SELECTED CRITICISM AND PUBLIC RESPONSE TO U.S. IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE LITERATURES

The public response to immigrant literatures is tied in to larger questions concerning how American society received literally millions of newcomers to their land during the Great Wave of Migration. Cultural and social issues, such as racist attitudes to immigrants, are complex, for example, racism can occur among, or between, different immigrant groups, not just between Americans and newcomers. As an example of such a complexity, historian Gerald Sorin has examined the causes of German Jews in America taking an anti-immigrant stance against Russian Jews in the 1880s (a stance which later changed into a position of support and encouragement); he sketches important anti-Semitic experiences that German Jews had already been through, which they felt would be increased by the arrival of more Jewish immigrants:

In the status-hungry years following the Civil War, Jews' upward mobility contributed to the erection of social barriers like restricted hotels and exclusive clubs. In the scramble for prestige, Gentiles could use these noneconomic status markers in their competition with Jews, and social discrimination was intensified. In the late 1870s, German Jewish arrivistes found themselves increasingly excluded from upper-crust private schools, college fraternities, and “desirable” neighborhoods.¹

In times of large increases in immigrant arrivals to the west, any visible marker of difference can be foregrounded by those wishing to discriminate against and ultimately exclude so-called “foreigners” or “aliens” from mainstream society; again, the arguments are complex, for example, with public voices saying that the obviously different looking or acting immigrants in question do not wish to adopt the values of American society. However, such an accusation then leads into further issues, such as whether society should be composed of ethnic groups that have complex, multiple and even contradictory allegiances and cultural identities, or whether assimilation to, say, an Anglo-Saxon or some other norm is desirable. In other words, what exactly it is that constitutes “American values” and an “American citizen” is up for debate. Such issues and arguments are beyond the scope of this essay, but it is important to note that different immigrant groups have had different experiences coming to America in part because of shifting attitudes among Americans to how they should conceive of their own identity or citizenship.² The Exclusion Act of 1882, for example, was indicative of the long-term rejection of “Asian” peoples in America, and was the culminating point of a large number of racist and discriminatory measures, such as the Foreign Miners Tax of 1852, and a whole series of irritating and problematic laws, such as the Cubic Air Ordinance (1870) which ostensibly was a public health ruling that led to problems among Chinese who shared cramped tenement rooms.³ The Exclusion Act: “… heralded a change in the nation's immigration pattern. Free and unrestricted immigration was replaced by restrictions and racism. For the first time in American history, members of a specific ethnic group were refused entry and admittance to the naturalization process.”⁴ However, this is not to suggest that Chinese immigrants passively accepted all of the discriminatory measures legally created; the reality is that Chinese social and political organizations were active in working to create freedom and opportunity within America.

The question of the initial public response to immigrant literatures in part reflects back upon the public themselves: their response showed what they wanted to see within various immigrant groups. For example, the Chinese and Japanese Ambassadors of Goodwill wrote narratives that appealed in general to the American public because the latter appeared to be getting glimpses into romantic, or even exotic locations (the descriptions of China or Japan) and at the same time, quaint or cute descriptions of America, such as Sugimoto's representation of San Francisco:

My experiences in San Francisco were strange and puzzling, but delightful in their novelty. The astonishing little room at the Palace Hotel which we had no sooner entered than it began to rise upward, finally depositing us in a large apartment where we had a view as vast as from a mountain-top; the smooth white bathtub which could be filled with hot water without fuel or delay; the locked doors everywhere, for in Japan we never had a lock; all of these strange things, combined with the bewildering sense of the bigness of everything, was almost overpowering.⁵

Such a series of descriptions can be said to not only gently show Japan's “backward” state in terms of modern technologies such as elevators and instant hot-water, but it also conveys a sense of America being simply bigger and more powerful than Japan and the Japanese. Such an ideology may have appealed to Sugimoto's original western readers, but more recently has been rejected by critics such as Kim: “Her [Sugimoto's] personal account is laced with romantic Japanese legends, shimmering tales, and lyrical descriptions of traditional customs and festivals, which were already being “lost in the mist of past years.” The Japan Sugimoto knows and loves symbolizes the beautiful and doomed past, and she stands between, a living bridge between two countries and two eras.”⁶ However, Sugimoto's text does contain a subtly critical edge, for example with her critique of the American suburban lifestyle she finds herself marooned within, and in particular her account of the way American wives seem to be disempowered by, and within, their marriages. Kim sketches briefly some of the initial responses to Sugimoto's autobiography:

Generally, American critics viewed A Daughter of a Samurai sympathetically as the “appealing narrative of a little daughter of old Japan.” [New York Times, Jan. 10, 1926] They found favor with it as an apologia for Japan and a hymn of praise to America by an endearing Japanese who has “no superiority complex, pleads no causes, asks no vexing questions” but instead “tells a tale with delicacy and taste.” [New York Tribune, Nov. 22, 1925]⁷

“Vexing questions” were of course being asked elsewhere in American society, for example, by Japanese politicians and Japanese American lobbyists (leading to the Gentleman's Agreement) and in the Chinese community by members of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (originally called the Native Sons of the Golden State, formed 1895) and later, groups such as the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA) founded in 1933.⁸

Stereotypes concerning immigrant groups are a serious consideration when it comes to the reception of immigrant narratives. Much of the hostility to Asian Americans in the early years, for example, can be traced to stereotypical representations of Chinatown as a place of intense criminality and evil in texts written by westerners. The project to place such stereotyping under criticism would be a long and difficult one, and was successfully initiated in literature written in English by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), in her journalism, autobiographical sketches and short stories, all of which appeared in a wide range of mainstream newspapers and magazines. Many immigrant writers used their own languages and community newspapers (and other outlets) to resist stereotyping; some critics have argued that as long as such writers failed to reach a wider English-speaking public, such resistance was doomed to fail. Fred L. Gardaphé examines stereotypes of Italian Americans, which would later be interrogated most powerfully by second-generation writers and novelists:

By 1930 various stereotypes of the Italian immigrant in American culture had been well established as the myths through which the Italian American presence would be read. If the Italian was not seen as a gangster or a knife-wielding, mustachioed foreigner who had taken away jobs from the earlier immigrants, then he was depicted as “a restless, roving creature, who dislikes the confinement and restraint of mill and factory,” “very slow to take to American ways,” “volatile, and incapable of effective team work” (Orth, Our Foreigners, 182-3). In spite of the quotas established on Italian immigration in the mid-1920s, restrictionists in Congress pointed to the Italians as a major reason for unemployment and crime. Nativists argued for total exclusion and even wholesale deportation of Italians. If these views were not enough to marginalize Italians, the rise of fascism in Italy during this period renewed suspicion of and hostility toward the Italian in America.⁹

Generally, early immigrant autobiographical narratives were well-received by the American public, although such a reception did not necessarily convert into huge sales or a large following among readers. This may be reflected in part by the generic limitations of immigrant autobiographies; in other words, usually only one main autobiographical text is likely to be written by an author, such as with Rosa (there are of course exceptions to this rule), and autobiographical narratives do not generally receive the publicity that a novel can quickly gain, except in the case of autobiographies of famous public figures such as leading (or corrupt) politicians, movie stars, or people made notorious for some other reason (usually a major crime or public scandal). Clearly, immigrants in their first phase of arrival are unlikely to occupy such a famous public position within society. However, with second-generation immigrant narratives and bildungsromans, the scope for creativity and output is increased, especially with stories and novels that combine the experiences and burning issues of a particular immigrant group with themes that appeal to the wider community of English-speaking readers. In other words, while autobiographical narratives have universal appeal, the immigrant bildungsroman, based upon personal experience and imaginative creation, can utilize the best of both worlds. The increasingly critical edge found in the immigrant bildungsroman does not necessarily lead to the genre being rejected by the public: in fact the opposite is the case, with diverse texts from Toshio Mori's subtly critical Yokohama, California to Gold's blaring Marxist-Socialist condemnation of capitalism, in Jews without Money, being critically acclaimed.

