\u2018Many American women wrote books. Why should not a Chinese? She would write a book about Americans for her Chinese women friends,\u201d thinks Mrs. Spring Fragrance in Edith Maude Eaton’s story The Inferior Woman. \u201cThe American people were so interesting and mysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eaton, who often wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, is considered the mother of Asian-American literature, the first writer of Chinese descent to publish fiction in North America, closely followed by her sister Winnifred Eaton, who assumed a half-Japanese persona and wrote as Onoto Watanna.<\/p>\n
Eaton’s stories, published from the late 1880s until the years leading up to her death in 1914, offered an insider’s view of the Chinese diaspora living in North America, covering both universal struggles \u2013 romantic love, gender inequality \u2013 and those specific to the community \u2013 immigration, assimilation, racism. A major new discovery of 89 works by a researcher at the University of British Columbia reveals that Eaton, who spent many years in Montreal, was a lot more prolific than previously believed, her oeuvre much more complex and diverse.<\/p>\n
The find, along with other recent discoveries, has essentially quadrupled Eaton’s canon, says Mary Chapman, associate professor at UBC’s Department of English, and the detective in this literary sleuthing tale. Some of the uncovered works \u2013 including short stories, essays, newspaper articles and poetry \u2013 were attributed to Sui Sin Far. Others were anonymous, and some were written under different names for publications including the Montreal Star, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Boston Globe and Ladies’ Home Journal.<\/p>\n
Chapman says these finds challenge many widely held ideas about Eaton and her work, and have made Chapman question how many other unknown works by established female writers of the time might be out there.<\/p>\n
Edith Eaton was born in 1865 in Macclesfield, England, to a British father and Chinese mother. When Edith was 7, the family settled in Montreal.<\/p>\n
As a teenager, Eaton got a job setting type at the Montreal Star, and later earned a living as a stenographer. But she was also writing her own pieces. Over the years, many of these works \u2013 written in cities from Thunder Bay to San Francisco to Kingston, Jamaica \u2013 were published under the name Sui Sin Far or a variation of this nickname from childhood.<\/p>\n
Eaton’s stories offered an alternative to the familiar \u201cyellow peril\u201d outsider’s narrative of the Chinese experience in North America at the time. She wrote about diasporic families \u2013 women, children \u2013 and she wrote from a Eurasian perspective, which was groundbreaking<\/p>\n
The stories in Eaton’s 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance smashed literary stereotypes, shining a sympathetic light on the North American experience for Chinese immigrants and their descendants during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States and the head tax in Canada.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not recoil \u2013 not even at first,\u201d recounts the protagonist in The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese after she leaves her white husband and is offered a place to stay by a Chinese man. \u201cIt may have been because he was wearing American clothes, wore his hair cut, and, even to my American eyes, appeared a good-looking young man \u2013 and it may have been because of my troubles; but whatever it was I answered him, and I meant it: \u2018I would much rather live with Chinese than Americans.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Two years after the book’s publication, Eaton died in Montreal. Her literary contribution was essentially forgotten for decades, but her work was rediscovered after the 1995 publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, edited by Eaton scholars Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Sui Sin Far became a household name, at least in the small universe of academic circles focusing on Asian-American fiction \u2013 and among scholarly literary academics in China.<\/p>\n
Chapman was doing research into suffragist writing when she hit on what would become a treasure trove. Aware that Eaton had written a couple of stories that were \u201ckind of snippy about suffrage,\u201d a Google search turned up an Eaton story Chapman had never seen. The Alaska Widow, published in Bohemian Magazine in 1909, was not referenced in any of the Eaton scholarship, and seemed atypical of her oeuvre: It was set in Alaska and the Philippines; it was a much more sustained, lengthy piece; it dealt with racy issues such as infidelity.<\/p>\n
For Chapman, a light went on. \u201cI thought, oh my God; she was a self-supporting writer; she had to have published way more stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
The search was on.<\/p>\n
A fertile starting point was the Mrs. Spring Fragrance acknowledgment page, where Eaton thanked editors of various publications \u201cwho were kind enough to care for my children when I sent them out into the world, for permitting the dear ones to return to me to be grouped together within this volume.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chapman and student researchers in various cities scoured those publications, and were rewarded with more clues. Chapman also traced the careers of editors who worked with Eaton, figuring they might have published her work elsewhere. She was right. In one case, Chapman found a letter from Eaton saying she was travelling by train across the continent, \u201cmaking my way as a Chinaman.\u201d Chapman, knowing who Eaton was writing for then and the rough dates, found a 1904 article in the L.A. Express by a man named Wing Sing, about a cross-country train trip. She knew Wing Sing was Eaton \u2013 the dates, cities, publications lined up. Although the writing was in an entirely different style.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am a Chinaman. My name is Wing Sing,\u201d begins Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels. \u201cI got a wife and boy in China, but for ten years I live in America. I learn speak American. Some time white man laugh at my speaking and I say him, \u2018Perhaps you not speak my Chinese talk so well I speak your talk. Perhaps I laugh more at you try to speak Chinese man’s language.’ That American man not laugh any more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here Eaton, posing as an Americanized Chinese merchant, is able to sell what is promised to be the first of a series of travel articles, while refuting stereotypes in a more subversive way.<\/p>\n
One major piece of the puzzle is still missing: the book Eaton was working on toward the end of her life. \u201cThe search continues for that one,\u201d says Chapman, whose Sui Sin Far in Canada: The Uncollected Canadian Writings of Edith Eaton (working title) will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.<\/p>\n
In The Inferior Woman, Mrs. Spring Fragrance talks repeatedly about the book she wants to write. She describes it as \u201ca book about Americans, an immortal book.\u201d Even if Eaton’s second book is never found, Mrs. Spring Fragrance \u2013 a book about people, not just Americans \u2013 has turned out to have more life than Eaton probably could have imagined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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