Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings

During an era of extreme Sinophobia, the Eurasian Sui Sin Far (1865-1914) courageously wrote of the Chinese in North America as humorous, tragic, charming, and loving—in short, as human. Her stories sympathetically portrayed a group caught between worlds, inheritors of traditional Chinese values who found themselves thrust into booming mercantile and extremely race-conscious cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Montreal at the turn of the last century. 

Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks select from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1914) two dozen of the author's finest stories, including "In the Land of the Free," "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese," "Her Chinese Husband," and "The Wisdom of the New." They also delve into Children's stories like "The Story of a Little Chinese Seabird" and "What about the Cat?" A second section offers previously uncollected writings, including journalism and fiction that appeared in the Montreal Daily Witness, Los Angeles Express, New York Independent, The Westerner, and New England Magazine. The final piece, "Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career," was printed in the Boston Globein 1912, two years before her death.

Amy Ling is a professor of English and director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. Annette White-Parks is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the author of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography.