Abandonment

Stoler talks about the issue of abandonment of mixed blood children in the colonial context as that which is predicated on specific race, cultural and gender coordinates. If the colonial project is based on colonial difference – race – then these mixed blood children who blur racial distinctions also disrupts colonialism and a European national identity.

The other significant thing is how criticism on abandoned mixed blood children falls more so on the immoral influences of native women rather than European men: “the indigenous woman who consents to live with a European is a veritable prostitute…when…the latter disappear or abandon her, she fatally returns to the vice which she came from…” Which seems to be exactly how Ma Hla May is portrayed in the text: a prostitute. Cultural, physical and moral contamination does not arise just out of racial differences but also becomes a gender issue. Elizabeth points out the belief that “these Eurasians are very degenerate…that half-castes always inherit what’s worst in both races” (126) – referring to these “worst” aspects as inherited from native women.

Stoler also mentions how the issue of abandonment centers on the lack of paternal [European] discipline and the threat of the single-mother family. Which can perhaps be refuted by Flory’s argument: “We always talk of them as though they’d sprung up from the ground like mushrooms, with all their faults ready-made. But when’s all said and done, we’re responsible for their existence” (126). The use of “we” suggests that there is a need to claim responsibility for these children, beyond an individual level to a national level – in which, perhaps the European colonizing nation will replace the father figure [that seems to have been missing from single-native-mother families]. But can these children, brought up by “immoral” native women, really be incorporated into the paternal colonizing nation?

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