Sui Sin Far (, born Edith Maude Eaton; 15 March 1865 – 7 April 1914) was an author known for her writing about

Chinese people The Chinese people or simply Chinese, are people or ethnic groups identified with China, usually through ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, or other affiliation. Chinese people are known as Zhongguoren () or as Huaren () by speakers of s ...

in North America and the

Chinese American Chinese Americans are Americans of Han Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans along with their ancestors trace lineage from ...

experience. "Sui Sin Far", the pen name under which most of her work was published, is the

Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...

name of the narcissus flower, popular amongst Chinese people.

Life account

Born in

Macclesfield Macclesfield is a market town and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England. It is located on the River Bollin in the east of the county, on the edge of the Cheshire Plain, with Macclesfield Forest to its east ...

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county t ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, Eaton was the daughter of

Englishman The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common history and culture. The English identity is of Anglo-Saxon origin, when they were known in ...

Edward Eaton, a merchant who met her Chinese mother Achuen Grace Amoy in

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. Eaton was the eldest daughter and second child of fourteen children born to the couple. In 1865, her family left England to live in

Hudson, New York Hudson is a city and the county seat of Columbia County, New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 5,894. Located on the east side of the Hudson River and 120 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, it was named for the rive ...

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, but stayed there only a short time before returning to England in 1868. The family returned to North America in 1872, relocating to

Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple-pea ...

, Canada. Her father worked as a clerk for Grand Trunk Railway and perhaps for Hudon Mills. In 1882, he left his job and attempted to earn a living through his art. Nonetheless, the children were educated at home and raised in an intellectually stimulating environment that saw both Edith and her younger sister Winnifred, who wrote under the pen name Onoto Watanna, become successful writers. Because of their poverty, at a young age, Edith Eaton left school to work in order to help support her family. By age 18, Eaton was setting type for the ''

Montreal Star ''The Montreal Star'' was an English-language Canadian newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It closed in 1979 in the wake of an eight-month pressmen's strike. It was Canada's largest newspaper until the 1950s and remained the dominan ...

''. She began writing as a young girl; her stories and poetry were accepted for publication in Montreal's '' Dominion Illustrated'' magazine, and, beginning in 1890, she published anonymous journalistic articles about the local Chinese community in Montreal's English-language newspapers, the ''Montreal Star'' and the ''Daily Witness''. She also worked as a stenographer and legal secretary. She left Montreal first in 1891 to work as a stenographer and special correspondent in what is now

Thunder Bay, Ontario Thunder Bay is a city in and the seat of Thunder Bay District, Ontario, Canada. It is the most populous municipality in Northwestern Ontario and the second most populous (after Greater Sudbury) municipality in Northern Ontario; its population ...

. In 1896, she worked as a journalist for '' Gall's News Letter'' in Kingston, Jamaica, for about six months, and began to publish under her Chinese pen name. Later, she moved to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

then in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, before going to the

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to work in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

. While working as a legal secretary she continued to write. Although her appearance and manners would have allowed her to easily pass as an Englishwoman, she asserted her Chinese heritage after 1896 and wrote articles that told what life was like for a Chinese woman in white America. First published in 1896, her fictional stories about

s were a reasoned appeal for her society's acceptance of working-class Chinese at a time when the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

maintained the

Chinese Exclusion Act The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law excluded merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplom ...

, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States. Over the ensuing years, Eaton wrote a number of short stories and newspaper articles while working on her first collection of fiction. Published in June 1912, ''

Mrs. Spring Fragrance ''Mrs. Spring Fragrance'' was a popular short story collection by Sui Sin Far, pen name of Chinese-British-Canadian-American writer Edith Maude Eaton. The work is notable for being "the earliest book of fiction published in the United States by ...

'' was a collection that included some linked short stories that was marketed as a novel. Eaton never married. She died in Montreal and is interred in

Mount Royal Cemetery Opened in 1852, Mount Royal Cemetery is a terraced cemetery on the north slope of Mount Royal in the borough of Outremont in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Temple Emanu-El Cemetery, a Reform Judaism burial ground, is within the Mount Royal grounds. Th ...

