… a footnote in race relation theory a symbol for the intersection of two worlds, one foot in each of them so you can be dissected stuffed into labeled boxes—

Are you more white or more Japanese?

Race: check only one box below

What's it like only being half Japanese?

Half-breed!

And you're denied completeness wholeness and put on display

What are you?

--"Guessing Game,"

by Douglas P. Easterly

American society has long been prisoner to binary thinking about race. For the most part, racial matters have been cast in terms of black and white. Other groups, no matter how populous or important to the consideration of a given issue, have been seen as secondary to these two in the national dialogue about race.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings

By Sui Sin Far

Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks

University of Illinois Press

297 pp.; $39.95, hardcover;

$15.95, paper

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

By Annette White-Parks

University of Illinois Press

268 pp.; $34.95

In recent years, however, some parts of American society have begun to come to grips with multiplicity in the ways they think and act about race. The Census Bureau is testing new forms that include a controversial "multiracial" box and allow an individual to give more than one response. Tiger Woods, whom some sportswriters have dubbed the Great Black Hope of the golf world, insists that he is more Asian than African American, and that he has several other ancestries as well. The cover of Newsweek asks, "What Color Is Black?" and Time proclaims that "The New Face of America" is multiracial.

Such recent trends show promise of overturning binary thinking about race. In fact, if one examines the historical and literary record, one will find that there has long been a quiet tune played in a minor key by people with mixed racial consciousness. Some of the writings of prominent African American leaders from the first part of this century—people like W. E. B. DuBois and Mary Church Terrell and Walter White—have acknowledged multiple racial identities even as they have expressed solidarity with other Americans of African descent. Jean Toomer, whose Cane is rightly celebrated as one of the masterpieces of African American literature, nonetheless possessed mainly white ancestry and lived large parts of his life as white. Nella Larsen wrote two novels in the 1920s about the phenomenon of "passing"--a mixed person defying the one-drop rule and living as white.

First chair in this multiethnic orchestra was Sui Sin Far. Born in England in 1865 to a Chinese mother and English father, she grew up, mainly in Canada but also in the Caribbean and the United States, as Edith Maude Eaton. Embarking on a writing career, she sometimes took the pen name Sui Sin Far, especially when writing stories about Chinese North Americans. Those stories and many of her other writings are collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Most of the stories in this collection were first published in the original Mrs. Spring Fragrance in 1912.

They include "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese," about a woman who left an abusive white husband and eventually married a kindly Chinese man. Surely, Sui Sin Far must have angered white readers early in the century with paragraphs like these:

Loving Liu Kanghi, I became his wife, and though it is true that there are many Americans who look down upon me for so becoming, I have never regretted it. No, not even when men cast upon me the glances they cast upon sporting women. I accept the lot of the American wife of a humble Chinaman in America. The happiness of the man who loves me is more to me than the approval or disapproval of those who in my dark days left me to die like a dog. My Chinese husband has his faults. He is hot-tempered and, at times, arbitrary; but he is always a man, and has never sought to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman. I can lean upon and trust in him. I feel him behind me, protecting and caring for me, and that, to an ordinary woman like myself, means more than anything else.

No passage more clearly encapsulates the essence of Sui Sin Far's writing. She wrote in clear prose about Chinese North Americans, speaking as a nearby, sympathetic outsider. She portrayed them as ordinary people with understandable emotions and aspirations. And she did so at a time when nearly all published writing pictured Chinese people as exotic, threatening, and inscrutably alien.

Some of the stories have a gender-crossing theme. "The Smuggling of Tie Co" offers a swashbuckling tale of daredevils who smuggle Chinese into the United States. Early in the story, Fabian, a white male smuggler, teases Tie Co, apparently a Chinese boy, about the joys of having a "little woman" around to cook for him. Tie Co responds, "I not have wife. I not like woman, I like man," and then, "I like you." Later, Tie Co leaps off a bridge to save his comrade Fabian, whereupon the white man is perplexed to learn that his worshipful companion is actually a woman. Two other stories, "A Chinese Boy-Girl" and "Tian Shan's Kindred Spirit," also describe people of one gender presented as of another.

