Storyteller
Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton (SSF/EE) was born in Macclesfield, England on March 15th 1865. Her father, Edward, was a merchant and artist, and her mother Grace "Lotus Blossom" was of Chinese origin, a circus performer who was raised by English missionaries.
SSF/EE grew up in Montreal, in the francophone suburb of Hochelaga, after her parents emigrated there in the early 1870s. She was one of fourteen children, and was pulled out of school at a very young age to help support the family by selling lace and her father's art.
SSF/EE began writing as a young girl; in an autobiographical essay, "Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer Tells of her Career" she says "I must have been about 8 years old when I conceived the ambition to write a book about half Chinese. This ambition arose from my sensitiveness to the remarks, criticisms and observations on the half Chinese which continually assailed my ears, also from an impulse, born with me, to describe, to impart to others all that I felt, all that I saw, all that I was". Her stories appeared in over a dozen newspapers and magazines, including the Montreal Daily Witness, Chicago Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and numerous other publications popular at the time across North America. In June 1912, SSF/EE published Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a collection of short stories linked through a set of reappearing characters.
Her stories take on many themes: racism and cross-cultural misunderstanding; class and poverty; and the role of women in contemporary society. One notable feature of her storytelling is the prominent role of Chinese characters, though as more of her work gets discovered, it reveals a body of writing in which Chinatown stories are the minority, complemented by tales of other cultures and an impressive output of journalism written for newspapers across North America and beyond.
A key question her stories raise is: does she challenge or reinforce stereotypes about Chinese people that were widely held at the beginning of the 20th Century? Moreover, how do the other issues that would have affected her ability to be a professional writer at that time - such as her gender, and her class - appear in her stories, and what can we learn from this, both about the time in which SSF/EE lived, and about our own time?
View and download the LESSON PLAN for SSF/EE as STORYTELLER.
Read stories by SSF/EE:
"The Inferior Woman"
"A White Woman Who Married a Chinaman"
"Her Chinese Husband"
More stories from the Modern English Collection, University of Virginia.