[In the following essay, Solberg discusses the significance of Far's Asian-American identity to central themes in her short fiction.]

Both her photographs and her own testimony seem to indicate that Edith Maud Eaton (1865-1914) could have “passed” into the majority society with little trouble.¹ Moreover, although her mother was Chinese, Edith was unacquainted with her mother's native language, except for a few phrases, during her early years; in fact, she had very little contact with Asians or Eurasians, except for her own large group of siblings. Yet when she began to publish stories and articles, she chose to write chiefly about China and Chinese-Americans, and she wrote under the nom de plume of Sui Sin Far (occasionally Sui Seen or Sin Fah).²

Such public identification with a group which was treated so contemptuously in America (as her autobiography vividly depicts) must be attributed to her allegiance to the principle of Confucius who “taught ‘The way of sincerity is the way of heaven.’”³ Because of her integrity, Sui Sin Far earned the encomium, “one of the first to speak for an Asian-American sensibility that was neither Asian or white American.”⁴ She was not a great writer; she has only one book (a collection of her stories) to her credit, but her attempts deserve recognition.

She tells us that, after she began to write, she met “some funny people” who advised her to distance herself from reality. She scoffs:

Instead of making myself familiar with the Chinese-Americans around me, I should discourse on my spirit acquaintance with Chinese ancestors and quote in between the “Good mornings” and “How d'ye dos” of editors,

Confucius, Confucius, how great is Confucius, Before Confucius, there never was Confucius, After Confucius, there never came Confucius,” etc., etc., etc.

or something like that, both illuminating and obscuring, don't you know.

What makes her choice so remarkable is the fact that she had lived in many parts of the world before she finally settled in Seattle. The public record is scant, but it is clear that she came from an educated family, very large yet very close.⁵ Out of a morass of contradiction, confusion, and evasion, a rough sketch can be hazarded. Edward Eaton, her father, came from a well-to-do English family. As a young man he went to the Far East, apparently to further family business concerns. While in China he met and married an Asian woman. Upon returning to England with his wife, he ran into difficulties with his family, both over his marriage and over his determination to become an artist. The upshot was that he emigrated to the United States. The family lived for awhile in the New York area, then, after a Japanese interlude, finally settled in Canada (Montreal or Quebec), living in poverty in the French district.

Edith, as the eldest girl in a family of fourteen, appears to have taken over many of the maternal responsibilities for holding the family together. By her own account, and that of her sister, Edith was never very strong, suffered from protracted illnesses, yet somehow made her own way into journalism and stenography from a childhood spent selling lace and her father's paintings door to door—sales that, she was later to remark, were helped by her “nationality.” Then came, in turn, a stint on a paper in the West Indies, an advertising contract with a railroad which took her to San Francisco and later to various stenographic and journalistic positions in Seattle. It was in these West Coast cities that she became a part of Chinese-American communities, serving at times as spokesperson and partisan.

Again we have her own verification, although in a tantalizingly brief comment. “My heart leaps for joy when I read one day an article signed by a New York Chinese in which he declares ‘The Chinese in America owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to Sui Sin Far for the bold stand she has taken in their defense.’”⁶

To go much further is to become enmeshed in a sticky web of contradictions and confusions. There may be more answers in archives, family and personal papers, even in obscure printed sources. There are no doubt people still living whose memories could yield information. The MacMillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography's reticence in listing sources beyond “private information” would suggest that there may be personal or family objections still standing in the way of any open discussion of antecedents. It takes more than death to release the living from the meshes of prior dissimulations.

In Edith's case, however, the obfuscation was provided by her own sister, for Winnifred Eaton Babcock must have been the one responsible for the New York Times obituary of Edith on April 9, 1914. Edith, straightforwardly enough, had described her mother as “English bred with English ways and manner of dress.”⁷ But this description was evidently too prosaic for Winnifred. The obituary ran:

Edith Eaton, author, known in the East as Sui Sin Far, the “Chinese Lily,” died on Tuesday at her home in Montreal, Canada. She was the daughter of Edward Eaton, landscape painter, an intimate friend of Gen. Gordon, known as “Chinese” Gordon, the English soldier killed at Khartoum in 1885. When a young man, Mr. Eaton received ＄300,000 and went to the Orient. He became fascinated with the East, and after a year married a Japanese noblewoman who had been adopted by Sir Hugh Matheson as a child and educated in England. Miss Edith Eaton was the oldest girl of their fourteen children. After a number of years the family returned to England.

