Sui Sin Far, also called Edith Eaton, was born to an English father and Chinese mother. As a child, she grew up in North America and Central England. Thus, she obtained an intimate grasp of the complicated and challenging relationships between races, which were entangled with many individual misconceptions and community biases. Sui Sin Far faces the constant challenge of reconciling her ethnic orientation in a society of discrimination and hatred. Nevertheless, between 1890 and 1915, she productively authored several short tales and essays. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian” is a brief autobiographical article chronicling her early and adulthood encounters with racism. Following the account of an American female who wedded a Chinese, her article “Half-Chinese Children” shows the predicament of kids born from mixed marriages in North America. The key distinction between “Sweet Sin” and the characters in “Half-Chinese Children” is that the former is the author’s first literary interaction with race and has a Eurasian hero. These literary works illustrate a longstanding battle with racism and miscegenation stereotypes in which she establishes a discursive platform to confront a range of issues that are often taboo in open discourse.
Sui Sin Far learned journalism through practice, mentoring, and observation rather than formal schooling. Notably, upon the family’s relocation to Quebec, she was forced to drop out of school at ten years old to support her family (Lee 11). No documented correspondence or interview material is attributed to Far or notable writers who influenced her to begin writing. Sui Sin Far started her writing profession as a young lady in Montreal, but she would later move to the United States to continue her love of literature. Despite having no mentors, she made several friends in the places where she worked, and they pushed her to submit her articles to local publications. For example, her early short stories were featured in Jamaican publications, such as Gall’s News Letter (Cordell 215). These early experiences marked the beginning of Far’s journey as an author.
The technique and instrument of writing facilitate Sui Sin Far’s ability to restore her subjectivity. As her piece “Leaves from a Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian” reveals, this mission can only be accomplished if she remembers and interprets her prior encounter in its entirety. Nonetheless, Far’s approach to recollection is frequently powerful and unsettling. Her constant attempts to piece together parts of her past do not usually result in a whole image. The proactive notion usually entails re-evaluating the individual’s standing in the first trauma situation by invoking a conclusion that was lacking at the time. Throughout the work, the author discusses her childhood and adolescence as they relate to race and ethnicity (Lee 15). She does not attempt to hide the conflicted racial awareness and its roots by removing her scathing undertone.
Given her foreign socialization and looks, Sui Sin Far could blend into white society and avoid the blatant bigotry Chinese people experience. Teng notes that Far opted not to expose her identity in her journal posts out of modesty, notwithstanding her unmarried status and the intimate nature of her writings (56). Nevertheless, her indignation concerning this discrimination and her loyalty to the Chinese are too powerful for her to relinquish her ethnicity for convenience. Moreover, her Eurasian awareness enables her to speak for others subjected to scathing comments founded on a widespread fear and disgust of intermarriage. In her article “Half-Chinese Children,” an American lady who wedded a Chinese vividly describes the predicament of the kids of mixed couples in North America. She claims that youngsters living in the city’s Chinatown are mocked and taunted even by lower-class white folks (Tricker 259). Mixed marriages were considered a threat to the white race and the Chinese during that era, and mixed-race children were considered unclean.
Racial discrimination and surveillance are seldom distant from Sui Sin Far, even though her childhood is distinctive from other half-Chinese kids in Chinatown. In “Leaves,” Sui Sin Far describes being exposed to inquisitive and demeaning gazes that reduced her to a silent commodity for show and scrutiny. Then, at age four, Far hears her caregiver “inform another of her kind that my mother is Chinese… then the two ladies speak together,” she knows something is amiss. “Even though the term “Chinese” transmits no meaning to me, I sense that they are conversing about my parents, and my heart is pounding with indignation” (Lee 9). Furthermore, when she is summoned from her play for her identity to be inspected, she refuses to be reduced to an exotic being, a show for entertainment. She says she will not go back there, and until it is time to go home, she will stay behind a hallway door and decline to come out. Thus, no analysis of Sui Sin Far as an author and individual can refute the reality that racial tensions constitute the bulk of her works.
