The very idea behind O’Reilly’s book was ironic, even farcical. He was the most respected Irishman in Boston, one who dined with the Brahmins; he embodied Irish-American gentility and social aspirations. Yet his choice of subject—boxing—played into all of the worst fears about the Irish in his day, who were thought to be intemperate, uncouth, corrupt, and violent.

Boxing’s most prominent champion, the great John L. Sullivan, earned and squandered several fortunes, drank champagne by the bucket, left his wife in order to live openly with a chorus girl, and generally served as a walking affront to Victorian morality. That such a man could be the subject of several chapters in O’Reilly’s book displays a deep conflict in the Irish-American experience at the time—the emergent “lace curtain Irish” succeeding the so called “shanty Irish.” Stereotypes aside, the clashing identities were, for millions of Irish Americans, a very real struggle for redefinition.

John L. Sullivan, heavyweight boxer and unrepentant tough guy, in an undated photo. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

Fifty years earlier, the Great Famine had spurred a massive out-migration of emigrants from Ireland, a wave so large it would be comparable to 13 million indigent newcomers arriving in the U.S. today. Most were dirty, unskilled, illiterate, and subject to exploitations we can barely imagine. But by century’s end, the Irish had taken over urban politics, turned the Roman Catholic Church into the nation’s largest denomination, and begun sending their sons and daughters to college.

It’s an old American story: The outsider becomes the insider, the country bumpkin becomes a sophisticate. For the Irish, the story often played out in the world of professional sports. Then as now, celebrities used autobiographies (sometimes clearly ghost-written) to polish and to reinforce their image; it was one of the perks of showmanship. Three such books by Irish athletes open a window on this transitional era and the push for respectability: John L. Sullivan, the last bareknuckle boxing champion; boxer James J. Corbett, widely known as “Gentleman Jim,” who straddled both sides of the social gulf; and baseball’s Connie Mack (real name Cornelius McGillicuddy), who raised respectability to an art form. All three, through carefully constructed public personae, promoted a virtual cult of respectability. Its cornerstones were sobriety, pious Catholicism, a home life focusing on idealized motherhood, and a preoccupation with good appearances.

Most professional athletes of the day fell well short of the cult’s standards, not least Sullivan, whose signature saloon entry involved striking the bar and bellowing, “My name is John L. Sullivan and I can lick any sonofabitch in the house!” It was a telling slur. To call someone an SOB is to slander their origins. Though he may have had a funny way of showing it, Sullivan, like any upwardly mobile Irishman of his day, cared about his breeding and his good reputation.

Boxer James Corbett, photographed in the 1890s, championed “scientific boxing,” a departure from the bare-knuckled brawls of the past, and attended the opera. His mother, who he revered, had hoped he would become a priest. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

“My father and mother were Irish,” he would write in his 1892 autobiography, Life and Reminiscences of a 19th-Century Gladiator, “and I always aim at upholding the honor of the Irish people, who are a brave race.” His memoir was an attempt to disown his raffish side. He intended to show, he wrote, that he was “conscious of being something more than a pugilist.” He insisted that he could “give an intelligent opinion on almost any subject, and conduct myself as a gentleman in any company.” Sullivan proudly quoted a sportswriter who had remarked that, “He was a very well-read man, and preferred any time to discuss Shakespeare, Gladstone or Parnell to talking fight.”

Skepticism can be forgiven. In fact, when a publisher spotted his Life and Reminiscences in the public domain and reissued it, the memoir was retitled I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House—a celebration of loutishness. That the same book could appear under two titles, one evoking classic courage and the other hooliganism is, in a way, the point: Sullivan knew that certain behaviors were unacceptable, but he also delighted in his own transgressiveness. His public delighted in it, too.

Sullivan was a ruffian who could pretend sophistication. But boxing has long tried to meld coarseness with refinement (as ringside fans and announcers in tuxedoes show), and it was “Gentleman Jim” Corbett who tipped the balance. Only eight years younger than John L., he truly was a polished young man. He read widely and attended the opera. As the literary critic John V. Kelleher said, Corbett “was a prophetic figure: slim, deft, witty, looking like a proto-Ivy Leaguer with his pompadour, his fresh intelligent face, his well-cut young man’s clothes. He was, as it were, the paradigm of all those young Irish Americans about to make the grade.”

Corbett was still a boxer, of course, but his 1925 memoir The Roar of the Crowd emphasized “scientific” boxing as a pointed renunciation of the old lumbering brawn of Sullivan’s generation. His memoir also took direct aim at Sullivan’s behavior outside the ring, recounting a time when Corbett witnessed the older boxer’s brash barroom insults first hand. In this telling, Corbett, a teetotaler, stepped up to give Sullivan a stern lesson in manners, telling him that profanity-laced namecalling was “hardly courteous, and I don’t want you to make that remark in my presence again!’” The rough-edged champ, we are told, “listens to reason.”

John L. Sullivan and James Corbett squared off in the ring in 1892. Corbett won, signaling the rise of a new, more respectable Irish American athletic icon. Image courtesy of Associated Press.

The Roar of the Crowd repeatedly asserts Corbett’s lifelong dedication to his parents. As champion, he pays off their mortgage, and late in the book he delights in taking his mother back to Ireland. Corbett’s account presents his father as deeply divided when it came to boxing, simultaneously ill-at-ease with it and proud of his son’s success. It should surprise no one that Corbett’s mother’s dream was for him to become a priest.

Corbett’s relative wholesomeness marked a symbolic step, yet when he wrested the boxing title from Sullivan in 1892, the Irish American community felt a pang of remorse for the old raffishness. It would be up to a baseball player to mark the decorous end of the shanty Irish world.

Though early baseball is not generally considered the Irish specialty that prizefighting was, at the end of the 19th century around 40 percent of professional baseball players were the sons of Irish immigrants, and the national game shared many of the concerns, and aspirations, of the American Irish. Ballplayers were known for gambling, liquor, brawling, and venereal disease, and baseball grew desperate to cast off its unsavory reputation. The American League was founded in 1901 as a conscious attempt to present a more sanitized and socially acceptable pastime. A founding paragon of its new respectability was another Irish athlete: Connie Mack.

The ever-formal Connie Mack hung up his hat and coat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium on August 10, 1950. Photo by Murray Becker/Associated Press.

He bore no traces of the hardscrabble mill town in which he’d grown up. Corbett may have been a gentleman, but Mack was a young man of exceptionally clean habits. When he got his first offer to play professionally, in the Connecticut State League, he did what any good Irish boy would do—he asked his mother for advice. Here is their reported exchange, from Mack’s 1950 memoir, My Sixty-Six Years in the Big Leagues: “‘Promise me one thing,’ she said. ‘Promise me that you won’t let them get you into bad habits. I’ve brought you up to be a good boy. Promise me that you won’t drink.’ I promised her, and that promise I shall keep to the end of my life.”

Indeed, in later years Mack, by then the venerable manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, unfailingly presented the game in terms of personal conduct, advising rookies that they must “have good moral habits and self-control. You can have everything else that’s needed to make the grade, but if you don’t have good moral character you are not for the big leagues.” Wilfrid Sheed once quipped that not swearing counts as the “pinnacle of virtue in baseball.” Mack’s disdain for rough language was famous. For a baseball man, he was heroically circumspect, rarely arguing a call. As a manager, he always wore a suit and starched collar, which kept him off the field and out of the public eye.

Personal reserve, and humility—concepts foreign to Sullivan and Corbett, who thrived on their superstar status —were cherished aspects of his public face. So unobtrusive was Mack that when a holiday was declared in Philadelphia after the 1910 World Series, he reportedly rode a public streetcar to the mayor’s office and went unrecognized. Mack’s formal persona would eventually eclipse, or even excuse, his baseball. He came to be honored for his rectitude rather than his team’s achievements. By the time of Mack’s eventual retirement in 1950, the old rough-and-tumble Irish America that had produced these athletes was all but forgotten. In another decade, the Harvard-educated Kennedys would be playing touch football on the White House lawn.

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Halfway through the connecting flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, I was handed a landing card from the flight attendant and began filling out my passport details. Under nationality, I wrote Korean and Irish. After all, anytime someone at college in Santa Barbara, California, (or on the street, or in a retail store, or at a bar) would ask me the dreaded “What are you?” question, I knew that was the answer they were after. My mother was raised in Dublin and my father was of Korean descent, though he grew up in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. When people in the U.S. ask you about your origin story, they usually don’t want to hear that you’re from Newport Beach.

That question generally is trying to get at where you are really, really from – that is, where your parents are from. In those transformative college years, when race, ethnicity, and gender were at the forefront of my class discussions, I felt as if I was always under scrutiny. I was not Asian enough to be Asian and not white enough to be white. Back then, I preferred to think of myself as a global citizen since I didn’t fit into one box.