Financial reverses in that country reduced the family to poverty and Miss Eaton's grandfather made a place for her father in the banking firm of Pardee Matheson & Son. However, Mr. Eaton soon came to this country, where his fortunes varied. At one time he built a church in Jersey City that is still standing; later, on being reduced to poverty, he was forced to obtain assistance from England. Eventually he earned a living by painting landscapes.

Miss Eaton took up literary work at this time and her short stories attracted favorable comment. Her best known book is Mrs. Spring Fragrance. One of Miss Eaton's sisters, Mrs. Betram W. Babcock of New York, is an author, writing under the pen name of Onoto Watanna.⁸

Edith, being dead, had no more claims in the matter, but Winnifred, engaged in an active and successful writing career, had a great deal at stake. The irony is that the obituary manages to skirt any meaningful summary of Edith's life in favor of legitimizing family history for Winnifred. Not only is the mother a “Japanese noblewoman”; she has been adopted by an English peer. The family credentials are impeccable, given the necessary truth that must creep in: a solid background in English mercantile life and peerage, yet with a touch of the exotic added to even the father's life through his implied association with “Chinese” Gordon. There is less criticism than truth in saying that obituaries are written to serve the living rather than the dead.

Here Edith's name of Sui Sin Far and the sobriquet of the “Chinese Lily” seem dependent on her father's friendship with an Englishman nicknamed “Chinese.” Her stories, with such titles as “Her Chinese Husband,” “Ku Yum and the Butterflies,” or “White Woman Who Married a Chinaman,” [“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,”] are not mentioned; they would not give much authenticity to the work of the daughter of a “Japanese noblewoman.” Indeed, the “obituary” seems to be that of Edward Eaton, not of his daughter.

Perhaps the obituary should be taken as one more proof of the hostility toward Chinese-Americans against which Edith Eaton had fought during her lifetime. An overview can be cited from the work of Stow Persons, who noted in 1944:

any summary of attitudes expressed in the California race conflict fails to indicate the depth of hatred for the Oriental and the determination of the native [white] Americans to exclude them. Treaty, legislation and court action were all employed to close the first chapter in immigration restriction.⁹

William Purviance Fenn, in a basic study of attitudes towards Chinese in American literature, suggested that these attitudes might be summed up in four periods, the first three falling into what he somewhat wryly labeled the era of the “Chinese ‘Invasion'”—“1) that of toleration, from 1849 to 1853; 2) that of growing antagonism, from 1853 to 1882; and 3) that of restriction, from 1882 on.” The San Francisco fire of 1906 marked the end of that “era,” he says, and “the Chinese question dropped into discard as a real issue, making way … for the Japanese question of more recent times.”¹⁰

In terms of that periodization, Edith succeeded during the time of restriction in having five publications, one of them in the prestigious Century magazine. She had no model to follow; the public taste was for the exotic or for the stereotype. The “funny people” who wanted her to trade on her nationality told her:

if I wanted to succeed in literature in America I should dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet beaded slippers, live in New York, and come of high birth.

Not only did she repudiate all this; she saw it as ineffectual. She knew that Americans definitely preferred Japanese to Chinese:

The Americans having for many years manifested a much higher regard for the Japanese than the Chinese, several half-Chinese young men and women, thinking to advance themselves, both in a social and business sense, pass as Japanese. They continue to be known as Eurasian, but a Japanese Eurasian does not appear in the same light as a Chinese Eurasian.

Immediately after this she adds:

The unfortunate Chinese Eurasians! Are not those who compel them to thus cringe more to be blamed than they?¹¹

The question of choice, of being true to one's heritage and family, of selling a birthright for momentary peace in an uncomfortable society are the same questions that have plagued Asian-American writers down to the present.¹²

Further comprehension of her situation, as a Chinese person as well as a writer, can be found in American cultural history and in mainstream literature of her time. Howard Mumford Jones, in an extended discussion of the taste for the exotic in what he calls the “cosmopolitan spirit,” makes the provocative suggestion that while the American response to Japan was derived from a taste for the exotic the same was not true of China. “American taste for Chinoiserie descends from the eighteenth century, and aside from vulgar notions about Chinese sexuality, joss houses, and opium dens, it is problematical whether things Chinese served greatly to quench any thirst for the exotic.”¹³ While the reasons for this are no doubt complex, central to them would seem to be the simple fact that the Chinese were already present in the United States and most of the popular images derived from that direct contact. The Japanese had, for the most part, the added attraction of being across the Pacific without much danger of the facts of their presence damaging whatever fantasies might be evoked.

