1. EWRT 1B
CLASS #5

2. AGENDA
• Presentation: Terms
• Author Lecture: Sui Sin
Far
• Discussion: “Leaves from
the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian”
• Author Lecture: Nella
Larsen

3. Take ten minutes to discuss Sui Sin Far
and your QHQs on “Leaves from the
Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.”
Consider how and why Far is different
from Jack.
GROUP DISCUSSION

4. SUI SIN FAR
EDITH MAUD EATON
1865-1914
What do you
know?

5. She was born in England, in 1865 to a
Chinese mother and an English (white)
father. According to Eaton scholars, Amy
Ling and Annette White-Parks, "interracial
marriage was taboo in both cultures[; thus,]
theirs was an unusual union." At age seven,
Eaton and her family left England and
immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in
the early 1870s, settled in a Montreal suburb.
SUI SIN FAR, BORN EDITH MAUDE EATON, WAS
THE FIRST WRITER OF ASIAN DESCENT
PUBLISHED IN NORTH AMERICA

6. EATON STARTED HER CAREER AT HUGH GRAHAM'S
MONTREAL DAILY STAR NEWSPAPER AS A TYPESETTER AT AGE
EIGHTEEN.
Her first short stories were published in the Dominion
Illustrated in 1888; she also maintained her
administrative duties as well as submitted newspaper
articles. It was in her journalistic writing that Eaton
openly identified herself as a Chinese American and
explained her biracial heritage to her readers. She
wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a childhood
nickname that means "water lily" in Chinese. Her sister,
Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used Onoto Watanna as
her penname.

7. A SPIRITUAL FOREMOTHER
Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations, a
literary biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui Sin
Far scholars include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James
Doyle, and Annette White-Parks.
Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of
her time and place, in late nineteenth-century
sinophobic and imperialistic Euro-American nations,
then we admit that for her, a Eurasian woman who
could pass as white, to choose to champion the
Chinese and working-class women and to identify
herself as such, publicly and in print, an act of great
determination and courage."

8. THE RECEPTION OF CHINESE BY WHITE AMERICANS
To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical
and social context during her period. Though the Chinese were never
enslaved in this country, as were Africans, they were brought here in
large numbers as indentured laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for Asians was
permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians
were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California
by the discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s
thousands of Chinese laborers were enticed here to construct the
mountainous western section of the transcontinental railroad. Almost
from the beginning, prejudice against them was strong. They were
regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that
made them inassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; their
hard-working, frugal ways and their willingness to work for lower wages
than whites rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of
racial violence.

9. SPRING FRAGRANCE AND OTHER WRITINGS
B Y S U I S I N F A R
T H I S T E X T I N C L U D E S “ L E A V E S F R O M T H E M E N T A L P O R T F O L I O O F A N E U R A S I A N ”
Summary?

10. QHQ: “LEAVES FROM THE MENTAL
PORTFOLIO OF AN EURASIAN”
1. Q: Why does Sui Sin Far’s family think she is the weakest/ most emotional
out of her brother and sisters?
1. Q: While playing in the garden with another child, a girl passes by and
warns the other child not to play with the author because of her Chinese
mother. The other child insists that she doesn’t care, at which point the
author responds to the other child: “But I don’t like you.”
Why did the author close herself off from the other child, whose only
intention was to befriend her?
1. Q: In the short story as [Far] grew older she became less ashamed of her
origin and her mixed race. Why is that so?

11. QHQ: “LEAVES FROM THE MENTAL
PORTFOLIO OF AN EURASIAN”
1. Q: How did Sui get through the constant bullying and
racism when she was younger and as journalist? How
did she remain professional when she heard people
bash her own race?
2. Q: Why does Sui Sun Far identify more with her Chinese
culture than her white culture?
3. Q: [Is] more important for Sui to embrace one side of
her nationality or her individualism?
4. Q: Why does Sui feel a deep need to fight for the half
of her that is Chinese?
5. Q: Why does Sui Sin Far want to move to China even
though she says individuality is more important than
nationality?

12. QHQ: “LEAVES FROM THE MENTAL
PORTFOLIO OF AN EURASIAN”
1.Q: Besides her race, Far is also a woman; in
that era, women did not get much chance to
succeed, but Far chose to be a journalist. How
did her race and gender affect her career?
2.Q: Why doesn’t Sui Sin far identify as white or
at least pass as white to make her life easier?
3.Q: How often do people of mixed race
identify only as one, or more strongly with one
race than another?

13. PASSING AND SUI SIN FAR
“Ah, indeed!” he exclaims. “Who would have thought it at first
glance? Yet now I see the difference between her and other
children. What a peculiar coloring! Her mother’s eyes and hair and
her father’s features, I presume. Very interesting little creature!”
I had been called from play for the purpose of inspection. I do not
return to it. For the rest of the evening I hide myself behind a hall
door and refuse to show myself until it is time to go home.
Why does Far hide after this experience?
How does this moment contribute to her identity
development?