Arriving at the modern airport in KL, as locals affectionately refer to the city, the immigration officer was quick to tell me to fill out a new landing card. My blue passport did not say “Korean” or “Irish;” it said United States of America. I was a bit mortified at my error and couldn’t blame it on the jet lag. It was as though I had forgotten that I was indeed American after a lifetime of mini-interrogations about my ethnic background.

In the backseat of the taxi, I remember being blown away by the skyline—it put Los Angeles to shame—especially the Petronas Twin Towers, which were the tallest in the world at the time. People were friendly and everyone I interacted with spoke English, making the initial transition far easier than I had anticipated. My editor Kean arranged for another student intern and I to stay with a generous host who refused to charge us rent. We knew nothing about him, only that his name was Charles and that he worked for the New Straits Times.

I loved working at the magazine, and aside from the stifling humidity (it only took a few weeks before I chopped my long hair off) and insane traffic, KL was better than I could have imagined. I ate stuffed pancakes and skewers from the hawker stalls, South Indian dishes off a banana leaf (with my hand, a first), the best stir-fried rice noodles, and even durian, the famed stinky fruit, at Charley’s encouragement. Like most people, I felt far more adventurous and independent when thousands of miles away from home.

That summer provided me with a comparative lesson in multiculturalism and diversity. Malaysia is about half Malay, 25 percent Chinese, and 8 percent Indian. Speaking of my own diverse background, I told Charley one evening that I was half-Korean. He hastened to correct me: “You are not half and half,” he said. “You are one plus one. Your whole mom and your whole dad.” After that conversation, I stopped referring to myself as half-anything, as that word didn’t describe the multitudes in my family. I liked his definition better.

Kuala Lumpur street market

Since Malaysia is an Islamic country with stricter laws (capital punishment for drug trafficking, for example), there were moments of culture shock, for sure. I became paranoid about the amount I pointed (it’s considered rude) and didn’t feel the freedom to dress exactly as I would have back in Santa Barbara (where surf culture rules sartorial choices). One weekend, we visited a nearby resort where an older man approached me saying that I looked like his fourth wife. As I tried to picture a sequence of four marriages, he made it clear that he actually had four current wives (plural marriage was not in my guidebook).

Even though I could probably pass as a local if I didn’t speak, the differing cultural traditions reminded me of my American-ness, a character trait I had never quite felt before. At five-foot-four, I felt tall and sometimes loud, even though no one at home would describe me as so. But what I noticed most was that Malaysians didn’t seem especially interested in my ethnic background. Instead, we talked about regular 20-year-old things like college life, boyfriends, and travel. On any given night, I could be out with my Chinese-Malaysian editor who was educated in Australia, my Indian-Malaysian friends who lived in London, but came back to KL for the summers, or a Muslim Malay colleague and her Dutch boyfriend. Everyone and everything—from colorful street markets to the local cuisine—was so multicultural that I no longer felt exotic, different, or all that interesting. I realized that in the U.S., the so-called melting pot was more of an illusion. I was still only able to “check one box” on most government forms (though that has changed since). Even in California, for all its diversity, ethnic groups tended to live and socialize in a segregated manner, whereas in KL, multiculturalism was visibly apparent, whether on television or at a local dinner party.

The author (second from the right) with co-workers in Kuala Lumpur.

As I met more Malaysians, I learned about their country’s colonial history, intolerant politics, and pervasive gender and sexual orientation discrimination, particularly outside of the capital. I started seeing a more complex country, realizing that it was far from perfect, just like my own homeland. Most notably, I was disturbed by the way LGBT people were discriminated against in Malaysia. Even though I had gay friends back home who weren’t fully embraced by all family members after coming out, their human rights still mattered and their identity was not considered a crime by our government.

My diary from the end of that summer says, “I feel very safe and happy, but as much as I love it, I can’t wait to go home. I realize now that being born in America makes me one of the luckiest people on Earth.” While America does not always offer “liberty and justice for all,” I certainly enjoy far more privileges as an American woman than I ever would have if I were born in Malaysia. I can dress however I like, say anything I want, and was raised by two feminist parents.

It’s funny, but my appreciation for America from afar made me embrace some of our shared culture in KL in ways that I rarely did back home, by listening to Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40 countdown, watching blockbusters like Nicolas Cage’s Face/Off and smiling at the familiarity of a Mobil gas station.

On the long flight back to LAX, anxious for Mexican food from my favorite taqueria and dying to sleep in my own bed, I correctly identified my nationality on all forms, without needing a redo.

The post How Living Abroad Brought Me Closer to Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.