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3. Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-First Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods

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Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture
This chapter is in the book Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture
71On a clear Sunday morning on April13, 1997, in Augusta, Georgia, profes-sional golfers, throngs of spectators, and viewers around the globe stood ready to anoint its next prince, a golfing prodigy who was already known by just a single moniker: Tiger. By the time Tiger Woods walked off the eighteenth hole at Augusta National, one of the nation’s most prestigious and exclusive country clubs that hosts the Masters, one of the world’s most prestigious and exclu-sive golf tournaments, Woods had broken several tournament records: he had the lowest recorded score (eighteen under par), won the Masters at the young-est age (twenty-one), with the highest lead (nine) going into the final day of the championship. But perhaps the biggest barrier of all—the reason that non-golfers were as riveted to their television screens as inveterate golf fans—was that the young man who embraced his African American father and Asian American mother at the end of the tournament was not white. Woods’s triumph was especially notable given Augusta National’s less than illustrious history of racial segregation, discrimination, and upholding of Jim Crow traditions and attitudes. This was the club where founder Clifford Roberts once infamously said, “As long as I live, there will be nothing at the Masters besides black cad-dies and white players”; the club admitted its first black member only in 1990, thirteen years after Roberts’s passing.1 The image of the mixed race black–Asian American golfer wearing the coveted and iconic green jacket seemed to signal a transcendent moment for both golf and race relations nationwide.2This moment, and the many others that would follow in the decade and a half that Woods has been playing on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour, would seem to signal that Tiger has exceeded typical racial categories to become a global symbol of mixed heritage and multiraciality. According to his father, Earl Woods, Tiger is “qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish 3Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian RealitiesTranscending Race in the Twenty-FirstCentury and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods
© 2019 Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

71On a clear Sunday morning on April13, 1997, in Augusta, Georgia, profes-sional golfers, throngs of spectators, and viewers around the globe stood ready to anoint its next prince, a golfing prodigy who was already known by just a single moniker: Tiger. By the time Tiger Woods walked off the eighteenth hole at Augusta National, one of the nation’s most prestigious and exclusive country clubs that hosts the Masters, one of the world’s most prestigious and exclu-sive golf tournaments, Woods had broken several tournament records: he had the lowest recorded score (eighteen under par), won the Masters at the young-est age (twenty-one), with the highest lead (nine) going into the final day of the championship. But perhaps the biggest barrier of all—the reason that non-golfers were as riveted to their television screens as inveterate golf fans—was that the young man who embraced his African American father and Asian American mother at the end of the tournament was not white. Woods’s triumph was especially notable given Augusta National’s less than illustrious history of racial segregation, discrimination, and upholding of Jim Crow traditions and attitudes. This was the club where founder Clifford Roberts once infamously said, “As long as I live, there will be nothing at the Masters besides black cad-dies and white players”; the club admitted its first black member only in 1990, thirteen years after Roberts’s passing.1 The image of the mixed race black–Asian American golfer wearing the coveted and iconic green jacket seemed to signal a transcendent moment for both golf and race relations nationwide.2This moment, and the many others that would follow in the decade and a half that Woods has been playing on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour, would seem to signal that Tiger has exceeded typical racial categories to become a global symbol of mixed heritage and multiraciality. According to his father, Earl Woods, Tiger is “qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish 3Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian RealitiesTranscending Race in the Twenty-FirstCentury and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods
© 2019 Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments ix
  4. Introduction: Ambiguous Americans 1
  5. 1. From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration 22
  6. 2. Antisentimental Loss: Stories of Transracial/Transnational Asian American Adult Adoptees in the Blogosphere 44
  7. 3. Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-First Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods 71
  8. 4. Ambiguous Movements and Mobile Subjectivity: Passing in between Autobiography and Fiction with Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki 96
  9. 5. Transgressive Texts and Ambiguous Authors: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Literature 123
  10. Coda: Ending with Origins: My Own Racial Ambiguity 148
  11. Notes 153
  12. Bibliography 189
  13. Index 207
  14. About the author 217
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https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813570716-005

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments ix
  4. Introduction: Ambiguous Americans 1
  5. 1. From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration 22
  6. 2. Antisentimental Loss: Stories of Transracial/Transnational Asian American Adult Adoptees in the Blogosphere 44
  7. 3. Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-First Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods 71
  8. 4. Ambiguous Movements and Mobile Subjectivity: Passing in between Autobiography and Fiction with Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki 96
  9. 5. Transgressive Texts and Ambiguous Authors: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Literature 123
  10. Coda: Ending with Origins: My Own Racial Ambiguity 148
  11. Notes 153
  12. Bibliography 189
  13. Index 207
  14. About the author 217
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