While this contrast could be illustrated from many sources, it is suggested in even the works of those great champions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Jack London and Frank Norris.¹⁴ Note, for example, London's description of Captain West in The Mutiny of the Elsinore as a “samurai,” or the evocation of a remembered woman in Martin Eden: “Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs” as contrasted with his treatment of the Chinese in the short story “Yellow Handkerchief”: “What was to happen next I could not imagine, for the Chinese were a different race from mine, and from what I knew I was confident that fair play was no part of their make-up” or, further on, “I was familiar enough with the Chinese character to know that fear alone restrained them.”¹⁵

Frank Norris, in describing Vanamee's vision in The Octopus, has the spectre “dressed in a gown of scarlet silk, with flowing sleeves, such as Japanese wear, embroidered with flowers and figures of birds worked in gold threads,” while in Moran of the Lady Letty, the Chinese crew of the Bertha Millner is described in these terms: “the absolute indifference of these brown-suited Mongols, the blankness of their flat, fat faces, the dullness of their slanting, fishlike eyes that never met his own or even wandered in his direction was uncanny, disquieting.”¹⁶

A general pattern had been established, much as in these examples, of the Chinese as mysterious, evil, nearby, and threatening, while the Japanese were exotic, quaint, delicate (or manly, as the samurai), and distant. A verbal equivalent appears in a curious article in the Bookman in 1923, entitled “Chinese Characters in American Fiction”: “The Chinese resent the popular term Chinaman. They prefer to be referred to as Chinese, just as natives of Japan are termed Japanese. Would anyone ever use the expression Japanman?”¹⁷ While this is not the place to go into the specific stereotypes of Japanese and Chinese that existed at the turn of the century, it is necessary to note the curious way in which the general fascination with the exotic (Japan) was able to transcend racist ideas so long as distance was a part of the formula.

As a Chinese-American writer, then, Sui Sin Far had to find a mode that would enable her to deal with her own experience (as the classic editorial injunction has it), but to do that meant to fall outside the boundaries of any of the “maincurrents” of American writing. She was not a regionalist nor nationalist. If anything, she was an internationalist, but hardly of the Henry James school, though some of what is interesting in her work lies in the subtleties that are apt to be lost on the untrained casual reader. She is not naturalist or local colorist, and her essays at humor, which tend to fall short of the mark in any case, can hardly be looked upon as falling in the Mr. Dooley or Mark Twain “native American” styles. She was trapped by experience and inclination into working within a sub-genre of American prose: what, for lack of a better term, we might call Chinatown Tales. Such classification by subject matter (Chinatown, or more broadly, the Chinese in America) breaks down an established literary form, the novel, into sub-genres defined by content, not form or stylistic skill. Eaton, by choosing to identify with and write about the Chinese, found herself alone in an essentially formless field. There had been fifty years of writing about the Chinese in America, but out of that writing no clear literary form had evolved. As William Purviance Fenn sums it up:

The impress of Chinese immigration on American literature … is hard to evaluate. … Its influence has been two-fold: first, as a problem the discussion of which has resulted in literature; second, as a source of subject matter for the literature of local color. In the first place, the half century of economic and political discussion resulted in an immense amount of material which is still preserved for us in newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, and book. Of this, a larger proportion, of course, is of value only to the economist, historian, or sociologist; but the heated emotions of that struggle occasionally found expression in fiction, drama, and verse. Party prejudices and passions, however, are poor inspiration for anything but cheap propaganda, and it is in the appeal of the subject to the sense of justice that we have an approach to the fundamental inspirational problems of literature.

