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 Europeaninspired “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, antiChinese sentiment
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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 ManilaAcapulco 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
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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
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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 JapaneseEurasian 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
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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. The Eaton family immigrated to North America and lived briefly in New York before settling in Montreal, Canada. Born as the eldest daughter of fourteen siblings, Edith Eaton vividly remembered the racial prejudice and abuses the children suffered: “They pull my hair, they tear my clothes, they scratch my face and all but lame my brother.”7 As an interracial child, she experienced prejudice from both sides of her heritage: her mother’s people were as prejudiced as her father’s. In order to support
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her family, Edith left school at a young age to work. Her strong sense of responsibility to protect her siblings from racial prejudice led her to become sensitive to the social and political issues of race. Because she was only half-Chinese, Edith Eaton’s Asian heritage was not evident in her face and she might have passed as white. However, she courageously chose to embrace her Chinese identity. At the age of eighteen, Edith Eaton started her career as a typesetter for Hugh Graham’s Montreal Daily Star, and her first short stories were published in the Dominion Illustrated in 1888. She continued to write journal articles and short stories about Chinese immigrants on the west coast of Canada and the US She published her short story “The Gamblers” in the February 1896 issue of Fly Leaf under her pen name Sui Sin Far (meaning “narcissus water lily” in Cantonese). The late Amy Ling, one of the first scholars to research the history of Asian American Literature, and Annette White-Parks, author of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, are convinced that Edith Eaton is the very first writer in North America of Asian descent and the founder of the tradition of the Asian North American woman writer. In the context of late nineteenth-century sinophobic America, Edith Eaton not only publicly identified herself as Chinese, but audaciously expressed her concerns and discomfort about the majority white immigrants’ prejudice and racial discrimination against Chinese people in her journalistic newspaper articles. In short stories such as “In the Land of the Free” and “Its Wavering Image,” Sui Sin Far sought to defend the Chinese from the popular misconception that they were heathen, opium-smoking, pig-tailed, primitive people. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, published in Chicago in 1912, is Sui Sin Far’s only volume, and it is an interesting, if ambivalent, text. First of all, this is the first lengthy literary work by Sui Sin Far, who had previously written mostly journalistic entries and short stories, an indication of her urge to become a more popular writer, like her sister Winnifred Eaton. By the time Edith Eaton was trying to write Mrs. Spring Fragrance, her younger sister Winnifred Eaton had been enjoying a successful career for almost ten years, following the
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publication of her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale. Edith Eaton probably titled her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance as a kind of literary echo of the title of her sister’s first novel, Miss Nume of Japan. In the novel, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has been living in Seattle for only five years, but from the perspective of her husband, she has become too westernized. Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s best friend is Laura, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Chinese neighbor. Throughout the story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance meddles in the life of Laura and the romantic relationships and arranged marriages of her other young Chinese neighbors. When she travels outside the city for several days, her husband, Mr. Spring Fragrance, worries that his wife may be trying to find her true love. In this novel, Sui Sin Far humorously depicts the ordinary life of Chinese immigrants in America, the cultural clash between the immigrant parents and their America-born children, and the universal aspects of Chinese customs and thought. In terms of literary style, though, Sui Sin Far hearkens back to the romantic fiction of Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma as well as to the young adult novels like Anne of Green Gables and the work of her own younger sister, Winnifred Eaton. Like the heroines in Austin’s novels, Mrs. Spring Fragrance observes the neighbors carefully; like Anne in Anne of Green Gables, Spring Fragrance brings vitality to her new neighborhood and her optimistic and ideal personality traits make her a unique and loveable protagonist. At the same time, however, Spring Fragrance seems to be too naive, firmly believing that her newfound homeland has no flaws, whereas Mr. Spring Fragrance feels insecure about his wife’s cultural assimilation. As the main character, Mrs. Spring Fragrance does not pose any critical questions about what is happening to her neighbors, seeming to believe that an arranged marriage can be good. Like some women’s fictions from the period, the most obvious literary device used to develop the romantic relationships in Mrs. Spring Fragrance is dramatic irony. Here, readers can comprehend the entire scene, while the characters struggle to grasp what is going on. Dramatic irony, thus, arises when there are misunderstandings or crossed identities between the main characters. When Mrs. Spring
