I have just finished reading Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). It is the kind of collection that can be picked up with no prior knowledge and that also makes me want a couple of degrees in literature and cultural studies to discuss both the stories and their transcultural, transnational author as they deserve. Eaton was Chinese-British by birth, grew up mostly in Canada, and spent the majority of her adulthood in the U.S. where her fiction and journalism focused on Chinese-American communities at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act; she took her Cantonese pen name from the narcissus flower of the Lunar New Year. The stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance are as boundary-crossing as their author, employing the conventions of sentimental fiction to tackle questions as topical and realistic as institutional racism, assimilation, and cultural appreciation vs. appropriation, intended for the readership of a white audience at the same time as they decenter whiteness; they are trickster stories, talking from the edges of things, documents and arguments at the same time. There are layers on layers in the title story, but I was struck by the fact that its co-protagonist is a Chinese man who is the farthest thing imaginable from a desexualized or inscrutable stereotype, deeply in love after five years of arranged marriage and suddenly panicking that his more assimilated wife might no longer feel the same way: "If his wife was becoming an American woman, would it not be possible for her to love as an American woman—a man to whom she was not married?" Meanwhile, the Chinese women in these stories may be housewifely, but they are not submissive, and when they're strong-willed, they're not dragon ladies, either. It's so matter-of-fact and it's the kind of representation this country is still resisting. Much of the topicality still has teeth. From the opening lines of "Tian Shan's Kindred Spirit" and the Department of Plus Ça Change, Plus Ça God Damn It:
Had Tian Shan been an American and China to him a forbidden country, his daring exploits and thrilling adventures would have furnished inspiration for many a newspaper and magazine article, novel, and short story. As a hero, he would certainly have far outshone Dewey, Peary, or Cook. Being, however, a Chinese, and the forbidden country America, he was simply recorded by the American press as "a wily Oriental, who 'by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,' is eluding the vigilance of our brave customs officers."
More power to him and his equally tricky kindred spirit Fin Fan, who turns the the authority of borders back on themselves in order to be reunited with rather than separated from the man she loves. It's more devastating that a story like "In the Land of the Free" hasn't gone out of style since 1909, since that one concerns a child separated, detained, and perhaps ultimately stolen from his parents on a pretext of papers out of order; perhaps the cruelty has always been the point. The difficulties facing the interracial couple in "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese" and "Her Chinese Husband" are not ascribed merely to personal or community prejudices, but to the matrix of white supremacy in which their relationship is embedded:
There was the continual uncertainty about his own life here in America, the constant irritation caused by the assumption of the white men that a white woman does not love her Chinese husband, and their actions accordingly; also sneers and offensive remarks. There was also on Liu Kanghi's side an acute consciousness that, though belonging to him as his wife, yet in a sense I was not his, but of the dominant race, which claimed, even while it professed to despise me.
Eaton herself never married; despite the pressure, then as now, for marginalized narratives to be authentic, ethnographic, confessional, none of her fiction seems to be autobiographical beyond its essentially intersectional concerns. The closest this collection might come is a sort of negative manifesto in "Its Wavering Image," in which a charming white reporter romantically exploits a biracial girl in San Francisco's Chinatown in order to perpetuate in his "special-feature article" exactly the kind of sensationalist, Orientalist misrepresentations Eaton was working to overwrite and the last sting of his betrayal is that his racially anxious gaze forces the heroine to renounce her mixed identity; it serves him right that she chooses despite his protestations of her whiteness to identify as Chinese, but for Eaton who valued her ambiguous position, who once declared, "I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any," that the choice is demanded at all is presented as tragedy.
Also in this collection you get a bunch of animal fables and stories for children, including a delightful and subtle one about the power of storytelling, featuring the imagined adventures of a cat. I may well try to get hold of Mary Chapman's Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (2016) even though Porter Square Books says its availability is "It's Complicated." I was already curious about her other writing, but there's an excerpt from her newspaper series "The Chinese in America" (1909) included in the excellent appendices of this edition that makes me want to read the rest of the interviews stat:
"I think," said Go Ek Ju, "that when I return to China I will write a book about the American people."
"What put such an idea into your head?" I asked.
"The number of books about the Chinese by Americans," answered Go Ek Ju. "I see them in the library; they are very amusing."
"See, then, that when you write your book, it is likewise amusing."
