Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. xx + 268 pages. Illustrated. $34.95, cloth.

Daughter of a British father and Chinese mother, English-born Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Seen Far/Sui Sin Far) was one of the first Eurasian writers to publish in Canada and the United States. Traversing the Canadian and U.S. borders in search of work to support her literary ambitions, Eaton spent the first thirty years of her life in Montreal and then lived for varying periods of times in Jamaica, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Boston, but often returned to her family in Montreal. Her stories and essays, which spanned the period from 1888 to 1913, foregrounded the difficulties Chinese immigrants faced in an often hostile North America and refuted many of the popular racist stereotypes promoted in the "yellow peril" literature of the day. In Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, Annette White-Parks offers a groundbreaking study of Sui Sin Far's life and work.

Considering Eaton's necessarily peripatetic lifestyle and the fact that only a handful of her personal and professional papers have survived, White-Parks does a remarkable job of positioning her subject within the specific communities for and about which she wrote. Her interviews with Eaton family descendants and discovery of relevant public records and correspondence, not to mention her tracking down of the segment of Sui Sin Far's work that appeared in relatively little known magazines and newspapers, testifies to the care with which White-Parks pursued this literary recovery project. When she must speculate (e.g., concerning the extent of Eaton's involvement in the mission movement), she bases her suppositions on a thorough analysis of the appropriate historical context.

The central question which interests White-Parks is how Sui Sin Far managed to publish sympathetic images of the Chinese during a period of intense sinophobia. Her answer is that Sui Sin Far deftly created a series of "trickster" figures who "slip past the censors and...upset her readers' monologic view of reality by opening multiple perspectives." Whether acting as creative problem solvers, social transgressors, or simply mischief makers, these trickster figures, argues White-Parks, reflect Sui Sin Far's ultimately subversive survival strategies. In "The Sing-Song Woman," for example, Sui Seen Far validates the husband-switching of two Chinese-American women. Mag-gee, "a half-white girl," wants to marry an Irish-American, while her father wants her to marry "a Chinaman." Her friend Lae Choo, "a despised actress in an American Chinatown," wants to return to China. When Mag-gee is compelled to masquerade as traditionally Chinese, thereby denying her biracial identity, Lae Choo steps into her place. While initially astounded, Mag-gee's intended groom quickly accepts Lae Choo as his wife. For White-Parks, this trickster use of disguise reveals Sui Sin Far's longing for "cultural wholeness," her dream of uniting her Chinese and European American selves.

This longing for "cultural wholeness" also appears to be at the root of what White-Parks sees as Sui Sin Far's ultimate rejection of Americanization. In "A Chinese Ishmael," for example, the protagonist Ku Yum scorns the motives for the antagonist's assimilation: "`He is a man who, wishing to curry favor with the white people wears American clothes, and when it suits his convenience passes for a Japanese.'" Considering the fact that Eaton's sister, Winnifred, essentially renounced her family heritage when she passed for Japanese to better sell her fiction, Sui Sin Far's criticism of the American marketplace ideal or "repackaging" is certainly understandable. White-Parks rightly note s the trauma which those purveyors of Americanization--missionaries, club women, teachers--often unwittingly bring to their wards. In stories such as "In the Land of the Free," "A Chinese Boy-Girl" and "The Wisdom of the New," well-meaning but uninformed white characters create untold pain in their zeal to Americanize the Chinese.

By privileging the name "Sui Sin Far" rather than choosing Edith Eaton or vacillating between names according to context, White-Parks tries to mitigate her own role as a white "interpreter" of a Eurasian writer. Using the name "Sui Sin Far" exclusively is a means by a which White-Parks may "help make visible the Chinese heritage for which [Edith Eaton/Sui Seen Far/Sui Sin Far] fought throughout her life."

Yet Sui Sin Far often creates male protagonists, especially, who make a decisive break from those Chinese traditions which inhibit upward mobility. As often as American culture appears negatively in her fiction, it appears as the thriving market of men. The middle class Chinese family, by contrast, often appears as an impediment to any such self-reliance. In "The Wisdom of the New," for example, the protagonist, Wou Sinkwei, as the precious only son, is "waited on hand and foot" by his mother and sister with nothing to do but "sleep, dream, and occasionally get into mischief." Fearing his future as a "woman man" in China, Sinkwei ventures to America. For Sui Sin Far, America offers an activity cure to a tradition-bound Chinese middle class which has become increasingly effete and neurasthenic.

White-Parks's vision of Sui Sin Far's longing for cultural wholeness is misguided, then, as it romanticizes Edith Eaton's artistic agency and her project. When a San Francisco newspaper hired her to obtain subscriptions in Chinatown, she realized that "save for a few phrases, I am unacquainted with my mother tongue.... The Americanized Chinamen actually laugh in my face when I tell them that I am of their race." Rather than acting foremost as a cultural "insider," Sui Sin Far acts as a mediator between cultures or, in James Clifford's term, an informant. Having never visited China and having to appeal to a North American reading public accustomed to travel guides to the orient, Sui Sin Far adopts a voice in many ways consistent with that of popular turn of the century regionalist fiction.

Sui Sin Far was also more compelled to craft her short fiction and essays to appeal to the editorial goals of each magazine than White-Parks allows. Her work was often published alongside ethnographic travel essays inviting readers to explore imaginatively the "exotic" orient. She created a vision of a markedly middle class, heterosocial domestic space and "safe" ethnic urban space in her fiction, not simply to combat racist images of the largely homosocial Chinatowns in the United States and Canada, as White-Parks suggests, but to invite white tourists to consume imaginatively what that community offered. With its lush red cover and delicately etched pages featuring a flowering fruit tree and bamboo, Sui Sin Far's one collection of stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, also offered readers a refuge from the cultural turmoil which seemed to characterize the new century. Indeed, Sui Sin Far created stories of Chinese North American communities committed to ideals of filial duty, piety, hard work, and cohesiveness not merely to combat the prevailing racist stereotypes of the Chinese as antithetical to Western values, but to appeal to a dominant white reading culture fearing the labor strife, immigrant influx, and mass market commodity culture of the new century.

COPYRIGHT 1997 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning