The Eurasian Look

[Tabouli]

WARNING: Exhaustive discussion of more than you ever wanted to know about the inheritance of Eurasian features follows...

Kimberly:
> I recently read a junky novel in which a girl with a Japanese mother 
and a red-headed Irish-American father had no discernable Asian 
physical characteristics - she had rosey cheeks and curly copper-red 
hair and her father's eyes too.  It really interfered with my ability 
to suspend disbelief because it seemed nearly impossible.  So please, 
Tabouli, in your Eurasian wisdom - was this a cheap trick for the 
sake of the story, or is that plausible?<

Ahaaa!!  My my, an interesting batch of OT posts today - religious debates *and* human-genetics-as-they-apply-to-looks (a pet topic of mine.  My love of colour and hair united)!  As some of you may recall, you have here the listmember who once researched the inheritance of human eye colour to see what sort of man she would need to produce a child with green eyes... (NOTE: I did grow out of that stage and move onto much more Mature and Profound methods of partner selection eventually!)

In my long Quest for a Eurasian Identity, I actually did a science project on this very topic when I was 14.  Yea, I went around to all the half-Chinese half-Caucasian people I knew (and I knew lots, at the time, having mostly grown up in the Australian Chinese community), scrutinised them, and interviewed them about the colouring and physical features of their parents.  I can't remember all of my findings, but IIRC, they included the following:

- Nose shape tends to be inherited... er, help me, geneticists... heterozygously?  That is, the child's nose tends to fall somewhere between the shapes of his/her parents' noses.  Chinese noses are typically small, and, in Southern China, tend to have little or no "bridge".  Hence my nose and my brother's nose are a compromise between my father's long thin high-bridged Caucasian model, and my mother's flat-bridged, widish model.

- Mouth shape is similar, but less clear - you do get Eurasians with a distinctly Chinese or Caucasian mouth shape.

- Chinese eye shape seems heterozygous to dominant.  You can usually detect a Chinese shape to the eyes somewhere.  A lot of Eurasians look like slightly pinkish Chinese people with dark brown hair and Chinese shaped eyes, but not all.  Both my brother and I are rarely taken for Eurasian because our eyes are large (and sort of brown to greenish hazel), and people associate Chinese blood with small, dark, slanty eyes.  However, our mother has quite large eyes herself and definitely looks Chinese...!  Mine are a bit almondy if you know where to look, but my brother's really are quite round (add the heavy brows and runaway five o' clock shadow he's inherited from my father and *no-one* would ever guess he has a Chinese mother.  He looks Italian).

- The Chinese "epicanthal fold" (i.e. a fold of skin concealing the upper eyelid, thought to be for insulating the eye against icy Mongolian winds) seems to be dominant.  That is, if the Chinese parent has it, so will the Eurasian child.  My mother doesn't have one, neither do I (I have quite heavy lids, hence flattering comparisons of myself to Mrs Lestrange, with her sexy hooded eyes).

- There seem to be two distinct skin types in Eurasians: the first, and more common, is a sort of yellowish olive colour, often (strangely enough) darker in tone than the Chinese parent.  The second type (maybe 30%?) is pale with freckles.  Not sure what's going on here... could be something to do with the part of China the Chinese parent originates from, as the Northern Chinese sometimes have freckles.  I have the first type of skin, and my skin is indeed somewhat darker than my mother's.

- Eye colour, like nose shape, seems to be heterozygous with a multigene twist (geneticists??).  If the Caucasian parent has brown eyes, the child will often appear to have pure "Chinese" eyes (very dark to medium brown, epicanthal fold, etc.).  If the Caucasian parent has green eyes, like my father, the child's eyes will be medium brown to greenish hazel.  If the Caucasian parent has blue or grey eyes, the child's eyes could be anywhere from medium brown to, possibly, green (I don't think I've seen a Eurasian with pure green eyes myself, but I think it should be possible).

- Hair colour and texture: Curly/wavy hair mostly seems to be recessive to heteozygous.  The great majority of Eurasians have straight, very dark brown hair, though if the Caucasian had tight ringlets you might get some waves in there.  If the Caucasian parent's hair is straight and dark, the Eurasian child's hair might be black; if the Caucasian parent's hair is blond, it might be medium to light brown.  Interestingly, Eurasian hair is often reddish.  This is because (said my trusty genetics book) about 70% of Mongoloids actually have the pigment responsible for red hair, it just doesn't show because their hair is so dark.  Dilute with some Caucasian blood, and it shows up.

I should mention that a lot of the Chinese seem convinced that "the man's blood is stronger", and therefore children with a Caucasian father will look more Caucasian and vice versa.  My inner feminist gets irritated by this view (oh come on, I mutter, basic genetics, 50% from the mother, 50% from the father), but she's even more irritated to note that it seems, to a degree, to hold.  How can this be?

Note that I confined my study to Chinese Mongoloids.  There are definitely differences between different strains of "Asian" blood.  Sub-continental blood seems incredibly tenacious... I knew a pair of siblings with only one Indian grandparent (the rest white) who still looked very Indian indeed, albeit a little lighter in skin, and someone who was half white, a quarter Chinese and a quarter Indian who looked like a fair, slightly yellowish Indian.  Japanese skin tends to be fairer and more freckle-prone than Chinese skin, and I have also met two or three Japanese people with naturally ringletty hair (I took some convincing, but apparently so).  To cap things off in the odd stakes, my parents know this couple where the husband is a very blond, blue-eyed Dutchman, and the wife is a Filipina.  All three of their children came out blond!  The wife was chagrined.  "I keep hoping that at last I'll get my raven-haired beauty, but I keep getting golden-haired beauties instead!"  Two of them did darken to medium brown later, but all the same, I think it must be the Spanish blood in the Filipino population at work.

So (says Tabouli to her by now very small audience), to answer Kimberly's question, I think the junky novelist is pushing it a bit.  By my calculations, the child would probably have, at the most Caucasian, wavy reddish brown hair, light pinkish olive skin, hazel to green and somewhat olive-y shaped eyes, and somewhere between a dainty, bridgeless Japanese nose and a large, bridged Irish nose.  The only save for the writer is the fair-skinned, natural Japanese curls/surprise Caucasian ancestor and generations of red-haired blue-eyed Irish escape clause (a la Dutch-Filipina couple).  Perhaps the Japanese wife had fair skin and both natural curls and a dash of "white blood" somewhere in her ancestry, and the Irish husband was from such potently pure red-curls and blue eyes stock, their daughter miraculously fluked a very Caucasian appearance, conveniently enough for the plot...

Tabouli.


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