Great Books 40: Mary Chapman on Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"

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And why you are our guest today, and I'm really thrilled to have you is because you're one of the people who are experts on the writings of the Ethan sisters of Peter the Ethan and her sister and the book that first got me acquainted with your work is becoming so we send for early fiction journalism and travel writing by Edith Martin. So I'm going to start us out to tell our listeners to talk a little bit about the beginning of this writer who you and I both think is really significant, but it's maybe not as well known to some listeners yet. I first stumbled on Sui's and far as she is known by because of her Chinese pseudonym in grad school when many of us as American literature teachers were looking for diverse content for our courses and Asian American literature was a very new field in the late 80s early 90s. But Sui's in far birth name, Edith Eden, had published one book of short stories in 1912, called Mrs. Spring fragrance, and it was sympathetic to diasporic Chinese during a period of intense racism towards Asian immigrants. So her stories were short, they were teachables, students really connected well with them, her memoirs or her sort of autobiographical journalism, which was also collected in a sort of edited collection was also really accessible. So that's kind of where I got started being interested in her, but my research took a really strange turn one night when I was googling her name I knew she had written about suffrage and I was writing a book about suffrage and I, you know, how the web is things appear and then, you know, months later. The stuff that you found is gone so who knows where it went, but on that particular evening when I searched her name a story came up that had nothing to do with diasporic Chinese it had I had never seen it before it had never been mentioned it was strange it was sort of about Alaska. Sort of about the Philippines about indigenous children and so I suddenly thought, you know what this writer wrote way more than we know about that one collection just completely underestimates how profound and involvement she had in the print culture of her day. So that sent me down the rabbit hole to your research has really uncovered a far greater reason writing after this collection is this frame fragrance which just for listeners, I think the important moment is 1974 when there's an apology of Asian American writers, when trying to kill people like them called i.e. and sui sin far is identified there as a bit of the kind of form on the ancestor of some parts of contemporary Asian American writing so this is 74 and as you said when people are really actively and a lot of people you credit in your book have really done enormous amount of work to basically it's hard to say not even recover but to actually put these people on a map from which shape and deliver the experience. I've been delivered the excluded from high school curricula so but you but what I found so interesting and you say this is not enough she is let's say the former mother she kind of this ancestral figure for Asian American Chinese American Chinese Canadian writing but she's much broader than that. That's right she is so rich unauthor to explore she's Chinese Canadian she's raised in Montreal but she had a long career in the US so we can consider her Chinese American as well because she's mixed race because her father was British. When she's raised in Montreal she really is raised in the kind of Victorian Canadian society she doesn't learn Chinese she there aren't many Chinese immigrants living in Montreal so we could say that part of the process of her career is becoming Chinese becoming Chinese American North American you could say. So I see her as a really fascinating figure because of the contributions she makes to a number of genres whether we look at fiction poetry journalism even political advocacy you know she's one of the first people to speak out against the head tax from the perspective of someone or the exclusion era from the perspective of someone of Chinese ancestry. Can you say something about this briefly the legal context so you in the US you have 1882 the Chinese exclusion act the head taxes in Canada what do these taxes and these laws mean for for Chinese people in both countries. Well I think the North America welcomed Chinese immigrants after the Civil War during the period of trans continental railroad expansion and Chinese were welcomed as workers but once the trans continental railroads were completed. Racist largely working class people especially in western the western states the western provinces opposed the presence of people they considered outsiders on the on the simulable immigrants and so there were moves a number of gestures you know everything from riots. Burning people's homes driving out businesses up kind of thing to what Canada came up with was a head tax everyone from China who came to Canada had to pay a sort of entrance fee and it was a staggeringly expensive entrance fee it began I think about 50 dollars and it went up to 500. In 19th century currency terms this might represent a significant part of somebody's annual earnings or more so very few people paying that head tax could afford to sponsor additional members of their families so the effective that was you limited the immigration to Canada to. Many of whom actually would return to China because their families were there or their wives were there so so it really limited the settlement of Chinese families in Canada and then in the 1920s the Canadian government. imposed an exclusion period similar to what the US had done. So as you said, the US imposed this exclusion beginning in 1882. They kept renewing it. So really Chinese American families didn't get a chance to form in North America until midway through the 20th century. And Sui said far if you can take us to her, so she's in Montreal growing up in English father, Chinese mother. And if you can say something about the parents and then how does an 16, 17, 18 year old girl start to actually have a voice on behalf of a community as you said that she had to actually become. I mean, I'm thinking of a, it's a teenage girl who is deciding, who's well educated and has some little bit of talent for writing at this moment. She's actually committing. I think that's why she becomes such an important figure for so many people afterwards. Absolutely. Well, to answer your first question about the parents, these parents are amazing. They're quite a distraction for me because I just love the eating. So, as far as I feel drawn to the parents' lives. And you're writing a book, right? You're writing this book into an intimate empire about the whole eating family, right? Because that's right. You know, sister was an important writer soon. Yes, you're, you're right. I'm writing a book about the family. It's kind of a micro history because it's trying to situate this transnational, biracial family in the broader context of 19th century social, cultural, and political contexts. So, so her parents are fascinating. Her father was British. He was born in a textile milling town in the north of England near Manchester. And what I have figured out is that after going to Asia, possibly meeting the mother there, he finally settled in Montreal, worked as a clerk for a while, and then quit his job, apparently, to support his family of, you know, 12 to 14 children by being an artist. But what I have discovered is he actively assisted Chinese in Montreal to move into the US during the exclusion era. Some of these men had been caught outside the US after actually having emigrated to the US. Legitimately, they had grounds to get back into the US, you know, continue their business in the US, etc. But many of these exclusion laws had caught them offside. Maybe they were in China visiting family or in Canada visiting colleagues. And so he helped them cross the border by smuggling them in the bottom of a truck kind of covered with hay, etc. and driving south from Montreal into New York State. So he got arrested for that. That was in 1896. And then he was arrested the second time in 19, I think it was 1914. So it's quite possible that between 1896 and 1914, he continued to be active in this role. It appears that some of the people he helped smuggle were actually newcomers to North America. And, you know, probably shouldn't have been assisted, but in many ways, I think Canadians of a sort of progressive band viewed the laws that the US had set up as kind of like the fugitive slave law, you know, something explicitly racist that was excluding people limiting their mobility, etc. So that's the father, what a fascinating character, Edward Eaton. And then the mother, very little was known about her, you know, between the challenges of accessing a Chinese archive, you know, scholars who don't read Chinese. And just the fact that she seemed to have no family. These have represented challenges to biographers. But I stumbled on a book by a Protestant missionary that basically told her story and it said she was a young girl, a talented dancer. She was made a Mutsai, a slave girl in the Chinese system of apprenticeship to a Chinese acrobat and his wife. And they toured the world in the 1850s. They came to San Francisco and they performed at the American theater on the San St. St. They crossed the isthmus of Panama and went up to New Orleans and traveled by Canal boat and steamer and who knows what else all over the US. Then they went to England, toured Great Britain, Europe, France, Germany. And then just by chance, because she had connected with some Protestant missionaries when she was in line-house with her owner. She was decoyed away, rescued. We don't exactly know what happened, but her owner lost her, and then she was raised with the support of Protestant missionaries until she was an adult and returned to China as a missionary. So they are fascinating. There are many things stories that is a Chinese woman who was a former slave to the true, then this British man who marries her. Where do they get married before they ultimately out of the back of the settlement in North America? They seem to get married on a boat somewhere. The record that we have is that in 1862, I think it is, or in 1863, they get remarried in official capacity in Shanghai. So I think maybe if you get married on board a ship, it's kind of a makeshift legal document. But yeah, they connect and get married in Shanghai in 1863. So they have numerous children, ultimately after some back and forth between England, they settle in Montreal and then one of the, you said about 12, 14 children, two-die in childhood. So the group, the numbers change every few years. There's an addition in the subtraction. So from our perspective, that is a truly cosmopolitan kind of global family before we even use these terms. And then either, so that's my second part of that question. She's a teenager and it sounds from how you describe it becoming suicide far. She makes a decision to assume a role or to speak on behalf of a community that she didn't have to do that. Exactly. I think she begins to have some opportunities to meet new Chinese immigrants to Montreal in the early 1890s. So she's already got a little bit of a writerly career going. She's been helping set type at the Montreal Star, you know, since she was 18 years old. She's been submitting humorous little anecdotes to American newspapers. And she's been publishing stories in the, in some local Montreal papers and magazines. But she doesn't, she hasn't oriented her work towards Chinese, towards China, diasporic communities or anything like that. But I think in the early 1890s, she meets some new immigrants, women who have come to join their husbands. And she visits them with her mother, who I guess has been invited by a local missionary to help out because as a translator. And clearly some of their stories captivate her so much that she begins to write journalism first. And then by, by 1896, when she's 31 years old, she's starting to write fiction about them. And you uncovered a lot of these other writings. The fiction is, as we said earlier, put her on a, on a particular map, which is kind of literary history. And these stories are considered sympathetic. And I think that word is used sometimes in the descriptions I read because there's so much anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment. that is so commonplace that her stories almost look like an exception. They're not stereotypes, they're not just caricatures. So she's giving voice to these experiences and people. When you first started teaching the story, to be honest with you, my experience was just assigning Mrs. Spring fragrance in the land of the free to undergraduate students who said to me in 2020, this is last summer, they had never been assigned a story written by a nation-American in either high school or college and they went to very fine high schools and Los Angeles. And I said, "No, I can't be accurate. You must have read Maxine on Kingston or any ten." Some big sort of popular and they said, "No, we've never read a story by anybody from our community." So I found that really remarkable and can you talk a little bit about the stories that put on the map and then what else you found because you found so many other things. I mean, everything is just incredible. What was there that hadn't been enthologized or sort of indexed in an easily retrieval way? Yeah, I think her most commonly taught story is Mrs. Spring fragrance and a sequel to Mrs. Spring fragrance called the inferior woman. And they both feature a diasporic woman who's moved to