. A study of Eaton and her life, ''Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography'' by Annette White-Parks, was published in 1995. ''Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton'' by Mary Chapman updates this earlier study.

Themes

As a child, Eaton witnessed hatred of and prejudice against Chinese people. This inclined her to write on the Chinese experience, with some of her works focusing on her own experiences as a Chinese person. In ''In the Land of the Free'', Eaton writes about what it meant to be a Chinese woman in a white man's world. Many of Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton's unsigned works are about the daily lives of Chinese people in Canada and the United States. The topics of these pieces range from the food Chinese people eat to the things they do for fun.

Contemporary interests

Many academics cite Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton as one of the first North American writers of Chinese ancestry. For this reason, there has been recent interest in Sui Sin Far's works and their revival. Mary Chapman, a professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, has published ''Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton'', a collection of 70 of Eaton's early writings. Most of these pieces had not been republished since their first appearance in newspapers. She is also the director o
the Winnifred Eaton Archive
Ying Xu, an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of New Mexico, has also been conducting scholarly work on Sui Sin Far. She contributed to the article "Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far)". In 2017, she published "Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free” in the era of Trump","Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free” in the era of Trump"
/ref> which makes connections between Far's writings and the current socio-political climate of the

Trump Trump most commonly refers to: * Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th president of the United States (2017–2021) * Trump (card games), any playing card given an ad-hoc high rank Trump may also refer to: Businesses and organizations * Donald J. T ...

era.

Published works

*Far, Sui Sin. ''

A Chinese Ishmael and Other Stories A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes' ...

''. Dodo Press, 2009. *Far, Sui Sin. ''

''. A. C. McClurg, 1912. *'' Chan Hen Yen, Chinese Student'' (1912) *'' A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China'' (1911) *'' The Bird of Love'' (1910) *'' An Autumn Fan'' (1910) *'' Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian'' (1909)

Unnamed works

Mary Chapman's ''Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton'' includes a working bibliography of Eaton's unsigned works: *"The Land of the Free." ''Montreal Daily Witness'', 15 March 1890: 8. *"The Ching Song Episode." ''Montreal Daily Witness'', 17 April 1890: 6. *"A Chinese Party." ''Montreal Daily Witness'', 7 November 1890: 7. *"Girl Slave in Montreal. Our Chinese Colony Cleverly Described. Only Two Women from the Flowery Land in Town." ''Montreal Daily Witness'', 4 May 1894:10. *"Seventeen Arrests." ''Montreal Daily Witness'', 10 July 1894: 1. *

_See_also

References

External links

Essays by Sui Sin Far
a
Quotidiana.org
* Short radio script and audi

at

California Legacy Project California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

.
Eaton
at Digitized Collections,

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from ...

, Coll. Canada's Early Women Writers (with a photograph)
Eaton
at

Dictionary of Canadian Biography The ''Dictionary of Canadian Biography'' (''DCB''; french: Dictionnaire biographique du Canada) is a dictionary of biographical entries for individuals who have contributed to the history of Canada. The ''DCB'', which was initiated in 1959, is a ...

, vol. 14, by Lorraine McMullen * * Seiwoong Oh: ''Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature.'' Series: Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Literature. Facts on File, 2007
Land of Sunshine. v.13 (1900)
has a picture of her on page 336. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Far, Sui Sin 1865 births 1914 deaths Anglophone Quebec people English emigrants to Canada People from Macclesfield Journalists from Quebec Writers from Montreal Canadian women short story writers American short story writers of Chinese descent Canadian people of Chinese descent Canadian writers of Asian descent American writers of Chinese descent American journalists of Chinese descent American women short story writers 19th-century Canadian short story writers 20th-century Canadian short story writers 20th-century Canadian women writers 19th-century Canadian women writers 19th-century American short story writers American women non-fiction writers Pseudonymous women writers Canadian women non-fiction writers Burials at Mount Royal Cemetery American women journalists of Asian descent 19th-century American women 19th-century pseudonymous writers 20th-century pseudonymous writers