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Creating Themselves and Asian American FictionSui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna
In the early 1980s, when I first decided to write a book about American women writers of Chinese ancestry, I had only read Maxine Hong Kingston and Nellie Wong. There were no bibliographical aids and the Library of Congress Subject Catalog had no heading for "Chinese American Women Writers." When I asked the librarian why, she said no book had been written on the subject; therefore, as far as they were concerned, the subject did not exist. This gave me added incentive to do the research and write the book so that the subject would exist. A paragraph in Dexter Fisher's book The Third Woman informed me that Edith Eaton was the first writer of Chinese ancestry to publish fiction in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century This opened an exciting area of research and gave my project a much longer history than I'd expected. An author's query in the New York Times brought me a response from Eaton family descendents, who now consider me an honorary Eaton family member. Edith's obituary of April 7, 1914 mentioned, among other things, that she was a Eurasian author who wrote under the name Sui Sin Far and was survived by a sister, also a writer, who used the pseudonym Onoto Watanna. Here was a mystery to unravel. Why would one sister choose a Chinese name while the other chose a Japanese sounding name? I dug further into the lives and work of these sisters. I learned that Edith Maud Eaton (1865-1914) began using the pen name Sui Sin Far in 1896, and published short stories in such national periodicals as The Independent, Century, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and New York Evening Post. In 1912, thirty-seven of her stories appeared in a volume entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Winnifred Eaton (1875-1952) claimed, in Who's Who of 1906, to be born in Nagasaki of a Japanese noblewoman to substantiate her authorial persona. Using the name Onoto Watanna, she published hundreds of short stories and seventeen novels, mostly romances between Japanese or Japanese-Eurasian women and American men. Most of her novels were bestsellers, appearing in deluxe editions from Harper's with full-color illustrations, and several were translated into European languages. An adaptation of her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale, enjoyed a short run on Broadway in 1903 to compete with Madame Butterfly. From 1926-1931, Winnifred worked as a scenarist in Hollywood on such films as the original Showboat and Phantom of the Opera. Because miscegenation was then illegal in many places, the Eaton family was unusual. Their mother was Grace A. Trefusis (1846-1921), a young Chinese who had been adopted by an English couple and educated in England. She was in Shanghai training to be a missionary when she met Edward C. Eaton (1839-1915), an Englishman, who had studied art in France but at age 22 was engaged in his father's silk business in China. The couple married and a year later moved to Macclesfield, England, where Grace bore six children. Edith was the second child and their first daughter. Disinherited by his father most likely because of his marriage, Edward moved his wife and children to America around 1870, landing first in Hudson City, New York, and settling in Montreal, Canada, where eight more children, including Winnifred, were born. In her moving autobiographical essay, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," Edith probed troubling questions about her Eurasian identity: "Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters? Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, Mamma is Chinese. Why couldn't we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother's race despised? I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why?"
With fourteen children and a father struggling to make a living as a landscape painter, the Eaton family knew extreme poverty. Edith's formal schooling stopped at age ten, and thereafter she went door to door selling her own handmade lace as well as her father's paintings. Winnifred later recalled that the only warm room in the house was the kitchen. Despite a constitution weakened by rheumatic fever at age 14, Edith became self- supporting early, finding work primarily as a typist in San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. All her life, she sent money home to help her parents and siblings. While poverty elicited Edith's sympathies, it repelled Winnifred, who for a school paper described her concept of hell as her home environment: "a place full of howling, roaring, fighting, shouting children and babies. It is supreme torture to a sensitive soul to live in such a Bedlam." (Me, 113-4) Winnifred could hardly wait to escape from the cramped and frequently-changing family quarters. After a short stint as a reporter in Jamaica, West Indies, she worked in Chicago and later lived several decades in New York City, a part of the literary circle that included Mark Twain and Edith Wharton. In her latter years, through her own efforts and through a second marriage to Frank Reeve, she became quite well-to-do. The couple retired to Calgary, Alberta, where they donated a theater to the University of Calgary. To return to the earlier question: Why did one sister choose