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" What will become relevant for feminist theory in the near future will be when the growing numbers of offspring of intermarriage who can potentially pass as white refuse their inherited white privilege and join subordinate groups to sabotage existing power arrangements," Aida Hurtado observes when discussing the different relationship between women of color, white women and white men respectively (12). About a century ago, a pair of Chinese Eurasian sisters did exactly what Hurtado predicts for the future. Born of an English father and a Chinese mother, Edith Maude Eaton, the older one among the two, sided herself with the working-class Chinese immigrants and sought to right the wrongs they suffered through writing them; while Winnifred Eaton achieved considerable financial success by churning out popular romance novels under a Japanese-sounding pseudonym Onoto Watanna.
The two sisters differ significantly in their ethnicity choices in public, their personal life experience, and their respective literary subject matter and writing styles. Edith declared " I'd rather be Chinese than anything else in the world" quite early in her life when she was a kid fighting with American boys in a New York street (219). Winnifred, when interviewed during the Japanese-Russian war, posed herself as a patriotic Japanese woman. "I know Japan and the Japanese, of course, and in their time of trial all my sympathy goes out to them. I certainly hope the Japanese – No, I mean I know the Japanese will win. If you knew them as I do, knew their courage and skill in arms, you would not have any doubt either," she told the interviewer while in fact she had never stepped onto the Japanese soil in her lifetime (qtd. in Birchall 93). Edith called herself "a very serious and sober-minded spinster" and remained single all her life. Winnifred had no objection to accept financial help from male friends at critical moments, married twice and had four children. Edith touched deep into the routine life of the Chinese immigrants in Chinatowns on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts and depicted them as normal human beings with tender feeling as well as defects of prejudice. At the same time, by exposing the unfair treatment that afflicted the Chinese immigrants, she questions the ideas of "liberty" and "equality" with ironic language. Winnifred, on the other hand, relies on the exotic Japanese setting in her novels and the sentimental interracial love stories to boost the sale of her books. This paper does not aim to praise one and accuse the other on the basis of their public claims of ethnic identity. On the contrary, I argue that both of them are embodiments of singular women who strive to achieve personal success in adverse circumstances.
The pioneering spirit in the two sisters can be traced back to the remarkable family from which they come. Their father Edward Eaton, the eldest son of an established merchant family in Macclesfield, the silk center of England, was on a tour in Shanghai extending family business in the early 1860s, where he met and married Grace A. (Lotus Blossom) Trefusis, a Chinese woman. The latter was said to be adopted, brought to England and given an English education by a Sir Hugh Matheson. Tranined as a missionary, as family legend held, she was sent back to China and met her husband, though little public record survived to prove that (White-Parks 10-12). It is well imaginable what kind of social sentiment the couple faced in the middle of 19th century concerning their decision to live as husband and wife, when interracial marriage was not only a rarity but also a taboo.
Except for a brief stay in the States, the couple mainly lived with the Eaton family at Macclesfield when they came back from China with an infant boy. However, in 1871 or 1872, Edward and Lotus Blossom Eaton, together with their recently enlarged family of four, migrated to North America. There was no clear indication of the reasons of their removal. It might be the depression in the silk trade between England and China, or it might result from possible conflict within the Eaton family or the community (White-Parks 17). In a suburban environment like that of Macclesfield, anti-miscegenation sentiment might be especially strong. The family finally settled down in Montreal, where Edward Eaton tried very hard to support his family as an artist and most of the twelve children who survived infancy were drawn from school at an early age and helped the family to make a living.
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Edith came to the awareness of her unique racial identity quite early in her life and courageously asserted it when she adopted the career of a journalist and a fiction writer. The gazes of curiosity from white people, ranging from those "tempered with kindness" (Eaton 220) to more hostile ones "in the way… people gaze upon strange animals in a menagerie" (Eaton 220) were commonplace events in her childhood. Through her Mom's tales about China and books on the same topic that she could find in the library, she learned the glory of China as an ancient civilization. "At eighteen years of age what troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority. I am small, but my feelings are big – and great is my vanity," she wrote in an auto-biological essay (222). Moreover, she used the Chinese words for narcissus "Sui Sin Far" as her pen name when entering into a professional writing career. One of the most popular flowers in China and the most suitable decoration flower in the Chinese New Year, narcissus is famous for both its tenderness and fortitude as the flower to bloom in the adverse environment in wintertime. It is indeed a well-chosen pseudonym for Edith as regards the nature of her unique mission.