So Sui Sin Far's fiction explores at least two kinds of forbidden border crossings: across the lines of race and gender. Other stories take the reader inside, or at least close to, Chinese lives in North America with sympathy and without exoticism. "The Chinese Lily" paints in a few quick strokes a moving tale of love, sisterhood, and death. The book also contains nine children's tales with Chinese American themes, all of them designed to reach younger white readers with the message that Chinese are people.

To that original collection, editors Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks have added two dozen short stories and journalistic feature articles that appeared in various newspapers and magazines across North America between 1890 and 1912. Most of these stories are straightforward descriptions of aspects of life in Chinatowns. Many express pleas for white North Americans to treat their Chinese American neighbors with greater friendship and understanding. In "Half-Chinese Children," Sui Sin Far describes the lives of the offspring of Chinese fathers and Caucasian women and emphasizes their mixedness:

In some [mixed] families, one daughter is married to a Chinaman, another to an American. It gives food for thought—the fact, that a couple of centuries from now, the great grand children of the woman who married an American will be Americans and nothing else, whilst the descendents of her sister, who married a Chinaman and probably followed her husband to his own country will be Chinamen, pure and simple.

The most noteworthy of the additions included by the editors are two autobiographical pieces, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," originally published in The Independent, and "Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career," from the Boston Globe. These are the chief sources we have for information on the author's life.

White-Parks has made good use of those sources in a companion volume, a full-scale literary biography titled Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. This is a work of prodigious research. Not content with just those two snatches of autobiography and the published stories, White-Parks tracked down and interviewed surviving relatives and descendants of friends. She read carefully through decades of newspapers in the several cities in which Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude Eaton lived. She read birth notices, death notices, baptismal certificates, and the census manuscripts of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton's father's ancestral village in England.

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton is heavily informed by theory from the literature of cultural studies and feminism. White-Parks is happy to demonstrate that she has read all the relevant authorities, from Mikhail Bakhtin and Carolyn Heilbrun to Joan Radner and Susan Lanser.

Despite the perhaps overly generous recourse to theory, White-Parks's own interests are fairly straightforward. She wants to study the writer in her historical, cultural, and literary context—in Sui Sin Far's case as a geographically mobile, multiethnic person. For White-Parks the central dilemma posed by the writing of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton is this: How is a minority woman writer to get published and also to say things that are true and important? White-Parks has a theory that Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton writes with "dual fictional voices"--one an exotic entertainment vehicle in order to achieve publication, the other a courageous voice that confounds white people's stereotypes and encourages them to perceive Chinese people sympathetically.

There are flaws, however, in White-Parks's work, and they are not insignificant. White-Parks exhibits a tendency to present theory undigested. It is absolutely true, and important, that Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton was "a writer marginalized by race, gender, and class in the imperialistic marketplace of her era," but such a sentence is also formulaic cant that does not illuminate much without further discussion. White-Parks tends, moreover, to treat all women and all people of color as virtuous and brave—surely there must have been some timidity somewhere.

Indeed, White-Parks tends to get caught up in binary thinking of the sort that Sui Sin Far was trying to dispel. White-Parks's analysis is often contradictory, as she divides Sui Sin Far and others into alternate Chinese and Caucasian personas to fit the thread of her interpretation. She arbitrarily imposes white feminist thinking, or Asian feminist thinking as she perceives it, without a working knowledge of the mixed-race thinking that is at the heart of Sui Sin Far's work.1 Rather than examine the multiplicities and incorporations of people like the character Tie Co, and like Sui Sin Far herself, who defy borders of social construction such as race and gender, White-Parks relies on stereotypes that reinforce those boundaries and pit one against another. White-Parks's binary vacillation between good and bad, insider and outsider, authentic and inauthentic, Chinese and Caucasian, ultimately amounts to a surrender to received racist and sexist categories, and to a misrepresentation of Sui Sin Far.

Some of the most obvious examples of such binary thinking surround White-Parks's use of names. In a curious lapse from her generally scrupulous respect for the people about whom she writes, White-Parks arrogates to herself the right to rename Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton's mother in service of White-Parks's ideology. All documents and nearly all family memories record the mother's name as Grace A. Eaton. Like many Chinese immigrants to English-speaking countries, she seems to have selected an English name and stuck to it throughout her life (indeed beyond, for Grace is the name on her tombstone). Yet White-Parks insists on calling her "Lotus Blossom." This was not her name—it is not even a Chinese name, but an English translation of "the kind of 'pet' flower name that Chinese families, especially rural families, have traditionally given their daughters." To name a Chinese person "Lotus Blossom" is as derogatory as to call an African American "Sambo," as Amy Ling points out in Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990). White-Parks defends this unfortunate choice by declaring her "commitment to breaking through the invisibility brought to this woman's history largely through British nomenclature and to portraying her not only as Sui Sin Far's mother but as a Chinese immigrant woman to England and then Canada."

