Playing in the Modern Mediascape: A Pseudonymous Travelogue by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton

Chinese North American author Edith Eaton, writing as “Sui Sin Far,” is one of the most transnational of periodical writers publishing at the turn of the twentieth century (fig. 1). She contributed over 220 texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and narrative voices, to over fifty Canadian, US, and Jamaican magazines and newspapers between the late 1880s and her death in 1914, although contemporary scholarship acknowledges only about fifty mostly Chinatown-themed stories published in her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance, under the pen name “Sui Sin Far” (fig. 2)

As the British-born Eaton migrated by steamship and railroad from England to Montreal to Jamaica to California to the Pacific Northwest and then eastward to Boston and Montreal, her texts also migrated across a transnational modern media ecology that included local North American newspapers, experimental fin-de-siècle little magazines, railway-sponsored precursors to in-flight magazines, conservative women’s magazines, Christian missionary publications, mainstream middlebrow periodicals, children’s magazines, and syndicated columns of both children’s stories, and sensation fiction (figs. 3–9).

During the Chinese Exclusion Era during which Eaton published, many people of Chinese ancestry would not have been permitted to enter the US from Canada unless they paid a Head Tax of $50, which was later raised to $100 and then $500, the equivalent of several months’ salary for most Chinese laborers in North America. But Edith Eaton was remarkably able to cross this border multiple times unimpeded, perhaps because she was English-speaking and British-born, wore Victorian dress, and was therefore able to “pass” as white. Clearly, her complex background gave her a form of the “flexible citizenship” that postcolonial scholar Aihwa Ong describes—that is, the ability of the cosmopolitan global citizen to have multiple (national, biological, racial, and gender) identifications and to politically participate in multiple “imagined communities” in an era of global capitalism.[1] At the same time, Eaton also exemplifies what I would call “flexible authorship,” signaled by the diversity of her genres, publications, audiences, pseudonyms, and narratives. While her best-known works voice a diasporic, usually female, Chinese/Chinese-North-American perspective, the diversity of her oeuvre reveals her much more complicated identifications with, among others, Native American women, US imperial adventurers, Philippine governors, and Japanese and Arab children. What unites all her texts, however, is an effort to appeal to her readers in a manner that anticipates the middlebrow field that did not really emerge until a few years after her death in 1914. In this essay, I focus on the productive instability of modern subjectivity in a first-person travelog that Eaton published under a Chinese male pseudonym in the Los Angeles Express newspaper in 1904.

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai coined the term “mediascape” to refer to both the geographical spaces that migrating human beings move through and the media by which they are emotionally transported. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai tracks the symbiotic relationship between migration and media in the era of postmodern globalization; he argues that both migration and media have a “joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity.”[2] Although Appadurai focuses on how electronic media permit the construction of imagined diasporic selves and imagined worlds in our contemporary global society, I use his concept of “mediascape” to consider how Edith Eaton’s flexible authorship is produced in the era of transcontinental railways and mass magazines. Migration and media promote, in Appadurai’s words, a “new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities” such as Eaton’s (Appadurai, Modernity, 4). This instability of identity, however, is not undesirable; to the contrary, for Eaton, both her railway travel across North America and her writing for different audiences of modern mass print culture encouraged her metaphorical migration away from prior fixed identities toward identities characterized by improvisation, self-transformation, and expanded empathy.