14. “Look!” says Charlie. “Those men in there are Chinese!” Eagerly I gaze
into the long low room. With the exception of my mother, who is English
bred with English ways and manner of dress, I have never seen a
Chinese person. The two men within the store are uncouth specimens of
their race, drest in working blouses and pantaloons with queues hanging
down their backs. I recoil with a sense of shock.
“Oh, Charlie,” I cry. “Are we like that?”
“Well, we’re Chinese, and they’re Chinese, too, so we must be!” returns
my seven year old brother.
“Of course you are,” puts in a boy who has followed us down the street,
and who lives near us and has seen my mother: “Chinky, Chinky,
Chinaman, yellow-face, pig-tail, rat-eater.” A number of other boys and
several little girls join in with him.
“Better than you,” shouts my brother, facing the crowd. He is younger
and smaller than any there, and I am even more insignificant than he;
but my spirit revives.
“I’d rather be Chinese than anything else in the world,” I scream.
Why does Far fight after this experience?
How does this moment contribute to her identity development?

15. The greatest temptation was in the thought of getting far away from
where I was known, to where no mocking cries of “Chinese!”
“Chinese!” could reach.
Here Sui seems to want to disappear. Given her desire to
escape prejudice, why does she become a champion of the
Chinese instead of “passing” as we know so many others do
during this time? In other words, which of her life experiences
compel her to refuse to pass as white? How does she become
the woman who speaks the lines below?
With a great effort I raise my eyes from my plate. “Mr. K.,” I say,
addressing my employer, “the Chinese people may have no
souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the
pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to
understand that I am—I am a Chinese.”

16. HOW AND WHY DOES FAR RESIST
PASSING?
1. Far refuses to pass as white. Why? What
convinces her to consciously and
intentionally reveal her racial identity?
2. Consider how Far resists passing. Which
behaviors can you specifically identify?
3. Why and how does Far do what Jack
could not do?

17. AUTHOR: NELLA LARSEN
Nella Larsen is best known as
the author of two of the
most famous novels of the
Harlem Renaissance,
Quicksand (1928) and
Passing (1929). Both novels
deal with the complicated
lives of light-skinned African
American women who are
faced with both
discrimination and the
temptation to forsake their
heritage and “pass” for
white.

18. Her father died when she was two, and her mother
then married a man of, in Larsen’s words, “her own
race and nationality.” While it is known that Larsen did
go to a small, private elementary school with her white
half sister, evidently her parents found her existence
increasingly embarrassing in their society of Germans
and Scandinavians. Although Larsen had been raised
in an all-white world, as an adult she felt herself shut off
from it, as well as from her own family. As she told an
interviewer many years later, she had little contact with
her mother and her half sister, because her presence
would be “awkward” for them.
LARSEN WAS BORN IN CHICAGO TO A DANISH
MOTHER AND A BLACK WEST INDIAN FATHER.

19. IF LARSEN WAS TO BE A WRITER, SHE COULD NOT
HAVE BEEN AT A BETTER PLACE AT A BETTER TIME.
Not only was Harlem the center of black society, but
black writers and intellectuals were also using it as the
base for a new cultural movement, to be known as
the Harlem Renaissance. This creative community did
more than enable the members of a black
intellectual elite, including such writers as Larsen,
Jessie Fauset, and Walter White, to meet and
exchange ideas; through their contacts in the white
publishing establishment, older writers, such as
Larsen’s close friend Carl Van Vechten, a white critic
and novelist, could help younger ones get their works
published.

20. IT IS UNCERTAIN WHY LARSEN’S CAREER AS
A WRITER ENDED SO ABRUPTLY.
A very private person, Larsen was shaken by accusations of plagiarism,
when her short story “Sanctuary” (1930) was said to be similar to an earlier
story by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Because they had seen Larsen’s rough drafts,
however, her editors had no difficulty establishing her innocence. At about
that time, Larsen also discovered that her husband, chairman of the physics
department at Fisk, was in love with another woman. Nevertheless, it is
known that Larsen worked on three different novels and that she had one
of them almost completed. Larsen was still working on novels as late as
1932 and 1933, while she was living in Nashville in an attempt to revive her
marriage. It may have been the notoriety that attended her divorce from
Imes in 1933 that drove Larsen into anonymity.
In any case, there were no more novels. Larsen left Harlem and moved to
Greenwich Village. In 1941, after her former husband died and her alimony
ceased, Larsen went back to her original career of nursing. She died in
Manhattan on March 30, 1964, at the age of seventy-two.

21.  Finish Larsen’s
Passing
 Post #6: QHQ on
Larsen’s Passing.
Make sure to include
cited textual support
in your question or
answer.
 Study: Terms Exam
#1 at our next
meeting