a Chinese pen name while the other preferred to be thought Japanese? Historical facts provide a context. Sinophobia was rampant throughout North America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Chinese had been brought to the United States to complete the transcontinental railroad and became the scapegoat for all the economic ills during the depression of the 1870s. To protect white laborers, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, blocking immigration from China for six decades. By contrast, the Japanese were greatly admired because Japan had won a war against China in 1895 and against Russia in 1904. In "Leaves," Edith recounts a dinner conversation when she was a newcomer to a "little town away off on the north shore of a big lake." Her new employer remarks, "Somehow or other…I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves." The town clerk responds, "A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger." To this her employer adds, "Now, the Japanese are different altogether. There is something bright and likeable about those men." In all likelihood, Edith chose a Chinese identity because of her close identification with her mother, by extension all Chinese people, and perhaps, underdogs in general . In "Leaves," she expressed great pride in defending her mother's people with her pen: "I meet many Chinese persons, and when they get into trouble am often called upon to fight their battles in the papers. This I enjoy. 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.'" Sui Sin Far's stories and newspaper articles all demonstrate that the Chinese were not merely heathen rat-eaters and opium addicts but lovable people with human emotions. Edith sought to right wrongs by writing wrongs. By contrast, Winnifred chose the route that brought her fame and fortune. If society admired the Japanese, she would be the admired Asian. If readers liked seductive but spirited young Japanese and Eurasian women who would ultimately find happiness with strong White males, that would be her major plot. Though her novels tend to be formulaic, they are filled with incident and variety, and her heroines are lively and charming. Their speech, however, hardly represents an authentic Japanese accent: "Japanese boy go long way from home--see all the big world; but liddle Japanese girl stay at home with fadder and mudder, an' vaery, vaery good, but parents luf always the boy," says Miss Nume of Japan. At the same time, this young woman is also expressing an awareness of the injustice of patriarchy. A Japanese reader, Kaksuhiko Takeda, acknowledged that "As a consequence of Onoto Watanna's work, Japanese customs and manners were properly introduced to the West" and in "the descriptions of human feelings" she was superior to Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn, two nineteenth century Western writers about Japan. In mid-career, Winnifred took a detour and wrote a novel in Irish dialect, The Diary of Delia: Being a Veracious Chronicle of the Kitchen with Some Side-lights on the Parlour (1907). Her Irish American accent seems more accurate than her Japanese: "Its an onest gurl I am...and its ashamed I'd be to mix mesilf in any such mess as that."
In 1915, Winnifred's autobiographical novel Me, a Book of Remembrance, was published anonymously and was a great hit. It tells of her leaving home at 17 with ten dollars in her pocket and high literary hopes, of being engaged to three men while falling in love with a fourth, a married man. Above all, Winnifred was a skilled storyteller, for as she rightly claims, "If you put me over a wash-tub, I tell you I would have woven a romance, aye, from the very suds. God had planted in me the fairy germs; that I knew...I had not had an Irish grandmother for nothing." (Me, p. 350) As Chinese Eurasian girls growing up during a period of intense sinophobia, Edith and Winnifred responded differently to their hostile environment. Edith chose confrontation while Winnifred chose camouflage. Edith's assumption of a Chinese pen name and her rejection of the conventional wife-mother role in order to be an artist-writer with a cause testifies to her spirit of courageous independence. Winnifred, on the other hand, used her storytelling talents as a tactical device for survival. Attuned to the taste of her day, she exploited stereotypes, provided exotic novelty in her books, and thus successfully supported herself and her three children. Edith herself defended Winnifred's actions. After explaining that some Chinese Eurasians "thinking to advance themselves, both in a social and business sense, pass as Japanese" because Americans have "for many years manifested a much higher regard for the Japanese than the Chinese," Edith asks pointedly, "Are not those who compel them to thus cringe more to be blamed than they?" Thus, Asian American fiction has two foremothers: Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, whose lives as well as their writings give us very different options when faced with an embattled situation. We can make a noble frontal attack, like Edith, and die young; or use subterfuge, playing the trickster role, like Winnifred, and live long and prosper.
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Several of the best stories in Mrs. Spring
Fragrance explore the difficulty of living between cultures and races when
both sides hated and mistrusted the other. 