Sui Sin Far

Edith Maude Eaton (15 March 1865 – 7 April 1914) was an author best known under the pseudonym, Sui Sin Far, the name (Cantonese pronunciation) of　the narcissus flower, popular amongst Chinese people.

Life account

Born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, Eaton was the daughter of Englishman Edward Eaton, a merchant who met her Chinese mother while on a business trip to Shanghai, China. Her mother was Grace "Lotus Blossom" Trefusis, the adopted daughter of English missionaries.

Eaton was the oldest daughter and second child of fourteen children. In the early 1870s, the Eaton family left England to live in Hudson, New York, United States, but stayed there only a short time before relocating to Montreal, Quebec. Her father struggled to make a living and the large family went through difficult times. Because of their poverty, at a young age Eaton had to leave school to work in order to help support her family. Nonetheless, the children were educated at home and raised in an intellectually stimulating environment that saw both Edith and her younger sister Winnifred (1875-1954), who wrote under the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, become successful writers.

Eaton began writing as a young girl; her articles on the Chinese were accepted for publication in Montreal's English-language newspapers, the Montreal Star and the Daily Witness. She eventually left Montreal to live in the United States, first in San Francisco then in Seattle, before going to the east coast to work in Boston. While working as a legal secretary she continued to write and although her appearance and manners would have allowed her to easily pass as an Englishwoman, she asserted her Chinese heritage and wrote articles that told what life was like for a Chinese woman in white America. First published in 1896, under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, her fictional stories about Chinese Americans were a reasoned appeal for her society's acceptance of working-class Chinese at a time when the United States Congress maintained the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943).

Over the ensuing years, Edith Eaton wrote a number of short stories and newspaper articles while working on her first collection of fiction. Published in June 1912, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, was a collection of linked short stories marketed as a novel.

Eaton never married and died in Montreal and is interred there in Mount Royal Cemetery.

A study of Eaton and her life, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography by Annette White-Parks, was published in 1995.

Partial bibliography

• Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912)
• Chan Hen Yen, Chinese Student (1912)
• A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China (1911)
• The Bird of Love (1910)
• An Autumn Fan (1910)
• Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1909)
• A Chinese Ishmael (1899)

See also

• Chinese American literature
• List of Asian American writers
• Onoto Watanna

External links

• Essays by Sui Sin Far at Quotidiana.org
• Sui Sin Far at Find a Grave
• Short radio script and audio "Lae Choo's Heart" at California Legacy Project.