Fooling the white folks: The passing politics of Eurasian Onoto Watanna

Abstract

     This research is to study Onoto Watanna's autobiography, Me: A Book of Remembrance. It considers why the author avoided identifying either her ethnicity or herself and what the author attempts to accomplish in her autobiography. The result shows that Me reveals the trauma of a Eurasian-- the offspring of European and Asian descent--living in liminality. The narrator plays a game of deception—passing. The narrator’s life serves as reminders that the author's passing as Japanese is a refusal to be fixed within a single truth, belief, or identity arising from the experiences of racial alienation. However, passing as Japanese is Watanna's underground tactic to subvert the color line to fool the white people. Through passing, she is able to gain wider opportunity rejected to her, and can employ literary space to resist the white male hegemony.