LOOKING AT THE LITERATURE OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE CULTURALLY

Any examination of the literature of the immigrant experience from a cultural perspective must take into account changing attitudes within western societies in relation to the issue of assimilation; that is to say, within certain sectors of society (notably within the college system and the liberal media) there has been a marked shift away from assimilation towards the recognition of value within ethnic identity. However, not all sectors of western society support this shift, or regard it as progressive. The rejection of “assimilation” and at times “multiculturalism” (as being a watered-down version of assimilation) has directly affected the ways in which immigrant literatures are read by academics and others. For example, many people within America have in recent years turned to a tracing of their ethnic roots, with a renewed interest in genealogy, or the tracing of family connections. In the college system, the rise of various “-isms” such as feminism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, have led to a renewed interest in ethnic writing, especially in the recovery of women writers who might otherwise have been marginalised or actively forgotten in literary history. Such a process of critical recovery and recuperation can be traced in the example of Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton).

Sui Sin Far's work was seen as central to the recovery of Asian American literature within the canon, gaining a mention from the editors of Aiiieeeee! in 1974,¹⁰ and with the groundbreaking work of S. E. Solberg in 1976, with a paper read at the Pacific Northwest Asian Writer's Conference in Seattle, entitled “Eaton Sisters: Sui Sin Far and Onota Watanna” (16^th April 1976); this paper was followed in 1981 by an essay in MELUS entitled “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionalist.”¹¹ where Solberg traces Sui Sin Far's ancestry, explores the historical differences in stereotyping and other attitudes towards the Chinese and Japanese Americans, and finally analyses Sui Sin Far's literary project and style. Solberg argues:

While Eaton wrote well, she never acquired the control of style necessary to deal with her subjects in depth or at length. What she wrote were chiefly sketches, vignettes. The task she had set herself was nearly impossible at that time. Trapped in the stylistic conventions of the time, including dialogue in a forced and artificial dialect, she could only try, by selection of her story material, to tell about the real Chinese-Americans she knew.¹²

This slightly negative assessment would be balanced by more positive views about the conditions and achievements of Sui Sin Far's work. In 1982, in his Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, William Wu “… acknowledged the insider perspective of Sui Sin Far's sympathetic stories about Chinese Americas.”¹³ In 1983, in an article called “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist” Amy Ling focused on Sui Sin Far's “rebellious and subversive stance,”¹⁴ followed by a study in 1986 which looked at Sui Sin Far's influence on Han Suyin.¹⁵ Linda Popp Di Biase published “A Chinese Lily in Seattle” in the Seattle Weekly in 1986, and the following year, a chapter by Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom in the book collection Chinese America: History and Perspectives, analyzed Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance.¹⁶ Dong and Hom took a critical stance, looking at Orientalism in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. In the 1990s, critical writing advanced into a number of areas, including a more extensive analysis of the biographical backgrounds to Far's writing with Annette White-Parks' 1991 doctoral dissertation “Sui Sin Far: Writer on the Chinese-Anglo Borders of North America,” which was revised and published in 1995 as Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography.¹⁷ Xiao-Huang Yin continued the recovery and recuperation process in 1991, with “Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far—the First Chinese-American Woman Writer,” arguing that: “Owing to her [Far's] talents in writing and deep insight into the themes she presents, she achieved great success. At a time when there was strong bias against writers of Chinese ancestry in mainstream American literature, her works were carried by major literary journals and newspapers throughout America …”¹⁸ Amy Ling compared and contrasted Far and her sister's different literary styles and strategies in a chapter of her Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry,¹⁹ while Elizabeth Ammons also devoted a chapter to Far in her Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century.²⁰ A debate concerning literary influences and relationships started in the mid-decade, with two papers of particular merit claiming Sui Sin Far for Canada and America, respectively: James Doyle's “Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna: Two Early Chinese-Canadian Authors,” (1994) and Ning Yu's “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice.” (1996)²¹ At the close of the decade, Sean McCann produced his “Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far,” published in The Yale Journal of Criticism. (1999)²²

