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The Pioneer Writers of Asian Descent and America's Early Literary Encounter with East Asia: Edith Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragra

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The Pioneer Writers of Asian Descent and America's Early Literary Encounter with East Asia: Edith Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragra Situations 7.1 Winter 2013/2014 The Pioneer Writers of Asian Descent and America’s Early Literary Encounter with East Asia: Edith Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Winnifred Eaton’s A Japanese Nightingale WOO MISEONG (YONSEI UNIVERSITY) Abstract This essay investigates late nineteenth-century American representations of East Asia. It does this by focusing on Edith and Winnifred Eaton, the two pioneering Eurasian sisters who inaugurated the tradition of Asian American literature in North America. America’s early cultural perception of Asians was negatively influenced by the presence of early Chinese immigrants, who were seen as a major economic threat to European immigrant workers. In establishing their careers, Edith and Winnifred Eaton employed very different strategies. Using ethnic pen names to create their literary personae, Edith embraced her half-Chinese identity, taking Sui Sin Far as her pen name, whereas Winnifred chose to use the Japanese pen name Onoto Watanna. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far’s only lengthy literary work, is an interesting but ambivalent text, which marks a departure from her previous journalistic entries and short stories. In contrast, Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale provides an illustration of the mentality of an ethnic minority writer who wished for mainstream success, while also highlighting the European- inspired “Japan fever” that swept the US cultural landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Keywords: Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, A Japanese Nightingale, Japonisme, anti- Chinese sentiment 64 Woo Miseong The Asian Diaspora in America versus the European Encounter with East Asia Despite the fact that the Asian diaspora to the American continent first began in the sixteenth century, when a group of Filipinos and Chinese arrived in Mexico as part of what is known as the Manila- Acapulco Galleon Trade, North America’s cultural experience of Asians did not begin until the mid-nineteenth century. It was then that a mass Chinese population movement to the United States occurred— a movement that lasted through the late nineteenth century—mainly as a result of wars, starvation, and political instability in China and the need for a greater labor force in the US to help develop its national frontiers. Around this time, the American media, which included daily newspapers and weekly journals such as the San Francisco Chronicle and Harper’s Magazine, began to report on the visibility of Asians and the political and economic issues associated with them. By the 1870s, an emerging postcolonial America was struggling desperately to establish a sense of national identity, particularly in terms of its contemporary popular culture. Toward this end, American writers were challenged with the difficulties of dealing with racial issues in literature and the theater for the more established American community. In stark contrast to America’s first encounter with Asia, in which a large number of Asian people—mostly Chinese—were physically present on the American continent, Europe's exposure to Asian culture during the mid- to late-nineteenth century was largely restricted to the consumption of Japanese imported products, theatrical performances set in Asia, and travelogues about East Asian countries. Following Commodore Matthew Perry’s opening of her gates to the Western world in 1853, Japan quickly became one of the hottest topics among upper-class Europeans. The universal exposition had come to be a popular new showcase of industrial products and scientific inventions as well as fine arts all in one place—thus displaying the hosting nation’s technological advances and cultural sophistication. Starting with the London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, Japanese houses, art pieces, pottery, kimonos, and miniature The Pioneer Writers of Asian Descent 65 Japanese villages, like the one set up in Knightsbridge, England—near London—around 1885 were grandly introduced to the public. Subsequently, Japonisme—“Japan fever” or the craze for Japanese style—caught fire and began to permeate European art, interior decoration, fashion, and various forms of merchandise. Pierre Loti’s travelogue, Madame Chrysanthemẻ, the progenitor of the Madame Butterfly narrative, first published in Europe in 1887, became a huge hit; and the famous British musical The Mikado, written by Gilbert and Sullivan in 1885, swept through continental Europe. By the turn of the century, this interest in Japanese culture had reached America, but not until after anti-Chinese vitriol had reached dangerously high levels. While Europe’s view of East Asian countries like China and Japan had formed gradually over the centuries, evolving mainly from exotic, idealized conceptualizations depicted in travelogues and works of art, America’s early cultural perception of East Asians developed centuries later, over a