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Fragrance is trying to give advice to Laura, who is in love with a neighborhood boy, Kai Tzu, but is supposed to marry the man her parents have chosen, Mrs. Spring Fragrance quotes the British poet Alfred L. Tennyson: “’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.”8 Mr. Spring Fragrance eavesdrops on his wife’s poetic quoting, not knowing the whole conversation between the two women, and becomes curious to understand its meaning. He asks his white American neighbor, a student at the University of Washington, the meaning of the lines. The young man carelessly declares that there is no truth in the words whatever and that it is not better to have what you do not love than to love what you do not have. As a result, Mr. Spring Fragrance begins to think that Westerners have weird perceptions and starts to worry about the possibility of his wife’s finding an ideal love. By not eating and sleeping at all for several days, he becomes sick. Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s relationship itself seems to be at stake, while she has been involved in other people’s emotions and relationships. The book is divided into two sections: the first seventeen stories, for adult readers, are entitled, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”; the remaining twenty stories are for children and subtitled, “Tales of Chinese Children.” It is the other short stories and journalistic entries that portray Edith Eaton as the spokesperson for the Chinese community in Seattle and San Francisco and later on the east coast, particularly Boston. In one of her most powerful essays, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” published in The Independent in Boston in 1909, she promotes the rights of women, the Chinese and Eurasians like herself. Edith’s talent lies mostly in short stories; and Mrs. Spring Fragrance seems to be an extension of her other short stories, lacking the dramatic conflict or surprising reversals that were the typical literary devices of the commercially successful novels of her age. Edith’s writing talent is more evident in her essays than in fiction. It is in her own personal essays that her strong voice on behalf of the Chinese community may be heard. In “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Edith, who chose to remain single her entire
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life, writes of one particular painful experience when she rejects a man’s proposal. A white man pursues her nine times before finally: [S]he told him that she was half Chinese, that her family was poor and that she sent them weekly or monthly checks and the man she married would have to do the same, and finally that she did not love him and never would. He declared that he did not care if she were Chinese or Hottentot, that he could send her parents double what she sent, and that he loved her ... [So she] promised to become the wife of the man. One day, in a spirit of mischief, while riding with her fiance, she claimed that a jaunty Chinese vegetable seller with his queue wrapped around his head was her brother ... The disconcerted young man tried to be obliging but asked gently, “Wouldn’t it be just a little pleasanter for us if, after we are married, we allowed it to be presumed that you were―er―Japanese? So many of my friends have inquired of me if that is not your nationality. They would be so charmed to meet a little Japanese lady.9 She gives him back his ring, and that evening writes in her diary: “Joy, oh, joy! I’m free once more. Never again shall I be untrue to my own heart. Never again will I allow any one to ‘hound’ or ‘sneer’ me into matrimony.”10 This anecdote illustrates the two diametrically opposed perspectives on Asia at the turn of the twentieth century: the antiChinese sentiment and the romanticized view of the Japanese.
From Chinese Reality to Japanese Fantasy
Just as cultural expositions provided an effective means for promoting the national image of Japan in Europe, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 marked a turning point in the dynamics of racial representation of Asians in the United States. Since 1862, Japan had been participating in the universal expositions, with the result being the growth in popularity of Japanese art in the West. In 1867, the Universal Exposition was held in Paris, which served as a forum in
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which the European public could experience Japanese paper, textiles, porcelain, and woodcuts for the first time. Almost twenty-five years following the last exposition in Europe, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago arrived, sparking “Japan fever” in America. The Japanese government subsidized this landmark event, again carefully creating its national image. Traditional Japanese buildings and a teahouse were erected in Jackson Park, Chicago, and tea ceremonies comprising Japanese women clad in colorful kimonos with paper umbrellas were performed. Interestingly, after its successful cultural debut on the world stage in Chicago, Japan fought and defeated two large continental nations in central Asia: China in 1895 and Russia in 1905.11 Shortly before Japan’s grand cultural debut in Chicago, Japonisme reached its all-time high across the Atlantic. William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic operetta, The Mikado, the first commercially successful musical set in Japan, ran for an impressive 672 performances at the Savoy Theatre in London. Between 1885 and 1901, The Mikado was followed by numerous “oriental” shows such as San Toy, Geisha, and The Korean Bride (Die Braut von Korea); and Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum, the French progenitor of the Madame Butterfly stories, which inspired John Luther Long’s short story, Madame Butterfly, was published in The Century, a popular US quarterly magazine. When the Japan fever that captivated Europe reached North America, it quickly evolved into a signifier of elegant European taste among as lower, middle and upper-class Americans. According to Maureen Honey and Jean Lee Cole, “By the late 1890s, Americans of all income levels furnished their homes with Japanese-style furniture, bought decorative lacquerware and painted screens, and devoured both fiction and nonfiction treating Japan and the supposedly quaint, exotic people who lived there.”12 Some of those popular texts about Japan included William Elliot Griffis’s The Mikado's Empire, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, and Japanese Girls and Women, Basil Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, and Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories. Although by the end of the nineteenth century, there had been Chinese people living in the United
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States for almost four or five decades, no comparable texts about China or the Chinese people had yet been written.
Winnifred Eaton’s Japanese Romance
In 1899, Winnifred published her first novel, Miss Nume of Japan, under the Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna. She went on to have a prolific career, writing hundreds of short stories that appeared in national magazines and a total of two-dozen novels that were nearly all bestsellers. Although Edith Eaton may be the first Asian American writer—establishing herself three years before Winnifred—it was Winnifred Eaton who achieved mainstream commercial success. Her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale, sold a remarkable 200,000 copies and became so popular that Broadway producers sought to make a theatrical adaptation of it in order to compete with David Belasco’s long-running Madame Butterfly The plan, however, was not successful because the Madame Butterfly production team brought a plagiarism lawsuit against Watanna. Still, Onoto Watanna’s name had become a commodity too valuable to ignore. Although Winnifred Eaton had never been to Asia, let alone Japan, Winnifred’s Japanese pen name and heritage and her occasional attention-grabbing display in public—for instance, wearing a kimono and kneeling down—convinced the readers of her romantic novels that her stories were authentic Japanese representations. With the emergence of her created second self “Onoto Watanna,” Winnifred’s original self as half-Chinese disappeared. With her pseudonym and her theatrical representation of herself in public, there could no longer be any doubt about which side of the racial and cultural fence the author inhabited. In supplying Who’s Who with the following “facts,” she became the writer of her own autobiography: born in 1879 in Nagasaki, Japan, to a Japanese noblewoman. Writing about Japanese themes was not solely an act of literary imagination; it was also a reflection of her research and study. From 1899 to 1904, she published a number of nonfiction articles on Japan, including The Life of a Japanese Girl, The Japanese Drama and the Actor, The Marvelous Miniature Trees of
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Japan, and Every-Day Life in Japan. Other than Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemẻ, the story most directly similar to Winnifred’s Japanese collection was Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo, a story published in 1895 by John Luther Long—who also published a short story called “Madame Butterfly” in 1898, even though Winnifred Eaton always denied Long’s influence. The novels of these three authors—Loti, Long, and Eaton—reflect not only the general late nineteenth century Western view of East Asia but also the European influence of Japonisme on the American sensibility. Winnifred’s keen marketing instincts and sense of timing were successful, although she has given literary scholars much trouble in terms of classifying her as a writer. For example, Samina Najmi, in her introduction to the reissued The Heart of Hyacinth, writes this to say about Winnifred’s anomalous situation: [Watanna] slips through the cracks of contemporary multicultural agendas ... feminist and Asian American literary critics often simply ignore Watanna, not knowing what else to do with her ... most Chinese Americans do not acknowledge her because she is not avowedly Chinese in her identification or her literary concerns. To most Japanese Americans, her biological heritage makes her a fake Japanese.13 Creating one’s self seems to be a very postmodern reaction to the harsh anti-Chinese environment; however, the invention of a more acceptable identity results from the rejection and devaluation of the biological self. Onoto Watanna was an ironic product of an ethnic minority’s American dream of becoming rich and famous—as well as a half-Asian writer’s desperate reaction to the Japan fever sweeping the United States. A Japanese Nightingale opens with an exotic moonlit Japanese teahouse. A young American man, Jack Bigelow, is fascinated by a beautiful Japanese dancer with black hair and blue eyes—an unrealistic combination of aesthetics in the Eurasian heroine. He feels a profound loneliness, being in an unfamiliar country; and the professional match-
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makers, who know that Jack is one of the richest foreigners in the town, are very eager to set him up in a temporary marriage. Jack, though, resists the idea of pursuing the woman because his good Eurasian friend, Taro Burton, repeatedly cautions him against conveniently taking a Japanese woman, if he inevitably intends to desert her. Meeting a dance, Jack does not bother to ask her name until he is so emotionally drawn to her that he finally asks the match-maker to bring her to his house. Unlike the insensitive Pinkerton and Loti in such interracial romances as Madame Butterfly and Madame Chrysanthemum, Jack is portrayed as a politically-correct, sensitive white man. However, at the same time, his attraction to Yuki is deeply rooted in the late nineteenth century imperialistic attitudes of the West. While he reclined at his ease one afternoon in the little room in which he lounged and smoked, he began to place her, in his imagination, here and there in the house, to try the effect. He set her in one of his largest chairs, notwithstanding she would have been much more comfortable on the floor, in this same room, and she added wonderfully to the appearance of things. He stood her pensively by the tokonona; he nodded his head—very good! He placed her out beneath a cherry tree in his garden; again he nodded approvingly. And a breakfast with her sitting opposite him! That would be like unto the breakfasts eaten by the angels in heaven—if angels partake of other than spiritual nourishment. Yes, she would be wonderfully effective in his little house, would harmonize with it greatly.14 In Jack’s imagination, the Japanese woman is dwarfed to be not much better than an expensive piece of pottery or a beautiful painting to fit nicely in his house alongside its Japanese-style furniture and exotic garden. Throughout the novel, Jack explores only his own feelings, which are always of the keenest interest to him, and furnishes the record of his introspection. Walking down the street in Tokyo, he thinks, “There was nothing Oriental in this brave display of the
