语中的hapa-haole，意为half-white。如今，这个词已经失去了当初的贬义色彩，单纯表示Asian-Pacific American。一些Asian-Pacific American宣称
hapa是“Half-Asian-Pacific American”的首字母缩写。