"No," said Go Ek Ju. "My aim, when I write a book about Americans will be to make it not amusing, but interesting and instructive. The poor Americans have to content themselves with writing for amusement only because they have no means of obtaining any true knowledge of the Chinese when in China; but we Chinese in America have fine facilities for learning all about the Americans. We go into the American houses as servants; we enter the American schools and colleges as students; we ask questions and we think about what we hear and see. Where is there the American who will go to China and enter into the service of a Chinese family as a domestic? We have yet to hear about a band of American youths, both male and female, being admitted as students into a Chinese university."
I had never heard of the author before![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer mentioned her last month in context of reading a novel by her sister. I am glad she has been rediscovered enough for critical editions and biographies. I look forward to finding out who else has been out there for more than a century that I don't know.
Had Tian Shan been an American and China to him a forbidden country, his daring exploits and thrilling adventures would have furnished inspiration for many a newspaper and magazine article, novel, and short story. As a hero, he would certainly have far outshone Dewey, Peary, or Cook. Being, however, a Chinese, and the forbidden country America, he was simply recorded by the American press as "a wily Oriental, who 'by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,' is eluding the vigilance of our brave customs officers."
More power to him and his equally tricky kindred spirit Fin Fan, who turns the the authority of borders back on themselves in order to be reunited with rather than separated from the man she loves. It's more devastating that a story like "In the Land of the Free" hasn't gone out of style since 1909, since that one concerns a child separated, detained, and perhaps ultimately stolen from his parents on a pretext of papers out of order; perhaps the cruelty has always been the point. The difficulties facing the interracial couple in "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese" and "Her Chinese Husband" are not ascribed merely to personal or community prejudices, but to the matrix of white supremacy in which their relationship is embedded:
There was the continual uncertainty about his own life here in America, the constant irritation caused by the assumption of the white men that a white woman does not love her Chinese husband, and their actions accordingly; also sneers and offensive remarks. There was also on Liu Kanghi's side an acute consciousness that, though belonging to him as his wife, yet in a sense I was not his, but of the dominant race, which claimed, even while it professed to despise me.
Eaton herself never married; despite the pressure, then as now, for marginalized narratives to be authentic, ethnographic, confessional, none of her fiction seems to be autobiographical beyond its essentially intersectional concerns. The closest this collection might come is a sort of negative manifesto in "Its Wavering Image," in which a charming white reporter romantically exploits a biracial girl in San Francisco's Chinatown in order to perpetuate in his "special-feature article" exactly the kind of sensationalist, Orientalist misrepresentations Eaton was working to overwrite and the last sting of his betrayal is that his racially anxious gaze forces the heroine to renounce her mixed identity; it serves him right that she chooses despite his protestations of her whiteness to identify as Chinese, but for Eaton who valued her ambiguous position, who once declared, "I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any," that the choice is demanded at all is presented as tragedy.
Also in this collection you get a bunch of animal fables and stories for children, including a delightful and subtle one about the power of storytelling, featuring the imagined adventures of a cat. I may well try to get hold of Mary Chapman's Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (2016) even though Porter Square Books says its availability is "It's Complicated." I was already curious about her other writing, but there's an excerpt from her newspaper series "The Chinese in America" (1909) included in the excellent appendices of this edition that makes me want to read the rest of the interviews stat:
"I think," said Go Ek Ju, "that when I return to China I will write a book about the American people."
"What put such an idea into your head?" I asked.
"The number of books about the Chinese by Americans," answered Go Ek Ju. "I see them in the library; they are very amusing."
"See, then, that when you write your book, it is likewise amusing."
"No," said Go Ek Ju. "My aim, when I write a book about Americans will be to make it not amusing, but interesting and instructive. The poor Americans have to content themselves with writing for amusement only because they have no means of obtaining any true knowledge of the Chinese when in China; but we Chinese in America have fine facilities for learning all about the Americans. We go into the American houses as servants; we enter the American schools and colleges as students; we ask questions and we think about what we hear and see. Where is there the American who will go to China and enter into the service of a Chinese family as a domestic? We have yet to hear about a band of American youths, both male and female, being admitted as students into a Chinese university."
I had never heard of the author before
osprey_archer mentioned her last month in context of reading a novel by her sister. I am glad she has been rediscovered enough for critical editions and biographies. I look forward to finding out who else has been out there for more than a century that I don't know.