Edith Eaton was a complex global modern subject. As the English-born mixed-race child of a white British businessman and a Chinese mother Achuen Amoy who had, in her childhood as a mui tsai (“Amoy” means “little sister,” a euphemism for slavegirl) toured North America and Europe with a Chinese acrobatic troupe; as a downwardly mobile child with genteel Victorian pretensions; as a British subject raised in predominantly French-Canadian Montreal who emigrated to Progressive Era US in her adulthood; and as an unmarried, childless woman who wrote about domesticity and child-rearing and queer desire in US, Canadian, and Jamaican women’s and children’s magazines and newspapers, Eaton occupied a complex subject position in terms of race, ethnicity, class, nation, gender, and sexuality.[3] Eaton experimented with multiple authorial personae and first-person narrators from the 1880s, when her first publications appeared in local Montreal magazines and newspapers, until her death in 1914, by which time her fiction had appeared in mainstream middlebrow national US magazines like Century and Ladies Home Journal. Her earliest fiction was signed “Edith Eaton”; her later more objective Montreal journalism was published anonymously; then in 1896, she took up the feminine orientalist pen-name “Sui Sin Far,” while at the same time contributing letters to the editor of her local Montreal newspaper signed only with her initials that advocated for fairer treatment of diasporic Chinese. Soon afterward, she began publishing stunt-girl journalism signed “Firefly” in a Jamaican newspaper. Eaton also projected numerous distinct first-person narrative voices in her fiction: those of a white female stenographer; a young white bachelor; a white male smuggler; a white male logging camp director; and a white male guest at a Chinese wedding. Throughout her fiction, however, Eaton never wrote in the first-person as a Chinese woman and wrote only once as a half-Chinese woman (“Woo Ma and I”).[4] However, her most famous and perhaps most successful character is the figure of the Americanized Chinese writer Mrs. Spring Fragrance, featured in her 1912 book by the same name, who is as comfortable among Chinese as among her WASP Seattle neighbors, yet who uses her bicultural position to write back to the dominant discourse in order to challenge racist stereotypes about the Chinese.

This essay focuses on an earlier experiment by Eaton to find a satisfying bicultural perspective that would attempt to remedy her experience of an existential in-betweenness that one of her mixed-race characters describes as “not know[ing] what I am and [feeling that] I don’t . . . have any place in the world,” or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to find a satisfying bicultural perspective that accepts in-betweenness as a necessary condition of modern life.[5] In early 1904, Eaton told the editor of Century that she was going to “make her way [across the continent] as a Chinaman” for a series of articles for the Los Angeles Express, a mass-market newspaper that catered to recent immigrants and migrants and prospective migrants to California.[6]

It’s unclear whether Eaton simply wrote “Wing Sing on His Travels” from the perspective of the man she identified in her first installment as a “well-known Americanized Chinese merchant” with a successful shop in Los Angeles’s Chinatown who had lived in America for ten years or if she literally cross-dressed as a Chinese immigrant merchant as she crossed the continent in order to enable her repeated entries into the US during her Exclusion Era transcontinental, transnational journey (fig. 10, fig. 11). In fifteen installments published over several months, Eaton documents her journey by train, from Los Angeles to Vancouver and then across Canada to Montreal and New York, before returning west to Seattle, a physical journey that coincides with an interior quest to find her “place in the world” (Far, “Sweet Sin,” 223).

At 70,000 words, “Wing Sing on His Travels” is technically Eaton’s longest authorial project, significantly longer than her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which collected thirty-five distinct short works of fiction.[7] It is also Eaton’s most remarkable act of authorial “passing” and exemplifies how both transnational mass print culture and emigration contributed to subjectivity formation in Eaton’s era. Paradoxically, Eaton’s “place” in North American culture is on a train moving across vast distances even as she remains stationary on the train, writing as a Chinese man while presumably appearing to other passengers as a white woman. The rail journey that Eaton describes is a metaphor for the process of becoming a syncretized bicultural subject, a process narratively traced through the serialized installments in a newspaper that, like Land of Sunshine, Sunset, Overland Monthly, and The Westerner magazine, encourages settlement in the American West. Where one might expect a travel narrative such as those sponsored by American railway companies and published in popular periodicals to trace a process of Americanization, Eaton’s narrative traces a different process by which a diasporic Chinese male narrator and America syncretically influence one other; significantly, where Wing Sing’s journey begins on “white man’s new year’s eve” in Los Angeles, he reaches his east-coast destination in time to celebrate Chinese New Year.

Like the character Mrs. Spring Fragrance who “with the speed of flames” writes down all she hears, Wing Sing begins his journey by copying white people’s words.[8] What an Irish passenger writes down in his own notebook about his own journey, Wing Sing also writes down. When the Irishman says “you must not copy . . . just put down what you think,” Wing Sing responds: “that all right. I think same as you.” “Then you must be an Irishman,” the Irishman jokes (Sing, “His Travels,” 204). However, even as Wing Sing mirrors the Irishman’s activity, Wing Sing’s perspective challenges white American passengers’ preconceptions about the abilities, intellect, and tastes of Chinese men. When a passenger says “See that Chinaman” and “his friend look[s] at [Wing Sing] and laugh[s],” Wing Sing looks back. “I look at him and laugh at him—plenty funny people in America” (202). A successful entrepreneur who tours in his adopted country and neighboring country looking for business opportunities, Wing Sing provides a very different model of the diasporic Chinese than that currently circulating in popular media; he travels as a tourist on the railway that other Chinese had built primarily for white emigrants. And instead of foregrounding the westward trajectory of European immigrants to the US and its attendant process of Americanization—a common narrative in contemporaneous fiction and nonfiction—Wing Sing’s journey traces the trajectory of Asian immigrants who arrived at Pacific ports and then traveled east by rail, a horizontal journey Eaton tropes vertically in terms of class climbing rather than simple Americanization: “I now very big Mandarin . . . I look in mirror . . . and see myself look more nice than before I come on car . . . I feel much superior man” (205). This process coincides with a process by which the continent and its culture are becoming more Chinese as people like Wing Sing emigrate and leave their marks on them. Although the majority of Wing Sing’s fellow passengers are white, the cities that Wing Sing visits instantiate the ubiquity of Chinese in North America; his cousins pan for gold in the Fraser River, own cigar factories in Seattle, run shops in Montreal, and lead organizations such as New York City’s Chinese Reform Party. Wing Sing’s observation that there are 17,000 Chinese in Canada, 800 in Montreal, decenters both whiteness as the North American standard of the human and the ethnographic description of the other as the implied object of most travel narratives.

Eaton tropes this process of syncretization as textual as well as experiential. Although early installments focus on Wing Sing’s duplication of the Irishman’s observations about the sublime landscape and white settlers’ successful businesses in his effort to become more American, by the time he arrives in New York, his notebook has begun to focus on Chinese achievements. “My cousin introduce me to the editor” of the Chinese Reform News, a newspaper bankrolled by “The J. P[.] Morgan of Chinatown.” “All the type in the cases are Chinese type with Chinese characters . . . American man and woman . . . exclaim, ‘How most amazing that the Chinese should learn print all same Americans do,’ and my cousin answer, ‘It is from [Chinese] that people of other countries learn to print.’ I send . . . The [Los Angeles] Express a copy of the Chinese Reform News” (Sing, “His Travels,” 224). This gesture of periodical exchange metaphorizes Eaton’s own authorial process of syncretization, as she, through her career, shifts from the white ethnographic perspective documented in her early Montreal Chinatown journalism to the internalized bicultural perspective reflected in later fiction informed by both the Chinese and American periodical press.

Distinctions between Irish and Chinese types dissolve in the narrative, culminating in an anecdote about how Wing Sing’s cousin adopts an Irish child: “Well, the baby he come, he be white baby with eye the color of the blue China teacup, nose like a piece of jade stone that is carved, mouth same as the red vine leaf and hair all same silk worm make—the color all light and bright. The [biological] parent[s] of the baby they not be proper parent and they be Irish. Some time I hear they be dead, but that not matter much to baby; only one thing sure, they love him. . . . Then my cousin, he say: ‘I will take that white baby and I will bring him up to be as a Chinaman. I will teach him the Chinese language and the Chinese ways and the Chinese principles. Then one day I take him with me to China and find a little Chinese wife for him—and he will be to me as a son’” (Sing, “His Travels,” 217–18). Like Wing Sing’s notebook, which starts out Irish but gradually becomes more Chinese, the Irish baby is made Chinese by nurturing, signaled textually through Eaton’s use of familiar Chinese tropes such as jade stone, red vine leaf, and silk to describe the child’s appearance.

The cultural practices of “exchange”—between the Los Angeles Express and the Chinese Reform News and the interracial adoption of an Irish child by Chinese parents—offer two tropes for a syncretic American culture. Friendship that accepts differences and encourages compromise provides a third trope. Although a recent immigrant to North America, Wing Sing experiences California as a “happy, cheerful, smiling friend,” Washington and British Columbia as “sympathizing friend[s],” and the St. Louis Exposition as a way of “mingl[ing] the people of United States and of Canada” (Sing, “His Travels,” 211, 230). In a rare self-reference, Eaton describes Wing Sing representing the fragrance of a Sui Sin Far (that is, a water lily) in a Montreal store as “greet[ing] me like a friend” (213).

Turn-of-the-century North American mass magazines and newspapers worked in tandem with railways and their attendant concepts of Americanization, class mobility, and other kinds of self-transformation. Emerging networks of mass-circulating print culture were enabled by expanding transcontinental transportation networks: telegraph lines running alongside the railroad tracks relayed news; express trains delivered syndication plates for newspapers; railroads distributed magazines; railway newsstands sold periodicals and newspapers that passengers read on board; and railroad companies created the precursors of today’s ubiquitous in-flight magazines. California’s Southern Pacific Railway had Sunset; Washington State’s Northwest Railway had the Northwest Monthly; St. Paul’s Railroad had Wonderland.

Likewise, the expansion of transcontinental railways was enabled by the cultural work performed by newspapers and magazines that used fiction, poetry, essays, advertisements, illustrations, and photographs to increase travel, by tourists, immigrants, and investors, to places that the railways served. Newspapers and magazines took many of their readers in rural areas, the South, and the West, to places that they could reach only through their imaginations. The cultural project shared by periodicals and railroads is implied in the transportation tropes of publication names such as the Dispatch, the Flyer, the Telegraph, and the Express. These publications mark a fundamental link between moving and being moved. This relationship between media and migration is particularly relevant for Eaton, many of whose publications appeared in magazines and newspapers that encouraged westward migration and/or were paid for by railway advertising contracts.

Like railways, which fostered an expanding national culture, westward migration, and self-invention enabled by the can-do dynamics of the frontier, modern mass magazines and newspapers played an important role in processes of gendered, racialized, and classed self-making for both readers and authors. Amy Blair’s Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States argues that aspirational readers of mass periodicals were encouraged to achieve upward mobility and class transformation through reading that permitted them to identify with successful figures and successful social trajectories.[9] The New Yorker had a similar effect on its rural readers. Catherine Keyser, in Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture, has documented how contributors to “smart” magazines both performed and resisted gender and class stereotypes promoted by the magazines themselves.[10] This performativity of authorship is characteristic of all modern periodicals, which Ann Ardis describes as deliberately and complexly performative “authorial environments.”[11] For Eaton, the collapse of the spatial gap between east and west coasts effected by the completion of the transcontinental railroad is accompanied by a cognate collapse of identitarian gaps between subjects, through the reading and writing of imaginative literature. Eaton’s own biographical vehicularity permitted her to pass into points of view not her own, views she represented in her writing. The collapse of these gaps places Eaton in the productive uncertainties of a middle way between whiteness and Chinese-ness, between successful businessman and oppressed worker, between Canada and the US

This productively uncertain middle way has a lot in common with what I see as a central project of many middlebrow modernist texts, that is to invent and consolidate a broad, civic-minded middle that can counter class extremes. The extremes I am thinking of at the moment are the selfish profit-seeking elites and the economically vulnerable—and therefore necessarily self-interested—working classes who are depicted in the modern suffrage fiction that I explored in Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism, but other extremes, i.e. of racial and gender essentialism, nationalism, etc., can also be countered by a vision such as the one that Eaton imagines here.[12] Serialized and read by a broad readership of Los Angeles residents, immigrants, migrants, and potential migrants, installment by installment, Wing Sing’s narrative of transformation works to foster deliberative debate between its readers and to encourage them to change their narrow views. Migrating across that US-Canadian border and writing fiction and nonfiction about that process helped Eaton see the productive instability of modern subjectivity.