UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS - SIX MONTHS LATER : Separate Lives / DEALING WITH RACE IN L.A. : ‘This Is an Ongoing Compromise’

No one has ever come right out and told Daisy Tseng she is married to a lazy liar. But several people who don’t know Tseng’s husband--who have never even seen him--have indirectly said as much. Some have even expected her to agree.

Once, a business associate--who, like Tseng, had immigrated to America from China--told Tseng that he didn’t like black people. They were not honest, he said, and didn’t work hard. Politely, but firmly, Tseng surprised him when she said she had living proof he was wrong: her husband, Reginald Holmes.

On another occasion, a Chinese acquaintance who was trying to adopt a child told Tseng that she could never bring herself to adopt a black infant. Tseng, whose two young sons are half-black and half-Chinese, spoke up again.

“Sometimes I have to tell people, not in a hostile way, ‘My husband is black. So if you have anything negative to say or stereotypical jokes, save them for other people,’ ” said the Ladera Heights resident. “I have no choice.”

Tseng, Holmes and their sons, Reynolds, 4, and Ryan, 2 1/2, are just one of a growing number of interracial households in Southern California for whom battling racism is a family affair. Twenty-five years after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling made interracial marriage legal in every state, mixed-race couples and their children continue to confront prejudices.

A white woman married to a black man receives this advice from a colleague at an Azusa electronics company: If you want to get ahead, don’t display a family portrait on your desk.

A Puerto Rican woman whose husband is black is invited out for an evening of salsa music by an old friend. She knows her friend’s intent: “To make sure I don’t ‘dilute’ myself further.”

Then there’s the look . All interracial families experience it--in shopping malls, at the beach. Strangers gaze unabashedly, some merely curious, others hostile. One woman calls it “the hate stare.”

Despite these challenges, the ranks of so-called high-contrast families continue to grow--a trend that some scholars believe bodes well for the future of race relations. Interracial marriages are not antidotes to bigotry, they say, but they are hopeful indicators. Each healthy multiethnic family offers a little bit of proof, experts say, that when it comes to race, differences need not always divide.

Daisy Tseng and Reginald Holmes have one of those families. After five years of marriage, their belief that diversity breeds strength underlies nearly everything they do.

Tseng, 33, and Holmes, 42, are working hard to teach their children about their two cultures--already, the toddlers speak both English and Chinese. In their professional life, the couple is building a law practice that specializes, among other things, in cross-cultural negotiations.

But as easy as Holmes and Tseng make interracial matrimony seem, they are the first to describe how difficult it can be. Especially early on, they faced hurtful stereotypes--not just those expressed by colleagues or acquaintances but also some that were nestled deep in their relatives’ minds, and in their own.

To change those attitudes has required perseverance, patience and compromise. On occasion, subtle cultural differences have caused misunderstandings between husband and wife. At times, both say they have felt drained by the demands of living multicultural lives.

“It takes a lot of energy to do this--educating our kids in two cultures, fighting the biases and prejudices and limitations of each of those cultures, some which are rather extreme,” said Holmes. But so far, the obstacles have only “made us cleave a little bit closer.”

They met at a Los Angeles language school, where Holmes had gone to study Tseng’s native language, Mandarin Chinese. Tseng was Holmes’ teacher, and he was immediately attracted to her.

Tseng admits she was oblivious. Raised in a conservative Chinese family, schooled at National Taiwan University in Taipei, she had always assumed she would marry a Chinese man. Unlike Holmes, who had dated many women outside his race, Tseng had never thought romantically about a black man.

“Before I met Reg, I never had extensive contact with African-Americans,” she said, adding that her lack of exposure made it easy for her to believe negative generalizations about black people: “That a lot of black people are on social welfare, that they commit crimes--that type of thing. Nobody I knew had ever challenged those things.”

Holmes did. Confident and sophisticated, he wooed her with invitations to foreign film screenings and moonlit walks on the beach. Tseng was finishing a master’s thesis on the assimilation of Chinese immigrants, and she found Holmes--then the general counsel to a large company that did business in Asia--to be a sharp thinker. Holmes, meanwhile, was impressed by her perceptiveness and her ability to read people.

They fell in love. But for months, Tseng says, worries about her family’s reaction made her avoid the topic of marriage.

“It was, ‘Maybe let’s wait. Maybe not right now. Maybe a little bit later,’ ” she recalls. “If it was another Chinese, we would probably have talked about marriage a lot sooner.”

When they did decide to marry, Tseng’s worst fears were confirmed. Her decision to marry a non-Chinese person was unacceptable to her parents.

“We rejected it from the beginning, not because he’s a black. Just because of the culture difference. . . He was Western. She was Eastern. Her mind, her blood, was all Chinese. How could they adjust to each other?” asked Wen-Wei Tseng, Daisy’s father. “We said, ‘Don’t.’ ”

When their daughter said she could not obey, both parents were deeply hurt.

“We thought, ‘You did not take my advice. That means I maybe mean nothing to you. I’m not important. So you are free,’ ” Daisy’s father recalls.

Some members of Holmes’ family reacted similarly. He had been married before, to a black woman, and has a 7-year-old son from that marriage. Betty Jones, Holmes’ mother, was still fond of Holmes’ first wife. But she said she would not oppose his new marriage.

But Sonji Higginbotham, Holmes’ youngest sister, was aghast.

“I liked the black women he dated. I felt like one of them should have been good enough for him,” said Higginbotham, 25, a bank analyst in Miami. “We didn’t have any argument. I just put him aside. He was my brother and yet he wasn’t my brother anymore.”

