Transnationalism at the Impasse of Race: Sui Sin Far and U.S. Imperialism

Even as histories and theories of transnationalism have become of central importance to recent scholarship in Asian American literary studies, critical treatments of Sui Sin Far’s groundbreaking work have only glanced over how it evokes the complexities of trans-Pacific social relations at the turn of the twentieth century.¹ Ever since Sui Sin Far was acknowledged in the pioneering Asian American literary anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974) as “one of the first to speak for an Asian-American sensibility that was neither Asian nor white American” (Chin, et al. xxi), the reception of her writing has burdened her with the responsibilities attendant to her status as the inaugurator of an ethnic literary tradition.² Working from an ethnic studies rubric that understands the dynamics of race within a U.S. national framework, such critics have championed Sui for presenting an empathetic and realistic view of Chinese immigrants starkly different from stereotypes circulating in an era of virulent racism. To account for the ideological underpinnings of establishing Sui as the origin of Asian American literature, Viet Nguyen explains how critics privileged “writers who were ‘authentic,’ meaning that the literature they wrote was more ‘truthful’ in regard to the experiences of Asian Americans than the stereotypical, often racist representations of Asian Americans in popular culture and historical discourse” (34).³ Yet as important as these issues of cultural representation are, they have obscured the histories of transnationalism and racialization that Sui’s stories engage so compellingly, where narrative conflicts carry not only an explicit anti-racist import, but also capture the geopolitical structures of power between China and the West. This essay shifts its attention away from issues of stereotyping and authenticity to a historically contextualized approach that examines how Sui’s narratives register the social production of race in its global dimensions.

The daughter of a British silk merchant and a Chinese mother educated in England, Sui Sin Far herself describes these transnational and cross-cultural currents poignantly in her autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909): “I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant ‘connecting link’” (Mrs. Spring 230). Rather than just considering how this powerful statement conveys the personal effects of racism, I suggest that this image of the “connecting link” speaks to the broader material conditions of transnational contact with which Sui grapples. Reading Sui’s literary endeavors along with the histories that produce their conditions of possibility identifies the social limits imposed on her writing—and how far it could push them. As David Palumbo-Liu argues, cultural production by and about Asian Americans in the early twentieth century “attempted to invent within their specific discursive spaces images of Asian America that both delineate its boundaries and envision particular modes of crossing them” (43). Along these lines, I trace the ways Sui Sin Far depicts the historical contours of Asian America, interrogating how her literary imagination tests these social boundaries and reveals the structural paradoxes inherent to U.S. economic and political formations.

To undertake a materialist approach to Sui Sin Far’s work, this essay examines how the recurring figure of the Chinese merchant represents a “connecting link” in the short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). In repeated appearances throughout stories varying widely in theme and tone, merchant characters crystallize the material conditions and ideological impasses defining the uneven geopolitical relationship between the U.S. and China during the period. To explore how Sui’s stories articulate the tensions between economic and cultural predications of Asian American identity, I propose that her diasporic merchants embody what Colleen Lye designates “Asiatic racial form,” which is the figuration of Asian Americans where the “most salient feature, whether it has been made the basis for exclusion or assimilation, is the trope of economic efficiency” (America’s Asia 5). In the genealogy of “Asiatic racial form,” the middle-class merchant might be the missing link between “yellow peril” and “model minority” stereotypes, showing how economic form...