A Connecting Link: Sui Sin Far's Calling as a Eurasian Writer

Abstract

Sui Sin Far was a Eurasian writer born of a Chinese mother and an English father in 1865. Despite her numerous short stories, journals and essays published in nationally popular magazines, she received little attention until the late twentieth century when the Asian American literature began to be canonized. With the institutionalization of Asian American studies, Sui Sin Far, a half-Chinese writer, has been represented not only as an inaugurator of Asian American writers but a heroine who resisted the stereotypes of the Chinese in America at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment. However, the critics have gradually come to reevaluate the early laudation, arguing that the canonization of Sui Sin Far's works shows the ideological rigidity of Asian American studies. This article avoids the issues of whether Sui Sin Far's stories appear anti-racist or comply with racial hierarchies, by establishing her Chinese identity. Instead the focus is her artistic representation and insight into the American society divided along diverse cultural signifiers like race, class and gender. For this purpose, I deal with the short stories from Sui Sin Far’s only published book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance. In the stories, she exposed American social diversity and the divisions silenced under the Progressives and the drive toward a national homogeneity. Furthermore, as a mixed race writer, she suggested a model to pursue the social integration with a sentimental literary imaginations. In this sense, the significance of studies of Sui Sin Far lies in the expansion of Asian American literary studies not in terms of time span, but in range by the inclusion of mixed-race women writers.