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imperial army. There was nothing Oriental in this bustling, noisy crowd of foreigners, each trying to outdo the other in importance and precedence ....”15 Onoto Watanna highlights the lonely westerner’s awareness of his alienation in this foreign country, thus endorsing his search for a remedy to cure his immense feeling of ennui: “For two weeks the dullness of Tokyo remained unabated, so that the evenings offered nothing else to do save to go to the tea-gardens. At the end of that time, Jack, becoming honest with himself, admitted that there was nothing else ... in all the land of the rising sun that held so much of interest to him as did the girl who had offered herself to him for wife ....”16 Despite the authorial manifestations of a colonialist mentality expressed through Jack’s character, Watanna’s skill in maintaining the dramatic tension, which is akin to that of a mystery novel, is good enough to whet the reader’s curiosity about Yuki’s true identity. Unlike most interracial romances between white men and Asian women, the Asian heroine is able to maintain her autonomy, constantly delaying the revelation of her true identity and real intentions. It is only on the forty-ninth page, at the moment of their third encounter, that her name is finally revealed. On the marriage contract, she signs herself “Yuki,” meaning “snowflakes,” a symbol of her white Eurasian skin. After the couple has lived together for about a couple of months, she starts to disappear frequently, which makes Jack feel desolate. Sometimes she leaves for four days straight, not even telling her whereabouts to Jack. As the story unfolds, it is Jack, the white hero, “who becomes ‘the nightingale’ caught up in Yuki’s web”; “Yuki’s unique personality as a bold, frank, yet fragile and docile young woman” seems subversive enough to make her a multi-dimensional character.”17 It is perhaps Winnifred Eaton’s unique identity as a EurasianAmerican woman writer that is the source of the in-depth complex characterizations of her two protagonists. Eaton’s identification with the characters shifts constantly between the position of the Western male hero and that of the Eurasian female protagonist.18 The major turning point of the novel is when Jack’s Eurasian friend, Taro Burton,
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arrives from the US Jack introduces him to Yuki; and, to everyone’s surprise, Taro turns out to be Yuki’s brother. Because of his guilt that her sister has sold herself for his education, Taro becomes ill and dies abruptly, while Yuki runs away to become a dancer on board on a ship to America. Unlike most interracial romances in the late nineteenthcentury, A Japanese Nightingale has a happy ending, portraying the interracial couple of Yuki and Jack embracing each other as a “thousand petals of cherry blossoms fall about them.”19 Through the happy reunion of the couple, the narrative suggests that Yuki’s mysterious attitude is a result not of cultural difference but of her personal situation as a desperate supporter of her family. Watanna applies the universal message that true love is based on honesty and communication in interracial relationships as well. A Japanese Nightingale was published by Harper and Brothers in November 1901 and was well received by the American literary critics. William Dean Howells wrote: “If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it.... There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette … which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassing loveableness.”20 The New York Times Book Review commented that the novel “was written by a young Anglo-Japanese girl whose opportunities for observing her countrywomen have been exceptional and whose mind has been trained to the European point of view.”21 Winnifred Eaton’s pioneering Asian-American novel, however, was a sad indicator of an ethnic minority’s struggle with the possibility of mainstream success. Eaton herself later expresses her realization of this and her feelings of humility in Me, her autobiography, when the Broadway production of A Japanese Nightingale failed: Alas! I was aware only of a sad excitement, a sense of disappointment and despair. I realized that what as an ignorant little girl I had thought was fame was something very different. What then I ardently believed to be the divine sparks of genius, I now perceived to be nothing but a mediocre talent that could