far shorter period, and under rather unfavorable circumstances. By the early 1870s, antagonism toward the Chinese in the US was virulent, and it became even worse with the completion of the transcontinental railroad when thousands of Chinese laborers streamed into San Francisco and other cities looking for work. This coincided with a severe economic depression, “the Panic of 1877,” which nationwide threw millions out of work. In 1877, the Board of Health in San Francisco condemned Chinatown as a “nuisance” to the health of the city that had to be “abated.”1 As a result, the American public’s perception of East Asian immigrants was quite negative, as evidenced by the degrading racial and anthropological caricatures emphasized on stage and in public displays. These images included those of the Chinese in Ah Sin, a play by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, which premiered in 1877. As the American historian of Sino-Western cultural relations, David E. Mungello, suggests in his book, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800: “During the period 1500–1800, the predominant image of China was captured in the sagely Confucius (551–479 BC).”2 In contrast, one of the most common images of the entire period between 1800 and 2000 was the hostile depiction of “John Chinaman, a 66 Woo Miseong vicious-looking, pigtailed Chinese male with long fingernails.”3 In the 1870s, America’s understanding of East Asians was greatly influenced by its early media; and it is these media images that have set the tone for Western understanding of East Asia ever since. In 1882, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, America’s first law barring the immigration of a specific racial group, coupled with the hostile Sinophobic environment in America, brought Chinese immigration to a halt. According to James S. Moy, “In 1893, after the Geary Act extended the 1882 legislation with severe deportation requirements, only 472 Chinese entered America, and these were likely of the wealthy, privileged class who can always find loopholes in exclusionary laws.”4 Even with a secure legal status, this small number of Chinese and half-Chinese often identified as Mexican or Japanese- Eurasian so they could make their lives more comfortable. Unlike the Chinese, however, the Japanese were not viewed with scorn; there were few Japanese in America, and they were generally not viewed as an economic threat to white workers. Gradually, the vastly reduced influx of immigrants together with a slowly improving economic climate ushered in a new decade of lower visibility of working class Asians and less social tension amongst the different immigrant groups on the labor market. As a result, America’s cultural interest in Asia altered fairly dramatically, with a strong anti-Chinese sentiment more or less succeeded by a romanticized view of Japan. This article investigates the late nineteenth-century American history of representing East Asia, focusing on Edith and Winnifred Eaton, the pioneer Eurasian sisters who started Asian American literature in North America. Despite some recent groundbreaking research on the Eaton sisters by North American scholars such as Amy Ling, Annette White-Parks, S. E. Solberg, and Dominika Ferens, these writers are still rarely taught or even mentioned in Korea. “This is probably because Edith’s writings were mostly short stories and journal entries rather than literary material and Winnifred disguised her authentic ethnicity to support her writing career, thus making her too peculiar to be categorized as an Asian-American writer.”5 Edith and Winnifred Eaton are famous for employing very different The Pioneer Writers of Asian Descent 67 strategies in establishing their careers, so different in fact that their legacies could hardly be more opposite. Using ethnic pen names to create their literary personae, both Edith and Winnifred chose to acquire ethnic authenticity to support their writing careers based in large part on ethnic themes. Edith embraced her half-Chinese identity wholeheartedly, as she wrote under the Chinese-sounding pen name of Sui Sin Far. Since the Chinese and Japanese were virtually indistinguishable to Western eyes, Winnifred “chose to be” Japanese, assuming the pen name Onoto Watanna. As Roger Daniel sums up in the forword of Dominika Ferens’s Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances, the majority of previous studies have viewed Edith as the “authentic” political crusader and Winnifred as the “phony” chameleon who freely adopted her ethnic identity for commercial success.6 Despite such antithetical portrayals, the works of Edith and Winnifred Eaton—and of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and A Japanese Nightingale, in particular—provide profound insights into the American public's early cultural encounter and understanding of the East. Edith Maude Eaton as the Political Spokesperson for the Chinese Community It was in the late 1880s and 1890s, at the climax of anti-Chinese sentiment in America that Edith Eaton began her writing career. Edward Eaton, Edith’s father, was a British merchant who frequently visited Shanghai, China. On one of his visits, he met a Chinese woman named Grace Trefusis. Despite Edward’s parents’ objection to the interracial marriage, the couple eventually wed.
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