When she traveled across the Canadian-US border to earn a living with her pen, she met with more direct assaults on people with Chinese origin. Once at a dinner table in a "little town away off on the north shore of a big lake" in the States, her employer commented, "I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves…their faces seem to be so utterly devoid of expression that I cannot help but doubt," unaware of Edith's racial identity. Another acquaintance observed, "A chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger." " I wouldn't have one in my house," declares Edith's landlady (224). Kept by "a miserable, cowardly feeling" to remain silent at first, Edith nonetheless replied to the talk "with a great effort," "The Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to understand that I am – I am a Chinese" (225). Though her employer apologized for his prejudice, Edith did not remain longer in the little town, for she was fully conscious of the force of the prevalent public opinion on Chinese immigrants and people of mixed racial identity.
Her easily distinguished European appearance not only provides Edith with greater opportunities to observe social prejudice, it also enables her to fight the war against social injustice on behalf of Chinese immigrants more strategically. Opposing an unfair and discriminative tax proposal of five hundred dollars "upon every Chinaman coming into the Dominion of Canada," Edith Eaton wrote "A Plea for the Chinaman: A Correspondent's Argument in His Favor" to the editor of the local paper Montreal Daily Star, and signed "E.E" at the end of the article (Eaton 198). The letter reads like written by someone who belongs to the dominant white society in Montreal but nevertheless felt enraged by the unjust of the proposed tax impose. Attacking the alleged rationales behind the proposal one by one, Edith revealed that it was pure ethnocentric prejudice that was at play. In answer to the accusation of Chinaman's existence endangered the "material interests of this country," Edith shows that "he does good to our laboring class for he acts as an incentive to them to be industrious and honest." To the accusation that Chinaman "working cheap," she argues that it is because "the white men are willing to accept the same wages per week as the Chinamen, but they refuse to put in as much work for the wages." Finally, to the statement that Chinaman are "grossly immoral," Edith spoke from personal experience that "I have never heard during a residence her of many years of any one of these Chinese being accused of saying or doing that which was immoral," and went on to point out perhaps there were some exceptions for "it is true some of the Chinamen who have been contaminated by white men and American lawyers, become swindlers and perjurers, and help their contaminators" to exploit their own countrymen. As White-Parks points out, using words "that disguise as much as they reveal" (82), the author came to the clearest implication of her identity when she observed that "it needs a Chinaman to stand up for a Chinaman." By assuming the identity as an insider from the dominant social group, Edith made her argument even more convincing and easier for the public to accept. It is hardly imaginable that members from an ethnic group that was accused by the larger part of society as immoral could find any space in a mainstream publication to have their own voices heard even on matters so critical for their well being. In this sense, the interstitial space of her Eurasian status, to use Emma Pérez's word, serves as an advantage she enjoyed to advance her cause.
One of the most valuable contributions of Edith Eaton's work to Chinese American literature is her effort to depict early Chinese immigrants as diverse individuals with normal human feelings as opposed to the prevalent stereotype of Chinese being not only alike to each other but also devoid of any sublime emotions at all. Mrs. Spring Fragrance is the only collection of short stories that Edith managed to publish in her lifetime. Almost every story in this book is a vivid illustration of the commonplace life in a Chinese immigrant household. She creates such characters as the fully Americanized Chinese wife who cheerfully encourages her friend to break through family arranged marriage, the stubborn but respectable Chinese husband who has acquire American way of life but insists on Chinese way of thinking, and the Chinese woman who, driven mad by the drastic cultural difference she perceives on arriving in the States from a little village in China, poisoned her own son for fear that the American education that her husband planed for the kid would bring him to a more deplorable condition than death (Yin 99).
To draw a fair picture, Edith also incisively points out that some Chinese immigrants are also narrow-minded and prejudiced, just like some white people and other ordinary human beings. In the story titled "Her Chinese Husband," an originally harmonious family composed of a Chinese man, a white woman and two kids ends tragically when the husband is murdered not by Americans but by his own countrymen. The widow lamented at the end of the story, " There are some Chinese, just as there are some Americans, who are opposed to all progress, and who hate with a bitter hatred all who would enlighten or be enlightened" (Eaton 83). Exposing the virtues as well as imperfection in the Chinese immigrants, Edith presented them as individualized human beings rather than a cold-blooded mass common in the popular description of the Chinese at that time.
Living at the high time of Victorian culture, Edith not only courageously fought against dominant social injustice publicly, but also challenged social convention in her personal life. Working as a journalist in Jamaica, she found "some of the 'sporty' people seek" her acquaintance when they heard the rumor that she had Chinese blood in her. She drove away those adventurers by acting like "a very serious and sober-minded spinster" (Eaton 226). In order to further her career, she chose to remain single all her life. Only once did she consent to marry a man, whom she had refused nine times, due to the pressure from her "married mother and married sisters" (228). When one day the young man suggested, "…consider a moment. Wouldn't it be just a little pleasanter for us if, after we are married, we allowed it to be presumed that you were - er – Japanese? So many of my friends have inquired of me if that is not your nationality. They would be so charmed to meet a little Japanese lady" (229). She at once returned his ring and snapped back "Hadn't you better oblige them by finding one?" (229) On that very evening, she wrote in her diary, "Joy, oh, joy! I'm free once more. Never again shall I be untrue to my own heart. Never again will I allow any one to 'hound' or 'sneer' me into matrimony" (230).
Winnifred Eaton differed radically from her older sister in this regard. She was not a warrior who fought for the interest of any ethnic group, but a shrewd businesswoman who knew how to advance her personal career most efficiently, and a lively woman who had no objection to occasional flirtation with pleasant young men. A born fiction writer, she fantasized almost everything around her, including her own ethnic identity, with a romantic light. Fully aware of the taste of her day and the racial and sexual myths that her contemporary reading public held, Winnifred determined to cater to the prevalent and her own belief in social momentum and forfeited the common ancestry she shared with her mother's people. In her anonymous published autobiography Me, she claimed that "My father's an Oxford man, and a descendant of the family of Sir Isaac Newton…"(Birchall 6). When it comes to her mother, she would like to put her hometown in Japan to promote her own personal charm as a Eurasian and make the Japanese setting in her novel convincing to the reader. In a 1908 story about gardens, Winnifred wrote, "I often think of my mother, and her pathetic attempts to recall the bloom of the flowering land of Japan which had been her home" (Birchall 9) She internalized the fabrication that she created for herself to the degree that she virtually lived in this fantasy. In a "private, unpublished, diary-like document, entitled, with hilarious irony, 'You Can't Run Away from Yourself',' she declared, "I was 'labeled' Japanese. The little oriental blood in me did not make me a real 'Jap' any more that the drop of French in me made me a Frenchwoman" (qtd. in Birchall 140). It seems that she was little troubled by the fact that she did not have "little oriental blood" but was born of a Chinese mother. As Diana Birchall pointed out, "It is remarkable to see Winnifred in the very act of lying herself; perpetuating her false identity had become so habitual she did not drop it even in a discourse going on in her own mind" (140).
It is well understandable why Winnifred took such a strategy to achieve personal success. In the first place, she was also an ambitious and strong-willed individual who was quite determined to achieve worldly fame. The first few sentences in the first story that Winnifred Eaton ever published run as follows, "Since I was first able to think I have had intense longings for wealth. To have money, to have honor, greatness, grandeur and splendour, to have all this, was to live. Money, to me, was everything." It will not be fallacious to presume that Winnifred put some of her own voice into that of her character. In Me, her autobiographical novel published in 1915, she wrote, " I had always secretly believed there were the strains of genius somewhere hidden in me; I had always lived in a little dream world of my own, wherein, beautiful and courted I moved among the elect of the earth" (qtd. in Birchall 3). She is also optimistic, to say the least, in her evaluation of her own ability, "I think I had the most acute, inquiring and eager mind of any girl of my age in the world" (qtd. in Birchall 4). Like Edith, she was never submissive in her relationship with men. When her first husband turned out to be alcoholic and abusive, she divorced him and supported herself and her three children alone for several years. Her daughter Doris Rooney remembered how Winnifred prevented her second husband from returning the paint that she had ordered to repaint their house in Calgary, Canada soon after their marriage, to which the husband was less enthusiastic, by driving nails into the tops of the paint cans and making a hole in each (Ling 30).
Most importantly, her decision to "pass as Japanese" was firmly grounded in the historical situation and popular sentiment of her time. After two Opium Wars and Sino-Japanese War, China had fallen from an former glorious "Central Kingdom" to a semi-colonized and backward feudal society that was not only lack in modern technology but also in want of an efficient and strong political regime. On the other hand, Japan, though forced to open several of her ports to the western imperial power, recognized the force of modernization and quickly turned into an new expansionist imperial nation, securing her place in the political world by winning the Sino-Japanese and Russian-Japanese wars. Thus by the turn of the 20th century, the two countries were in completely different light in the western conception.