What this sequence of key critical and biographical works on Sui Sin Far reveals is the way that an interest in Chinese American writing coincides with a strong interest in feminist studies in the recuperation process. As critical attention to Sui Sin Far's work increases, the complex interlinking of place and literary context can be further elaborated. Such a recuperation process has occurred with other key immigrant authors, such as Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was brought back from virtual obscurity by its reprinting in the early 1960s. Hana Wirth-Nesher notes that:

The ever-increasing interest in Call It Sleep throughout the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a rise in ethnic studies, with the ideological shift from the melting pot to what we have come to call multiculturalism. Along with the book's impeccable credentials as modernist masterpiece, it now acquired the added dimension of ethnic chronicle. As a new wave of university students two generations removed from immigration participated in a nationwide search for national roots beyond the Atlantic, Call It Sleep became a staple of Jewish literature and Jewish studies curricula.²³

A variety of critical approaches to Roth was utilized during the 1960s and 1970s, including work which positioned him as a proletarian writer, for example, Kenneth Ledbetter's “Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: The Revival of a Proletarian Novel” (1966),²⁴ and work which focused on the apocalyptic strands in his, and others, writings. The latter studies include William Freedman's “Henry Roth and the Redemptive Imagination” (1967) and Bonnie Lyons' “The Symbolic Structure of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep” (1972).²⁵ During the 1980s and 1990s, critical research produced on Roth has increased exponentially, including many important comparative studies. Examples of the latter include Bruce Robbins' comparison of George Orwell and Roth in his book chapter “Modernism in History, Modernism in Power” (1983), Naomi Sokoloff's “Discoveries of Reading: Stories of Childhood by Bialik, Shahar, and Roth” (1985), Jules Chametzky's “Memory and Silences in the Work of Tillie Olsen and Henry Roth” (1994), Noam Flinker's “The Dying of the Light: American Jewish Self-Portrayal in Henry Roth and Robert Mezey” (1996), and Anne M. Wyatt-Brown's “Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth” (1998).²⁶

Regardless of the extensive critical attention placed upon various immigrant authors in academic journals and the more popular press, it has been the book-length critical studies (and anthologies) that have introduced the literature of the immigrant experience to a far wider audience, especially in the case of the biographical works. Key critical works on the literature of the immigrant experience include (in chronological order): Bernard Sherman's The Invention of the Jew: Jewish-American Education Novels, 1916-1964 (1969), Allen Guttman's The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (1971), Rose Green's The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures (1974), the introductory sections of Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Hsu Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1975), Elaine H. Kim's Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982), Edward A. Abramson's The Immigrant Experience in American Literature (1982), the introductory sections to, and critical framework of, Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (1991) and Fred L. Gardaphé's Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (1996).²⁷

Key contemporary biographies that have contributed to a public awareness of immigrant authors include Annette White-Parks Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (1995) and Stephen Cooper's Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (2000).²⁸ The historian Roger Daniels notes that: “White-Parks has, by dint of research that was truly detective work on both sides of the 49^th parallel, pieced together what will almost certainly be the definitive life story [of Sui Sin Far]. She has for the first time compiled what is probably the complete corpus of Sui Sin Far's published work, including unsigned material in newspapers.”²⁹ Stephen Cooper writes in his epilogue to Fante's biography of the way in which while critical recognition of Fante has been slow to catch up with his wider posthumous popularity, it has finally started to coalesce: “In May 1995 it was my privilege to help organize a three-day conference devoted solely to Fante which drew scores of writers, filmmakers, artists and scholars, as well as all of Fante's immediate surviving family, to California State University, Long Beach.”³⁰ Cooper identifies in this aside another important mechanism in focusing and increasing academic and popular interest in the literature of the immigrant experience: the critical conference. Kim notes how Toshio Mori's reputation was partially recuperated via the Asian American Writers' Conferences in Oakland in 1975, in Seattle in 1976, and in Honolulu in 1978.³¹ Key critical works published on Italian American writers and their socio-economic backgrounds were first presented at the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association at Rhode Island (1985). Many other conferences either entirely devoted to an immigrant group or simply presenting major panels could be cited here.

Notes

1. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920, pp. 8-9.