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never carry me far. My success was founded upon a cheap and popular device, and that jumble of sentimental moonshine that they called my play seemed to me the pathetic stamp of my inefficiency. Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!22 Winnifred Eaton provides an illustration of the mentality of an ethnic minority who wishes for mainstream success in the midst of the “Japan fever” that swept the cultural landscape of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The majority of American literary scholars who have studied the Eaton sisters observe a striking dichotomy between Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winnifred/Onoto Watanna: the former a politically sensitive, morally superior writer who conveyed an “authentic” representation of the Chinese in North America, the latter a commercially driven charlatan who exploited American orientalism. While American academia has largely focused on the differences between the careers of Edith and Winnifred, the meaningful similarities that also exist are much less often acknowledged, perhaps because they have underappreciated or overlooked the issues of the two writers’ literary strategies and writing styles. As Ferens argues, both Edith and Winnifred constructed their personas through their pen names, and to close degree. In other words, Edith’s taking of a Chinese pen name was an act by which she sought to take advantage of her ethnic identity in much the way that Winnifred’s use of a Japanese pen name was to secure both her novel’s sense of authenticity and its commercial success. Sui Sin Far’s representation of the Chinese people and culture was inspired by her effort to grapple with the issues of racism and anti-Chinese sentiment, a difficult topic to broach in a climate of economic and political instability. Onoto Watanna’s invention of the Japanese romance was welcomed by the American readers as a part of the vogue for all things Japanese, a signifier of sophisticated European tastes. Clearly, Winnifred Eaton was a better storyteller than Edith in catering both to the general and the cultivated reader. Edith Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Winnifred Eaton’s A Japanese Nightingale embody the American public’s ambivalent
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reception of the literary and cultural representations of East Asia and its peoples. Even though the cultural and legal issues related to Chinese immigrants were a “reality” that America had to confront, the American public tended to shy away from this harsh reality in favor of a more exotic “fantasy” set in Japan.
Notes 1
San Francisco Evening Bulletin, November 5, 1877.
2
David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 1995), 10. 3
Ibid.
4
James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1993), 52. 5
Miseong Woo, “Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale: Shifting Identities
of the Pioneer Asian American Woman Writer,” Feminist Studies in English Literature 10, no. 2 (2002): 331-53. 6
Later, when she published English/Canadian stories, she used the name
“Winnifred Babcock Reeve.” When she wrote a novel in Irish American dialect in The Diary of Delia, she used the name “Winnifred Mooney,” an Irish immigrant maid. See Amy Ling’s first article on the Eaton sisters, “Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Chameleon and Popular Success,” MELUS 11(1984): 4-15. 7
Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Independent,
January 21, 1909; Quotidiana, ed. Patrick Madden, last modified Aug 7, 2013, http://essays.quotidiana.org/far/leaves_mental_portfolio/. 8
Ed. Annette White-Parks, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 19. 9
Ibid., 289.
10
Ibid.
11
According to Youngna Kim, the Korean art historian, the World Columbian
Exposition in Chicago also holds a special meaning for Korea since it at this universal exposition that Korea first participated. It was not until the 1880s that Korea had inaugurated its open-door policy toward the West. After signing a treaty with the United States in 1882, King Kojong decided to participate in the 1893 Chicago Exposition, and later the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. In the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Korea built a small traditional Korean-style house in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and exhibited handicrafts,
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men and women’s clothes, traditional weapons, and musical instruments. Unfortunately, the Korean exhibition was too small in scale to receive much recognition, and the American newspapers and magazines of the time described the Korean exhibition as the work of an isolated and strange country. See chapter 2 of Youngna Kim’s book, 20th Century Korean Art (London: Laurence King, 1998). 12
Maureen Honey and Jean Lee Cole, Madame Butterfly and A Japanese
Nightingale: Two Orientalist Texts (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 1. 13
Samina Najmi, “Introduction,” in Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), xxxiii. 14
Onoto Watanna, A Japanese Nightingale (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1901), 39. 15
Ibid., 115-16.
16
Ibid., 38.
17
Woo, 343.
18
For the analysis of how Winnifred Eaton’s unique identity as an Eurasian
western writer enabled her to identify with both the white male and the Asian female characters, see Miseong Woo’s “Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale: Shifting Identities of the Pioneer Asian American Women Writer.” 19
Watanna, A Japanese Nightingale, 224.
20
Howells, 55.
21
“A Japanese Girl’s Novel,” New York Times Book Review, November 9, 1901,
819. 22
Eaton, Me, 153.