Besides, compared to the Japanese people in the far-away Pacific islands, the Chinese immigrants appeared to be a closer threat to white Americans. "From 1866 to 1869, between 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese made up ninety percent of the railroad workforce" (Ling 22). Especially when California entered its first economic depression in 1873 and unemployment rate was unprecedentedly high, the Chinese immigrants as a group were readily caught in a scapegoat position (Ling 23). The Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress in 1882 "officially confirmed the inferiority and undesirability of the Chinese and seemed to sanction any expressions of hatred …" (Ling 24). Toward a land that is on the other side of the earth where she had never been to, and a group of people suffering the worst public opinion in her time with whom she had never had any direct relation, Winnifred had every reason to deny any obligation on her part to fight on their behalf. After all, it takes immense courage to be a warrior against social momentum. By assuming a Japanese identity, Winnifred ingeniously manipulated the focus of the larger society from her less boastful Eurasian self, an outcome of a deplored interracial marriage to the exotic charm related to Japanese culture that she claimed to be embodied in her. "A woman with her finger squarely on the pulse of her time" (Ling, 55), Winnifred was described as a cultural chameleon that made the best use of her originally less advantageous ethnic identity to guarantee her better chance of survival in a hostile environment.
Though she writing in the popular genre of romance, there is still some merit in Winnifred's literary work. Appealing to popular taste for sentimental love stories and exploiting western notions of oriental exoticism, Winnifred successfully marketed her almost a dozen romance novels with picturesque Japanese setting and gentle and loving Japanese women as her heroines. However, she did centered most of her plots around miscegenation when interracial marriages were illegal by law in many states (Ling, 51). Yet her confrontation with social convention was always tainted with her willingness to acknowledge the established power structure. Among her interracial lovers, the majority of them were coupled on the model of white males with Japanese women. The reverse of this paradigm tends to end in tragedy rather than more popularly accepted reunion of the lovers, which is often the case in her novels.
It is also noteworthy that the heroines in Winnifred's novels are not traditional Japanese women who were content with their standings in society. They are "bohemians," as she called them (Ling, 52), who possess strong individuality that is typical and valued in American tradition. After the publication of her first novel Miss Numè of Japan, a review of this book in Chicago Tribune insightfully pointed out that "[the author] is said by those who ought to know – namely the publishers of the story—to be herself Japanese… but the reader cannot escape the conviction that some bright American girl who has traveled in Japan is coquetting with him under the guise of Onoto Watanna" (Birchall 58). The reviewer would be surprised to know that this "bright American girl" had never been to Japan at all. To some extent, it also attests to the power of the cultural stereotype in influencing and even shaping people's knowledge of a foreign land: all that was needed to depict a Japanese setting, or any setting outside the western society for that matter, was to comply to the popular conception of that Other culture.
Winnifred's literary work is not without its own merit. Her novels are often well-plotted pieces with vivid characters and strong emotional appeal. Even the respected William Dean Howells sang high praise for one of her most successful novel A Japanese Nightingale: "If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it….there is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette—it is hardly of the dimensions of a novel—which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere. Yuki (the Japanese heroine of the story) herself is of a surpassing loveableness" (Birchall 76).
True, judging from the present feminist standard, both sisters have their own limitations. Even the conscientious and selfless Edith is said to reinforce certain aspects of the popular stereotype against Chinese immigrants when she tended to describe Chinese men as almost womanly gentle but weak in body as opposed to the American man who is physically strong but heartless. Her objective of the assimilation of Chinese immigrants into the mainstream American society would also invite much criticism from scholars in minority studies. And a life under a lie is certainly not something to brag about in Winnifred's case. However, her position was extremely controversial and liberal in a society where Chinese were considered subhuman and totally rejected by the dominant race group. As for Winnifred, Edith once offered a most perceptive comment. She was fully aware that "several half Chinese young men and women, thinking to advance themselves, both in a social and business sense, pass as Japanese" (Eaton 228). Then she asked a rhetorical question: "Are not those who compel them to thus cringe more to be blamed than they"? (Eaton 228)
In her study of the Eaton sisters, Amy Ling concludes, "Though their methods diverged, ultimately, both sisters worked together, for what Edith in her writing asserted—the Chinese are human and assimilable—Winnifred, in her life and successful career, demonstrated" (39). This statement is not very firmly grounded in that Winnifred's success in her assimilation into the American society was based on her very negation of the Chinese identity. However, she achieved worldly success through the manipulation of an originally nonetheless disadvantaged status of a woman in the minorities. The exploitation of double identities is the common heritage that the sisters passed down to future generations.
Birchall, Diana Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. (series) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Eaton, Edith Maude/Sui Sin Far Mrs. Spring Frangance and Other Writings. Ed. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. (the Asian American Experience, series Editor: Roger Daniels) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Hurtado, Aida The Color of Privilege : Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism
Ling, Amy Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, Inc. 1990.
White-Parks, Annette Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. (series) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Yin,Xiao-Huang Chinese American Literature since the 1850s. (series) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
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