The Chinese Face of Jesus: Phenomenology of Truth in Sui Sin Far’s Short Fiction

As the first writer of Chinese descent to be published in North America, Edith Eaton, better known as Sui Sin Far, is today considered one of the most significant voices in American literary history, mainly because of her non-racialized approach to race in representing the early twentieth-century Chinese diaspora. Born to an English father and a Chinese mother, Sui Sin Far often spoke about her burden of growing up as a Eurasian amidst racial injustice in North America. The unique space she occupied between two races also became the basis of her constant pursuit to reconcile racial difference. According to her critics, her egalitarian view on race was established by her biracial experience and intense desire to forge a true understanding between the Chinese and white Americans. As Elizabeth Ammons observes, “that Sui Sin Far invented herself—created her own voice—out of such deep silencing and systematic racist repression was one of the triumphs of American literature at the turn of the century” (105). Many of Sui Sin Far’s critics attributed her distinctive perspective to her biracial heritage by birth and her Chinese identity by choice. She identified with her mother’s race not only by advocating for the rights of the Chinese in her writing, but also by choosing to publish under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, which means water lily in Chinese.

At an early age, Sui Sin Far had already learned that “the true fathers and mothers of the world were those who battled through great trials and hardships to leave to future generations noble and inspiring truths” (“Sui Sin Far” 290). History inevitably imposed a burden on Sui Sin Far, which was transformed into a mission to perpetuate a redemptive legacy for coming generations. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth century, the Chinese in America suffered blatant racial discrimination and sociopolitical trauma. In 1877, during a time of economic crisis and social strife, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to make it unlawful for Chinese laborers to enter the United States for the next ten years and denied citizenship to the Chinese already there. The prohibition was broadened in 1888 to include “all persons of Chinese race”; exemptions were provided for “Chinese officials, students, tourists, and merchants” (Takaki 111). Only two years before the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Page Law was enacted to prohibit wives and children of Chinese laborers from entering America.

Upon the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the western states launched violent raids on a broad scale to drive out the Chinese population; the Chinese called these raids pai hua, literally meaning to expel the Chinese. One account states:

At nine o’ clock on the morning of November 3, 1885, steam whistles blew at the foundries and mills across Tacoma, to announce the start of the purge of all the Chinese people from the town. Saloons closed and police stood by as five hundred men, brandishing clubs and pistols, went from house to house in the downtown Chinese quarter and through the Chinese tenements along the city’s wharf. … At midday, the mob began to drag Chinese laborers from their homes, pillage their laundries, and throw their furniture into the streets … the mob marched the Chinese through heavy rain to a muddy railroad crossing nine miles from town. The merchants’ wives, unable to walk on their bound feet, were tossed into wagons….

Two days later, Tacoma’s Chinatown was destroyed by fire.

(Pfaelzer xv–xvi)

The Tacoma roundup was only one out of a hundred Chinese ethnic purging programs across the Pacific Northwest in the late nineteenth century. News about the violent raids made its way into the local newspapers as well as national publications such as The New York Times and Harper’s Weekly. It was not uncommon knowledge among white Americans that Chinese purges were raging in California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado (Pfaelzer xix).

Living in an era of such intense racial conflicts in North America, Sui Sin Far carried a historical burden, which...