In the second place, the existence of a large number of this alien race offered an unusual opportunity for devotees of the local-color movement; and in the glorious process of exploding old myths and of creating new ones, the Chinamen were bound to suffer in many a poem, story, and play. … They were strange and they were enigmatical; their appearance and ways added color to already too colorful backgrounds, and the difficulty of understanding them piqued the curiosity of American readers. The result was a body of fiction, drama, and verse exploiting the Chinese as a rich source of local color.

But even of this small body of creative literature, by far the greater part was written by amateurs in the field of letters, and only a handful of efforts even approach greatness.¹⁸

Fiction, drama, and verse, each with a sub-genre which exploits the “Chinese as a rich source of color.” This gave Eaton little enough to build on, for her intent was certainly not to exploit, but rather to record, explain, and somehow give meaning to the experience of the Chinese in America. Fenn's 1933 summing up is interesting, for he had considered two of Eaton's stories in his summary, though his bibliography does not list her collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

Such, then, is the literature of Chinatown—no poems, no plays, but possibly half a dozen short stories worth remembering. And Chinatown will never be adequately described by anyone who fails to see in it something more fundamental than the superficial barbarity and high coloring which have been almost the only appeal so far. … The real Chinatown that is worth preserving lies beneath the surface color, among the deeper currents.¹⁹

I would argue that Edith Eaton as Sui Sin Far did manage to dip into those deeper currents beneath the surface color, but no matter what she saw and understood, there was no acceptable form to shape it to. Had she been physically stronger and had a more sophisticated literary apprenticeship, she might have been able to create that new form. As it was, she was defeated, for in that “glorious process of exploding old myths and of creating new ones,” as Fenn puts it, “the Chinamen were bound to suffer.”

Fictional stereotypes for the Chinatown tales had been established, and it was difficult for anyone, even of a strongly independent mind, to ignore them. No matter how frank and open Eaton might have been in a memoir such as “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” when she turned her hand to fiction the possible was limited by the acceptable. She was modest about her work. In acknowledging permissions to reprint previously published stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance she writes: “I wish to thank the Editors … who 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.²⁰

Even at the outset there were those who appreciated her difficulties and her attempts to create authentic characters. Said the editor of Land of Sunshine, a California magazine, in 1887:

[her stories are] all of Chinese characters in California or on the Pacific Coast; and they have an insight and sympathy which are probably unique. To others the alien Celestial is at best mere “literary material”: in these stories, he (or she) is a human being.²¹

That her contemporaries saw Sui Sin Far's writing as an attempt to speak for Chinese-Americans is borne out by the review of Mrs. Spring Fragrance in the New York Times Book Review of July 7, 1912.

Miss Eaton has struck a new note in American fiction. She has not struck it very surely, or with surpassing skill, but it has taken courage to strike it all, and, to some extent, she atones for lack of artistic skill with the unusual knowledge she undoubtedly has of her theme. The thing she has tried to do is to portray for readers of the white race the lives, feelings, sentiments of the Americanized Chinese of the Pacific Coast, of those who have intermarried with them and of the children who have sprung from such unions. It is a task whose adequate doing would require well nigh superhuman insight and the subtlest of methods.²²

The review had more insight that the publisher who inserted an advertisement on the same page; the advertisement reads in part: “Quaint, lovable characters are the Chinese who appear in these unusual and exquisite stories of our Western Coast. … Altogether they make as desirable reading as the title suggests.” Taken out of context, what does the title suggest? Perhaps the exotic, that could be traded on, at worst, the quaint, but hardly the struggle toward realism that is found in the pages.

The title story of Mrs. Spring Fragrance deals with the difficulties of Mr. Spring Fragrance in understanding and coming to grips with his very Americanized wife. While the story is slight, it does allow Eaton to create passages such as the following exchange between Mr. Spring Fragrance and an American friend:

“Everything is ‘high class” in America,” he [Mr. Spring Fragrance] observed.

“Sure!” cheerfully assented the young man. “Haven't you ever heard that all Americans are princes and princesses, and just as soon as a foreigner puts his foot upon our shores, he also becomes of the nobility—I mean, the royal family.”

“What about my brother in the Detention Pen?” dryly inquired Mr. Spring Fragrance.

“Now, you've got me,” said the young man, rubbing his head. “Well, that is a shame—‘a beastly shame,’ as the Englishman says. But understand, old fellow, we that are real Americans are up against that—even more than you. It is against our principles.”

