My Chinese Marriage

In 1907, when a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins fell in love with a Chinese student named Tiam Hock Franking, such relationships were not merely unusual. They were illegal in most American states and publicly deplored by newspapers in Ann Arbor and Detroit. The two met in high school, deepened their bond at the University of Michigan, and married despite every obstacle family, law, and society could place before them. Katherine Anne Porter, later celebrated as one of America's finest short story writers, ghostwrote Mae's memoir in 1920, translating her memories into luminous prose. The narrative follows their courtship through the shadow of prejudice, then across the Pacific to China, where Mae raised three children, taught college English, and deliberately became what she called a proper Chinese wife and daughter-in-law. This is not a fairy tale of easy acceptance. It is a document of what love required in an era of rigid racial hierarchies, and what one woman chose to build on the other side of exile.