Eurasian serves as a very successful transnational history, with its framework of negotiated identity showing the ambiguity and complexity of a mixed-race experience. Teng tends to focus on the lived experiences of specific Eurasians and their families, and many of her sources are memoirs, public accounts, newspaper stories, and other more personal forms of archival materials. She uses these sources to great effect to show the wide range of diversity in the experiences of Eurasians in both the U.S. and Asia. By situating these personal narratives in the larger context of the social and political views on racial mixing at the time, Tengs work also does an effective job of dispelling, as she calls it, the one-way street notion of assimilation and mixed-race acceptance by showing that in many ways Eurasians in China and Hong Kong experienced differing reactions to their hybrid identities, often more positive, than they did in the United States. The work ranges from the more theoretical (in her discussion on hybrid degeneracy vs. hybrid vigor) to the valuable and personal discussions narrated by Eurasians both in the U.S. and across the Pacific. Serving as an example of how individual narratives of lived experience can broaden our understanding of larger race and migration histories, Teng has produced a volume that provokes greater understanding of the diversity of experiences faced by mixed-race citizens. Her examples show the dichotomy between the experiences of Eurasians and the ways in which they were viewed as both positive and negative.

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