Then there is the naming and signifying of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton's sister. Following other recent critics such as Frank Chin, S. E. Solberg, and Amy Ling, White-Parks pits Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton against her sister Winifred Eaton Babcock, a commercially more successful fiction writer who published in the same decades under the Japanese pen name Onoto Watanna. Their argument on this score is essentially that Edith was the Good Sister, who embraced a Chinese identity and defended Chinese people against white racism, while Winifred, the Bad Sister, chickened out, pretended to be Japanese, and made a lot of money playing on white people's exotic fantasies about Asians.

There is some merit in this argument, but it depends on casting Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton as identifying solely with her Chinese heritage--"the first to write from an insider viewpoint on Chinese in North America," "a writer committed to her own people." In fact, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton wrote not as a Chinese North American insider but as a knowledgeable friend, and though she was passionately committed to the welfare of Chinese Americans, she also lived most of her personal life on the white side of the line. It is that mixedness that is the central quality of the life and work of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, and White-Parks and the other critics have missed it almost entirely.

They have also disrespected and failed to understand Onoto Watanna/ Winifred Eaton Babcock. White-Parks contends that somehow the name "Sui Sin Far" is authentic, while "Onoto Watanna" is fabricated. She represents Onoto Watanna/Winifred Eaton Babcock as selling out as she masks her Chinese identity, and Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude Eaton as having come to terms with hers. What White-Parks fails to recognize is that Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude Eaton and Onoto Watanna/Winifred Eaton Babcock were not just Chinese, nor were they just Caucasian. They were racially mixed, Chinese and white.

White-Parks appears to understand that "race" is not a biological category, rather a social construction invented to maintain hierarchy. Yet she does not recognize the implications of Onoto Watanna/Winifred Eaton Babcock's choice of a Japanese identity. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton's writing and Annette White-Parks's biography repeatedly refer to the racial hierarchy of the western United States at the turn of the century as comprising Caucasian, Japanese, and Chinese people in descending order of power and prestige. Neither sister claimed a national identity, nor a monoracial identity. The sisters were not just Chinese (and they were not seen as just Chinese by the Chinese community). Nor were they just Caucasian (and they were not seen as just Caucasian by the white community). They were, in their own estimate and the estimate of others, something in between. Is it not possible that Winifred Eaton Babcock, in choosing to rename herself as Japanese, was seeking just such an in-between category for herself? Rather than dismiss Onoto Watanna/ Winifred Eaton Babcock as having failed to come to terms with her "race," White-Parks ought to contemplate the implications of her choice. The Good Sister/Bad Sister theme begs the question of what it was that Onoto/Winifred was doing aesthetically and ethnically.

Beyond the problems of naming and of binary thinking, there is a critical problem with Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. At the center of White-Parks's dual-voices model is the figure of the trickster, a motif about which White-Parks has written on several other occasions. While the concept tells us some things about Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, it is better suited to the work of other fictionists. It simply will not bear the interpretive weight that White-Parks assigns it in this case.

Despite such hesitations about some aspects of the biography, these reviewers can recommend both books. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton are worthy additions to the distinguished series, the Asian American Experience, that Roger Daniels is assembling for the University of Illinois Press.

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton is, in the end, most important not as a woman writer, nor as a Chinese American writer, but as a writer of the experience and idea of multiethnicity. In her very person, in the subjects she chose, and in the literary voices she adopted, she acted to deconstruct the binary, hierarchical notions of race she received, and she substituted a vision of multiplicity and mutuality. In these tasks and multiple identities, she is an important writer for the needs of our own day.

1. Mixed-race thinking, much of it feminist, is available in Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontrera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987) and two books edited by Maria Root, Racially Mixed People in America: Within, Between, and Beyond Race (Sage, 1992) and The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders As the New Frontier (Sage, 1995).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 43