Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far: True "Westerner"?

We are all interested more or less in the Chinese. Particularly have we a curiosity to learn more about the habits, mode of living, the hopes, plans, and customs of the Chinese men and women who live and are a part of our life, yet not a part of it, here in the West.

—Edgar L. Hampton, editor of The Westerner magazine (1909)

You have always encouraged and helped me. There may be a certain literary prestige in having one's work accepted by the Eastern critics; but my stories and articles in "The Westerner," "Out West," and [Seattle] "Post-Intelligencer" accomplish more the object of my life, which is not so much to put a Chinese name into American literature, as to break down prejudice, and to cause the American heart to soften and the American mind to broaden towards the Chinese people now living in America—the humble, kindly, moral, unassuming Chinese people of America. And I have reason to believe from letters received, that to a certain extent, I have succeeded. And this, I owe chiefly to Western editors.

—Edith Eaton to Edgar Hampton (1909)¹

Ever since the recovery of the pioneering British/Canadian/American author Edith Eaton (who wrote under the pen name Sui Sin Far) and her works from the shadows of American literary history began in the early 1980s, scholars have steadfastly continued to comb through microfilm, digital, and even paper versions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century periodicals looking for more of her writing. As a result, the list of her published non-fiction, sketches, and short stories has significantly expanded. Yet, despite the greater knowledge about the extent of Eaton's publication record and audiences such sleuthing has produced, the approaches used to assess the significance of her works have remained mostly unchanged. When a previously-unknown serialized work is brought to light, typically the discoverer/scholar: a) attempts to connect the work to Sui Sin Far herself; b) delineates the prevailing negative attitudes towards Chinese people and culture in the United States at the time and then demonstrates the "trickster" strategies Eaton used to interrogate these views; and/or c) makes some type of assertion about what cultural labor the work performed among its readers. To support their hypotheses, scholars have usually offered a good deal of biographical or socio-historical contextual information, along with close textual analyses of Eaton's newly-discovered texts. Such evidence is quite appropriate if one wishes to connect Eaton's works to her life or analyze her intentions and methods; they are quite insufficient, however, to support any postulations about the effects her writing might have had on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodical readers. A new methodology to more accurately assess the historical reader response to Eaton's serialized writings is thus called for. And because the same weaknesses of previous assertions about readers' responses to Eaton's fictions are evident in almost all postulations offered thus far about the cultural labor performed by works of other American regionalist authors during this period, the development of such a new methodology can have significant implications for the study of this genre as a whole.

One particularly interesting group of Eaton's serialized works whose cultural labor is worth investigating were published between August 1905 and November 1909 in a Seattle-based magazine possessing the highly symbolic title of The Westerner. Fifteen pieces by Eaton appeared in its pages during this period: seven short stories, one travel narrative, one lengthy non-fiction article, a four-installment journalistic series, and two published letters to editorial staff members. In general, the fictions and travel narrative among these works are similar to the stories and sketches Eaton had published previously, such as those in Land of Sunshine between 1896 and 1900, the Los Angeles Express in October and early November 1903, and Out West in November 1903. Almost all provide readers an "insider" view of Chinese life in America (the only exception being the Japanese character Yuko Katzima); many revolve around a marriage plot; a number prominently feature innocent children wronged in some way...