"A Half Caste" and Other Writings

Introduction

introduction Linda Trinh Moser The short stories and essays collected here for the first time span the novelproducing years of Onoto Watanna (1875–1954), the first novelist of Asian ancestry to be published in the United States. The earliest, an essay entitled “The Half Caste,” appeared in 1898, a year before the publication of her first novel, Miss Numè: A Japanese-American Romance (1899). The last, “Elspeth,” a story, appeared in 1923, two years before Watanna published her last novel, His Royal Nibs (1925). Elizabeth Rooney located most of the stories and essays using clues gathered from the boxes of notes, receipts, manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks, and other writings by Watanna left to the University of Calgary (where it is housed in the library’s Special Collections) and in her family’s possession (Elizabeth is Watanna’s great-granddaughter). Of the approximately fifty short works authored by Watanna included or mentioned in her papers, we have selected nineteen—thirteen stories and six essays—divided into two sections: Fiction and Nonfiction. In compiling this collection, we began by omitting stories and essays for which we could not locate original publication information. We have also excluded those works still under copyright protection. From the remaining stories and essays, we selected those that would enable readers to see the scope and versatility of Onoto Watanna’s writing. Many of the most notable stories in the collection have nothing to do with the Japanese themes that earned Watanna so much fame and notoriety. Even the ones that do center on Japanese themes offer perspectives that differ from those in her better-known novels. Taken together, these short works encompass a variety of themes, styles, and characterization that demonstrate Watanna’s broad scope as a writer. Onoto Watanna has posed particular challenges to literary scholars who have tried to classify her work. Samina Najmi notes that “feminist and Asian American literary critics often simply ignore Watanna, not knowing what else to do with her.”1 Elaine H. Kim’s groundbreaking study, Asian Ameri- can Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982), for example, does not include her, although it mentions her sister Sui Sin Far (1865–1914) and other half-Asian writers, Sadakichi Hartmann (1867–1944) and Han Suyin (1917– ).2 The silence was undoubtedly related to choices Watanna made throughout her career. In contrast to Sui Sin Far’s positive and realistic portrayals of Chinese immigrant communities, Watanna ’s work tends to exoticize rather than explain Asian culture. More troublesome to critics is her self-depiction. Although she was a Chinese Eurasian (her father English, her mother Chinese), Watanna almost never revealed her half-Chinese ancestry publicly, as her sister had done, but instead “passed” as a Japanese Eurasian. Inventing an appropriate biography, she claimed Nagasaki as her birthplace and a Japanese noblewoman for a mother. Even the name Onoto Watanna is a fabrication; it only sounds Japanese. Onoto Watanna was the pseudonym of Winnifred Eaton, born in Montreal on August 21, 1875. Lillie Winifred, as she was christened, was the eighth child of Grace A. Trefusis (1846–1922) and Edward Eaton (1839– 1915), whose children would eventually number fourteen (twelve of whom survived past infancy).3 The Eatons were married in Shanghai on November 7, 1863. Edward had traveled to China, probably hoping to establish himself in the silk trade between China and England. Although Grace was born in China, she seems to have been educated in England; most likely, she returned to China to do missionary work. By 1872, the Eatons had immigrated to Canada from England. Edward Eaton intermittently worked as a merchant and clerk but eventually abandoned these occupations to devote himself to painting, a passion that never allowed him to earn enough to support his ever-growing family. The Eaton family was extremely poor; at various times, the older children were taken out of school to help support themselves and their younger siblings. While Watanna’s older siblings worked outside the home, she helped care for her young siblings at home. Despite the unevenness of her formal schooling, Watanna received a considerable amount of literary training at home, where she read works by such notables as Dickens, Tennyson, and Kipling. In 1896, Watanna left home for Kingston, Jamaica, where she worked as a “general writer and reporter” for Gall’s News Letter. Less than a year after arriving in Jamaica, she moved to Chicago, where she first began using her Japanese-sounding pseudonym. In early...