2. See, for example, chapter three of Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, for a discussion concerning “The Contingency of Community.”

3. Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, pp. 10-12.

4. Ibid., p. 12.

5. Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai, New York: Doubleday Page & Co and London: William Heinemann, 1925, p. 155.

6. Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, p. 27.

7. Ibid.

8. See, for example, Renqiu Yu, “‘Exercising Your Sacred Rights’” The Experience of New York's Chinese Laundrymen in Practicing Democracy,” in, K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During The Exclusion Era, chapter three.

9. Fred L. Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, p. 56.

10. Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Hsu Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975; Originally published by Howard University Press, 1975).

11. See Amy Ling, “Introduction” in, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, eds., Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 11; S. E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist,” MELUS 8 (1, Spring 1981): 27-39.

12. S. E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist,” p. 35.

13. Amy Ling, “Introduction” in, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, eds., Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, p. 11; William Wu, Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982.

14. Amy Ling, “Introduction” in, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, eds., Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, p. 11; Amy Ling, “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist” American Literary Realism, 16 (Autumn, 1983): 287-298.

15. Amy Ling, “Written with a Cause: Sui Sin Far and Han Suyin,” Women's Studies International Forum, 4 (1986): 411-19.

16. Linda Popp Di Biase, “A Chinese Lily in Seattle” Seattle Weekly (10 September, 1986); Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom, “Defiance or Perpetuation: An Analysis of Characters in Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” in, Him Mark Lai, Ruthanne Lum McCunn and Judy Yung, Chinese America: History and Perspectives, San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1987.

17. Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

18. Xiao-Huang Yin, “Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far—the First Chinese-American Woman Writer,” Arizona Quarterly, 47 (4, Winter 1991): 49-84; p. 49.

19. Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, New York: Pergamon, 1990.

20. Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

21. James Doyle, “Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna: Two Early Chinese-Canadian Authors,” Canadian Literature, 140 (Spring, 1994): 50-58; Ning Yu, “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice,” Women and Language, XIX (2, 1996): 44-47.

22. Sean McCann, “Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 12 (1, 1999): 73-88.

23. Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Call It Sleep: Jewish, American, Modernist, Classic,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, (44, 4, 1995): 388-398; p. 390.

24. Kenneth Ledbetter “Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: The Revival of a Proletarian Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature, 12 (1966): 123-130.

25. William Freedman, “Henry Roth and the Redemptive Imagination,” in, Warren French, ed., The Thirties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Deland, Fl: Everett Edwards, 1967, pp. 107-114; Bonnie Lyons, “The Symbolic Structure of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep,” Contemporary Literature, 13 (1972): 186-203.

26. Bruce Robbins, “Modernism in History, Modernism in Power,” in, Robert Kiely and John Hildebidle, eds., Modernism Reconsidered, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983: pp. 229-245; Naomi Sokoloff, “Discoveries of Reading: Stories of Childhood by Bialik, Shahar, and Roth,” Hebrew Annual Review, 9 (1985): 321-342; Jules Chametzky, “Memory and Silences in the Work of Tillie Olsen and Henry Roth,” in, Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, eds., Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994: pp. 114-127; Noam Flinker, “The Dying of the Light: American Jewish Self-Portrayal in Henry Roth and Robert Mezey,” in, Hans-Jurgen Schrader, Simon M. Elliott and Charlotte Wardi, eds., The Jewish Self-Portrait in European and American Literature, Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1996: pp. 147-157; Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, “Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth,” Journal of Aging and Identity, 3 (2, June 1998): 67-75.

27. Bernard Sherman, The Invention of the Jew: Jewish-American Education Novels, 1916-1964, New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969; Allen Guttman, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; Rose Green, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974; Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Hsu Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975; Originally published by Howard University Press, 1975; Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982; Edward A. Abramson, The Immigrant Experience in American Literature, Tyne & Wear, UK: British Association for American Studies 10: 1982; Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1991; Fred L. Gardaphé's Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

28. Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995; Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, New York and Edinburgh: Rebel Inc, 2000.

29. Preface to Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, p. xi.

30. Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, p. 327.

31. Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, p. 168.