“I offer the real Americans my consolations that they should be compelled to do that which is against their principles.”²³

In the story “The Inferior Woman” an interesting possibility is suggested, then dropped. But the suggestion shows that Eaton knew what she was up against and was somehow trying to warn her readers. The story describes Mrs. Spring Fragrance's interference in the love life of her American neighbor's son, and she helps him to marry the “inferior woman” he prefers rather than the “superior woman” chosen by his mother. As the story opens, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is walking in the garden reflecting upon the possibilities of “a book which she had some notion of writing. Many American women wrote books. Why should not a Chinese? She would write a book about Americans for her Chinese women friends. The American people were so interesting and mysterious.”²⁴ Unfortunately Mrs. Spring Fragrance never writes her book, and we never see her develop the stereotypes of the “mysterious Americans.”

“Particularly interesting,” says the New York Times reviewer, “are two stories in which an American woman is made to contrast her experiences as the wife of an American and afterward of a Chinese.” In 1952 the same stories caught the attention of John Burt Foster, and impressed him so much that he speculated: “So intimately does the author write of mixed marriage that one is tempted to believe that she herself married a Chinese and was enabled in this way to get firsthand information.”²⁵

Yet despite the fascination of many of the stories and their subjects—the problems with Angel Island, the self-protective aspects of the Chinese community, the Eurasians who in the crunch throw in their lot with the Chinese—the most impressive aspect of the writing is the conviction that environment is more important that heredity, that race is an accident, and, when, as with the Eurasian, there is a question of choice, the individual has the power to make that choice.

The most dramatic statement of the theme of choice is in “Pat and Pan,” the story of two children, the boy Caucasian-American, the girl Chinese-American, being raised together in a Chinese household; the Chinese couple has raised the boy from a baby as their own. He speaks only Chinese, has only Chinese playmates, is inseparable from his little “Chinese” sister. Enter the meddling mission school teacher who cannot allow a “white boy” to be brought up Chinese. The child is removed from his Chinese home and adopted by a white family. Slowly he grows away from his Chinese background. On his next meeting his little Chinese sister, he is friendly, but in their second encounter after their separation, egged on by his new playmates, he rejects her completely, shouting at her to get away from him. “But when she reached the foot of the hill, she looked up and shook her little head sorrowfully. ‘Poor Pat!’ said she. ‘He Chinese no more; he Chinese no more!”²⁶

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.

In 1974, attention was called to her by the editors of Aiiieeeee! who were keenly aware of her problem. In their Introduction they point out that in an atmosphere where the Chinese in America was “at best mere ‘literary material,’ she was forced to work ‘within the stereotype of Chinese as laundryman, prostitute, smuggler, coolie’; she was able to do little more than present ‘John Chinaman’ as … a comic caricature, giving him a sensibility that was her own.”²⁷

What she left was a unique public record of the difficulty of being an individual without racial, national, or group claims. “After all I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any,” she wrote. “Individuality is more than nationality. ‘You are you and I am I,’ says Confucius.” And then she goes on to the bitter heart of her dilemma. “I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant ‘connecting link.’ And that's all.”²⁸

Notes

1. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Independent, 66,3138 (January 21, 1909), 125-32. Hereafter referred to as “Leaves.” There is a photograph here and another portrait, with a brief biographical note, in the Chautauquan 43,5 (July 1909), 446. There is a note in the MacMillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Third edition [London and Ontario, 1963]), entry under the name of Edith Eaton, based on “private information.” The New York Times obituary is spurious.

   A search of Seattle city directories yielded the following: Edith Eaton lived for nearly a decade in Seattle. During that time she worked for three law firms, W. E. Hays in 1900, the pioneer firm of Piles, Dunworth & Howe in 1901, and for C. F. Munday in 1902-1903. In 1905 her occupation is given as stenographer, no employer listed, in 1906 no occupation or employer listed; in 1908 she is listed as a journalist. She moved even more frequently than she changed employers. In 1900 she was boarding at 519 Yesler Way; in 1901 she had rooms at 1026 Marion; in 1902 she was rooming at 1003 Yesler Way; in 1903 boarding at 318 James, in 1905 rooming at 807 Madison, in 1906 at 319 Boren, and finally in 1908 at 412 Terry Avenue. There is no record of her whereabouts in 1904 and 1907. Sometime between 1908 and 1910 she returned to the East. Beyond her listing in Susan Whitcomb Hassell, A Hundred and Sixty Books by Washington Authors; Some Other Writers Who Are Contributors to Periodical Literature (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford Co., 1916) and Lancaster Pollard, “A Checklist of Washington Authors,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 31:1 (January 1940), 3-96, there seems to be no record of her life in Seattle in any of the expected sources.

2. See accompanying checklist. Her only book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1912), is a collection of her short fiction.

3. “Leaves,” p. 132. The quotation continues below.

4. Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (Washington: Howard University Press, 1974), pp. xxi-xxii.

5. Her sister, Winnifred, twelve years her junior, was apparently born in Japan and lived there for many years; this was her rationale for adopting the nom de plume of Onoto Watanna. She wrote of Japan and of Japanese-Americans in her earliest years, but later used other settings and even attempted Irish-American dialect. More prolific than her sister, she wrote a novelette, “A Japanese Nightingale,” which was made into a Broadway play. Later she worked in Hollywood, where the last trace of her is 1930. See the Book Buyer 25 (November 1902), 301-302, and Women's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, 1914-1915.

6. “Leaves,” p. 128.

7. “Leaves,” p. 126.

8. “Edith Eaton Dead: Author of Chinese Stories Under the Name of Sui Sin Far,” New York Times, April 9, 1914, p. 11, col. 4.

9. Stow Persons, “The Americanization of the Immigrant” in David F. Bowers, ed., Foreign Influences in American Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 53.

10. William Purviance Fenn, Ah Sin and His Brethren in American Literature (Peiping [Peking], China: College of Chinese Studies Cooperating with California College in China, 1933), p. 2. The “Invasion” reference is, of course, to such “yellow peril” novels as Piertan W. Dooner, The Last Days of The Republic (San Francisco: Alta California Publishing House, 1880); Robert Woltor, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the year A.D. 1899 (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Company, 1882); and Oto E. Mundo, The Recovered Continent: A Tale of the Chinese Invasion (Columbus, Ohio: The Harper-Osgood Company, 1898).

11. “Leaves,” p. 131.

12. See Frank Chin, “Afterward,” MELUS 3:2 (Summer 1976), 13-17.

13. Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience: 1865-1915 (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 290.

14. For a detailed discussion of London's and Norris's ideas about race see the chapter, “Literary Naturalism and Race,” in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), pp. 198-227.

15. The Mutiny of the Elsinore (New York: MacMillan, 1914), pp. 71-81, albeit the samurai is via H. G. Wells; Martin Eden (New York: MacMillan, 1930 [original 1903]), p. 5. The passage reads, in part: “There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These in time were blotted out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs, by Eurasians, delicate featured, striped by degeneracy, by full bodied South-Sea-Island women, flowered and brown-skinned.” See also London's Tales of the Fish Patrol (New York: Regent Press, 1905), pp. 225-226. London wrote his own “invasion” story as well, “The Unparalleled Invasion,” Moon-Face and Other Stories (New York: MacMillan, 1929, original edition 1906), pp. 71-100. It opens: “It was in the year 1976 that trouble between the world and China reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred.” In this fantasy of biological warfare London traces the transmission of Western ideas and technology to China through Japan, the overthrow of Japan in 1922 after which “she [Japan] devoted herself to art, and her task became to please the world greatly with her creations of wonder and beauty” (p. 80). On the other hand, the Chinese, modernized and multiplying, begin to spill over into the rest of the world until American genius wipes out the race in 1976 by means of an assortment of man-spread plagues.

16. The Octopus (New York: Doubleday Page, 1901), p. 391; Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure off the California Coast in Complete Works of Frank Norris: Blix: Moran of the Lady Letty: Essays and Articles (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1899), p. 176 and passim. In an article “Cosmopolitan San Francisco,” first published in The Wave of December 24, 1897, and reprinted in Frank Norris of “The Wave”: Stories and Sketches from the San Francisco Weekly, 1893 to 1897 (San Francisco: The Westgate Press, 1931), pp. 134-141, Norris gives a generally uncomplimentary picture of Chinatown while treating the Japanese as more of a curiosity.