In the short novel “Sweet Sin,” Sui Sin Far restates her racial encounters in her formative years by having the protagonist shun the depersonalizing stare of her white viewers. In the story, an elderly man with white hair examines the tiny heroine with condescension, commenting that she is a “very peculiar little girl” due to her uncommon characteristics (Tricker 237). Consequently, she protests to her mother, “They may think anything they want! Furthermore, it’s not the Chinese half of my ancestry that makes me feel this way; it’s the American half…” (Tricker 237). In preserving her ethnicity and individuality, Sweet Sin resists resolutely people who want to transform her into a commodity. Thus, “…she whispers to the other people, and they try to make me talk and examine me from head to toe as if I were a wild animal—I’d rather be killed than be a show” (Far, Sweet Sin 226). When the plot progresses, Sweet Sin finally falls prey to bigotry against mixed marriages. She decides to take her life out of dread of having children who would experience racial intolerance. Sui Sin Far may have meant for the ‘sin’ in Sweet Sin’s title to refer to the alleged ‘sin’ of interracial marriage, given the anxieties surrounding interracial marriages. Nonetheless, combining “sweet” with “sin” would correspondingly signify defiance of traditional denouncements of mixed marriage.
The above three works compare with Sui Sin Far’s story “The Story of a White Woman Who Married a Chinese”, which elaborates on the aforementioned effort to confront the entrenched discrimination against interracial couples. This narrative depicts an interracial relationship between a Chinese man and a white lady, consistent with its title. The story’s depiction of persons and events addresses highly sensitive themes of the period in America. White individuals viewed Chinese inhabitants, many of whom were emigrant laborers with underpaid occupations, as inferior people (Lee 11). Racial lines were rigidly maintained both psychologically and physically. Most Chinese individuals spent their whole lives in Chinatown, an isolated community that excludes itself from the rest of the country. Far addresses this issue in her story “In the Land of the Free”, which mocks America for claiming to be a land of equal opportunities and freedom when, in reality, it oppresses immigrants and people of color (Far, The Collected Writings 76). This entrenched culture of hatred and the resulting community scrutiny made intermarriage offensive.
To this end, Sui Sin’s confused perspective on differences between races and persecution as a Eurasian kid in the West developed gradually. A statement like “the most uncouth representatives of their race,” made by Far about Chinese males she saw decades previously, is more than simply a casual sentiment (Far, Leaves 126). Its strongly didactic tone reveals the prevalent racial standard wherein she unwittingly participates and her conscious detachment from them. Ultimately, it became fully apparent when she began her literary career in an era when interracial marriage is still widely unacceptable, if not unimaginable, in the US.
Accordingly, this analysis demonstrates that most of Sui Sin Far’s work is devoted to expressing and striving to resolve the racial disparity between Asians and Americans. Throughout her lifetime, Eaton attracted a huge audience through her writing. As a woman of mixed race who wrote on the plight of minorities, she encountered prejudice in the editorial world in the late nineteenth century. Her stories try to dismantle racial purity misconceptions by reinforcing her perspectives on interracial relationships. Similarly, they show the racial myths behind white Americans’ pretense of natural supremacy. Her upbringing in both Western and Chinese settings enables her to build a unique dominant voice that urges conventional America to recognize and appreciate their Chinese counterparts. More importantly, Far’s works show that people’s experiences significantly influence their understanding and interaction with art.
Works Cited
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson. “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton ed. by Mary Chapman.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, vol. 27, no. 2, 2017, pp. 214-216.
Far, Sui Sin. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Independent 66.3138 (1909): 125129.
Far, Sui Sin. “Sweet Sin: A Chinese American Story.” Land of Sunrise. 1898: 223-26.
Far, Sui Sin. The Collected Writings of Sui Sin Far, Portland Mint Editions, 2022.
Lee, Sue Ann. Sui Sin Far: Voicing Unheard Asian American Female Writers from the Nineteenth Century. 2022, Trinity College, Senior Theses. Trinity College.
Teng, Emma J. Eurasian – Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 184, the University Of California Press, 2013.
Tricker, Spencer. “Pan’s Burden: Intertextual Aesthetics and Illiberal Cosmopolitanism in Sui Sin Far’s” Eurasian” Stories.” American Literary Realism, vol. 52, no. 3, 2020, pp. 234-263.