Today, family members on both sides say their opposition was grounded in love. Marriage is difficult enough between people of shared backgrounds. Higginbotham worried the couple would face societal disapproval.

“I thought they were just going to be battling it all the time. I was totally against it,” she said, adding that her brother’s happiness with Tseng has since changed her mind.

Some acquaintances also disapproved. It was suggested that Holmes was abandoning his black heritage, that his relationship with Tseng indicated he had a problem with his own ethnicity.

“That’s nonsense,” Holmes says flatly. “I love black people.”

Holmes and Tseng acknowledge that their cultural differences sometimes cause tensions, though not necessarily those that others expect. For example, some people assume that when interracial couples fight, racial slurs are used as weapons. Tseng and Holmes say no.

“It’s not like when I’m mad then he all of a sudden becomes a terrible black person or that I say, ‘This is how black people are,’ ” said Tseng. “No. He simply becomes a pain.”

At times, however, their styles do clash. Holmes is assertive and direct--qualities he attributes in part to his race. Tseng hangs back, reads a situation carefully and tries to end conflict quickly. In some arguments, that difference has brought them to an impasse.

“As a black person,” said Holmes, “what you savor above all is being real, laying it on the line and being truthful. Among Chinese it’s, ‘Let’s be polite.’ I’m saying, ‘What I want to hear is the truth.’ And she’s saying, ‘If I tell you the truth, we’ll never get to the end of this. So tell me what it is you want to hear.’ ”

But they say this kind of back-and-forth, though it can be frustrating, has strengthened their marriage.

“This is an ongoing compromise--picking up information from each other and seeing how you can do it better,” said Tseng, who credits Holmes with pushing her to be more forthright. Holmes, meanwhile, says he believes Tseng has made him more tolerant.

Tseng and Holmes got married in a private ceremony, then held a reception at the Jonathan Club, where Holmes is a member. Tseng’s family did not attend.

For more than a year, Tseng and her parents did not speak. It was a painful time. Both parents said they missed their daughter, but they couldn’t bring themselves to make the first move. Tseng says the isolation “was torture.”

Holmes and Tseng’s first son, Reynolds, broke the ice. Soon after the birth of the black-haired, light-skinned boy, Tseng made her first visit to her parents’ home. Today, Tseng’s parents say Reynolds was “the key to open the door.”

“I saw the baby and I strongly felt, this baby is my flesh and blood,” recalls Cheng Yu Tseng, Daisy’s mother. “I love the baby. I should accept the parents.”

Back then, Holmes would often sit in his car outside his in-laws’ home, waiting for his wife and child to complete their visit. He says he did not want to force an already fragile relationship. By letting the Tseng family set the pace, he believed things would improve.

“Most families want the best for their daughters. And they see in this country African-Americans at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale--who wants. . .their daughter to go off and marry a black man?” he said. “You have to give people time.”

Holmes’ mother was less philosophical.

“It upset me. It really did,” she recalled. Tseng’s parents, she felt, “were looking at Reg as a black man, not as a man.”

But one day, Wen-Wei was standing in the driveway when Holmes drove up. When Holmes got out of the car, his father-in-law embraced him.

Tseng’s mother took longer to welcome Holmes into the family. She took pains to avoid her son-in-law until 1990, when Reynolds’ second birthday party brought them together. Determined to be polite, Holmes addressed his mother-in-law formally, as “Mrs. Tseng.” She didn’t like it.

“Didn’t you teach him any manners?” she asked her daughter in a scolding tone that hid her underlying message of acceptance. “What is he calling me Mrs. Tseng for? He should call me mom.”

Today, Tseng’s parents brag that having two cultures may give their grandchildren an advantage. “They will be smarter than their father,” Tseng’s father said, grinning affectionately at Holmes.

Holmes hopes his father-in-law is right. At the predominantly black preschool Reynolds and Ryan attend, neither boy has been teased about being biracial. But Holmes and Tseng believe it is only a matter of time before the taunts begin, and they want their children to be ready.

“People do judge you based on the color of your skin,” said Holmes, noting the clashes between Koreans and blacks during the riots last spring. “How do you get your kids to rise above the bigotry?”

Holmes and Tseng are doing their best to set an example. Recently, someone asked Holmes, “When you look at your wife, don’t you think about the fact that she’s Chinese?” He recalls his answer: “No. I think ‘She’s my wife.’ ”

A Union of Color

“Under our Constitution the freedom to marry or not to marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.”

--Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, June, 1967

THE NUMBERS--In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that nationwide there were 651,000 interracial couples, or 1.3% of all married people. By 1991, the number had risen to 994,000, or 1.9%. Of those, about a quarter were unions of blacks and whites--a fairly constant proportion during the last decade.

THE OPPOSITION--Studies show that opposition intensifies if a family member marries someone of a darker hue. A 1992 survey by UCLA sociology Prof. Larry Bobo found 30% of non-black L.A. County residents would disapprove if a family member married a black person. Marriages to Asians were opposed by 20.3% of non-Asians. Latinos were opposed by 17.8% of non-Latinos, while white spouses were opposed by 10.9% of non-whites.

THE DIVORCE RATE--The U.S. Census does not track the divorce rate of interracial couples. But the National Center for Health Statistics used marriage and divorce records in 23 states to identify 7,900 black-white couples and 736,000 same-race couples married in 1975. Tracking divorce in both groups for 13 years, the center found virtually no difference. About 29% of both groups’ marriages ended in divorce.