Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Asian American Experience) - Hardcover

Annette White-Parks; Roger Daniels

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252021134 ISBN 13: 9780252021138

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1995

Synopsis

The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in the United Kingdom in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s, Eaton worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then settled in the United States, where she published her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

Annette White-Parks offers the first full-length biography of the woman now remembered as North America's first published Asian writer. White-Parks reveals an author who defied the in vogue style of "yellow peril" literature to show Chinatowns and their inhabitants as complex, feeling human beings. Her insider's sympathy focused in particular on Chinese American women and children. Confronted with social divisions and discrimination, Sui Sin Far experimented with trickster characters and irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization forced on them because of their race, gender, or class.

About this title

About the Author

Annette White-Parks is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and coeditor of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings.

From the Back Cover

The first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays a gifted, unsung woman and a world rarely seen in anything other than stereotypes. The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec in the early 1870s; she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name she has come to be known by, Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Today Sui Sin Far is finally being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinese with an insider's sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, breaking the stereotypes of silence, invisibility, and "bachelor society".

Reviews

Sui Sin Far (1865-1914) could have "passed," as did her brothers and sisters, but set out to be the voice of Chinese American women and children in Canada and the United States. She wrote short stories for magazines, newspaper articles and one book-length collection of stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Facing severe odds of poverty, poor health, and discrimination as a woman and as a Chinese (from both whites and Chinese), she persevered in writing poignant, often melodramatic tales that show the humanity of the Chinese people, such as "A Chinese Ishmael," "A Chinese Tom-Boy," and "A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China." Her news articles include "Chinatown Boys and Girls," and "The Chinese in America." White-Parks (editor, Gathering of Voices on the Asian American Experience, Highsmith Pr., 1994) retrieves a lost, important voice. Recommended for strong Asian collections.?Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252021134
• ISBN 13: 9780252021138
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288