    Little Japan is more scattered, Yokohama is broken into bits of marquetry and set here and there in San Francisco, in back courts and cul de sacs and streets that have no outlet … he organizes fencing clubs, which seem to be quite a feature of his social life among his fellows. … The Japs get into their native regalia and fence with bamboo swords from dawn to dark. It is a strange idea of amusement …”

    (pp. 138-39)

    Norris claims that the Chinaman, on the other hand, seems to have no such amusement, in fact, cannot be understood.

    He has brought to San Francisco and implanted here the atmosphere of the Mysterious East, that … must always remain an unknown, unknowable element to the West. No two races the world round could be more opposite than the Mongolian and Anglo-Saxon that are placed side by side in the streets of this strange city of the Occident.

    (p. 139)

17. S. P. Rudinger de Rodyenko, Bookman 58:3 (November 1923), 255-259, quotation occurs on p. 258.

18. Fenn, pp. 11-12.

19. Fenn, p. 127.

20. Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1912), p. vii. (Hereafter cited as MSF).

21. Aiiieeeee!, p. xxi.

22. New York Times, July 7, 1912. Another review of MSF appeared in the Independent 73 (August 15, 1912), 388.

23. MSF, pp. 12-13.

24. MSF, p. 22.

25. John Burt Foster, “China and the Chinese in American Literature, 1850-1950” (diss., University of Illinois, 1952), p. 205.

26. MSF, pp. 333-334.

27. Aiiieeeee!, p. xxi-xxii.

28. “Leaves,” p. 132. Compare Frank Chin, “I was Chinese-American, whatever that meant. … I was not an individual, not just a human being. Just a human being in this culture, in this society, is a white man, he can disappear.” Interview in Victor G. & Brett De Bary Nee, Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974, Sentry Edition), pp. 377-389, particularly, p. 383.

Check-List: Published Works of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maud Eaton, 1865-1914

1897

“The Chinese Woman in America.” Land of Sunshine 6, 2 (January 1897), 59-64.

1899

“A Chinese Ishmael.” Overland 34, 199 (July 1899), 43-49.

1900

‘The Smuggling of Tie Co.” Land of Sunshine 13, 2 (July 1900), 100-104.

1904

“A Chinese Boy-Girl.” Century 45, 6 (April 1904), 828-831.

1905

“Aluteh.” The Chautauquan 42, 4 (December 1905), 338-342.

1909

“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Independent 66, 3138 (January 21, 1909), 125-132.

“Ku Yum and the Butterflies.” Good Housekeeping, 48 (March 1909), 299 ff.

“Half Moon Cakes.” Good Housekeeping 48 (May 1909), 584-585.

“In the Land of the Free.” Independent 67, 3170 (September 2, 1909), 504-508.

1910

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” Hampton 24 (January 1910), 137-141.

“Kitten Headed Shoes.” Delineator 75 (February 1910), 165 ff.

“White Woman Who Married a Chinaman.” Independent 68, 2197 (March 10, 1910), 518-23.

“Inferior Woman.” Hampton 24 (May 1910), 727-31.

“Sugar Cane Baby.” Good Housekeeping 50, 5 (May 1910), 570-72.

“Candy That Was Not Sweet.” Delineator 76 (July 1910), 76 ff.

“Autumn Fan.” New England Magazine n.s. 42 (August 1910), 700-702.

“Her Chinese Husband.” Independent 69, 3220 (August 18, 1910), 358-61.

“Bird of Love.” New England Magazine n.s. 43, 1 (September 1910), 25-37.

1911

“Love Story from the Rice Fields of China.” New England Magazine n.s. 45, 4 (December 1911), 343-345.

1912

Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1912.

“Chen Hen Yen Chinese Student.” New England Magazine n.s. 45, 5 (January 1912), 462-466.

“Who's Game?” New England Magazine n.s. 45, 6 (February 1912), 573-79.

1913

“Chinese Workman in America.” Independent 75, 3370 (July 3, 1913), 56-58.

Edith Eaton also cites publications in the following journals. I have not, so far, been able to verify citations:

American Motherhood, Canadian Dominion Illustrated, Childrens, Designer, Gentlewoman, Holland's Housekeeper, Ladies' Home Journal, Little Folks, Montreal Witness, New Idea, New York Evening Post, Out West, Short Stories, Sunset, Westerner.