Seattle and she's very curious about American culture and she is regarded by her neighbors as the kind of old-fashioned one who, you know, it's not clear whether Mrs. Spring fragrance has bound feet or not but certainly the stereotype of the Chinese woman at the time would have been that she's different to her husband, that she's not really a feminist, that she's housebound and conservative in all kinds of ways. But Mrs. Spring fragrance, even as she doesn't ruffle feathers, she doesn't kind of aggressively challenge these stereotypes. She's very clever and she's very insistent that she correct the record. So these two stories are basically about her flipping the stereotype so that she exposes American mothers who are meddling to arrange their children's marriages as way more conservative in terms of romance and family politics, etc. So that's a really popular story. The other text that is often assigned is a memoir, sort of autobiographical text called "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian." And in that nonfiction work, she reflects on stages of her life and probably what we would call today the microaggressions that one experiences as a mixed race person or a racialized person. So those are the most popular. I guess since those ones were enthologized, people have discovered several scholars have discovered other works by her. So Dominica Farons found a whole bunch of journalism by her from Jamaica when she worked as a journalist in Kingston, Jamaica in 1896 and 17 and Martha Cutter found a story that was said in Jamaica and June Howard has found some stories. So her over is expanding. But the one piece I love the most is actually a piece that a graduate student slipped into a dissertation without working on Suison Farb, but this little nugget that I think her supervisor had found was really sweet. Turns out it's an 1896 newspaper interview with her by the New York recorder, which was kind of a woman's newspaper. And she's just arrived in New York city. She's staying at a boarding house. She wants to meet people in Chinatown and her description, her love of the energy and excitement of Chinatown is really great and her depiction of Chinatown, not as an exclusive enclave for Chinese, but rather as a space of rich, her rodenius points of contact. There are many mixed race people living there, parts Spanish, part African American, part Asian. And she really revels in the rich pluralism of that space. And I think when students read that interview, which is 130 years old or whatever, they're really struck by her vision of the potential of the American body politic. So that's one of my favorite stories. And all these stories, I would just struck how the characters in our stories, they occupy several positional ways. The Mrs. Spring fragrance, as you said, she introduced in you thinking in her name, she's possibly a traditional Chinese American or Chinese born American, young Seattle. But she becomes a figure who mediates between these different people who helps out this young girl who actually challenges her husband in a very subtle way to rethink certain assumptions he has. And I think that is the strength that's far greater than just saying he is a Chinese American writer, but here's someone who opens up what everybody does, everybody negotiates these different spheres and culture. And there's a letter that Mrs. Spring fragrance write in the story and my students were completely struck by similar things because she attends a lecture where someone says, well, you know, Chinese should pay more for certain things because the benevolent American government holds their hand over them and protects them. And my students said, what is she speaking on behalf of here? When she goes to China, Tom and New York, as you just described in this channel, this kind of interview, who does she identify herself in any way in which because that's what I think your book is so important to say, she's not just or she's not a Chinese American writer or Chinese Canadian writer, she's doing certain things to open up this category. Yeah, I think this piece that she writes or this interview of her in 1896 is one of the first texts where she acknowledges this other name she has, Sui Sin-Fa, which I'm not pronouncing in any correct way in terms of the Cantonese, but that is sort of how she's referred to. I think someone in China said to me, okay, if you really want to pronounce this correctly for for your Chinese audience, it's "Shuai Sin Hua". So, but if I said that to you, your listeners would be equally confused, but anyway, it's the first time she acknowledges in print that name and it may be a family name, it means Narcissus. She writes later in her work about how Narcissi grow and she's really interested in how underneath they rely on dirt and mud and things that we don't associate with beautiful aesthetic production and yet they are, in fact, beautiful flowers. And in a way, I read her reflections on her pseudonym and on aesthetics as a comment on what she sees as her role. There's something really dirty, foul, unpleasant about the racist culture and the exclusion or mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. And yet, she can write fiction that is aesthetically accomplished, beautiful and pointed very sharp. I mean, if you've ever smelled one of those paper rose white Narcissi, they're pretty intense. You can't you can't ignore them in the room because they are there. And she's quite similar. So she finds a way through beautiful aesthetically pleasing and thick. and other texts to convey a challenging message to American leaders. And can you say a little bit about how you think she is read or received in this way? She's publishing stories, so she's selling stories to a range of publications. Many of them you actually found and discovered. And it's as she read by people, I'm just trying to think because sort of this is overlay of 130 years of now people sort of thinking about what is Chinese American history. As you said, it's not just in nineteen hundred or eighteen ninety six, there's this kind of foul sediment of racism. The Chinese exclusion policies, government in the 80s till the 1960s in America, it's nearly a century of legislative exclusion which then leads to all sorts of social exclusion. But when she's publishing her stories, I'm trying to get a sense of what is this huge production of literary magazines and newspapers that publish short stories. How do you think people read her stories at that point is it a matter of curiosity or of entertainment or what's the status of your fiction. I'm really interested because of course now we live in a different world and you know, the fiction doesn't have that kind of status or us probably right now. Yeah, that's a great question. I think there was an expansion of print culture that coincided with her career. So effectively hundreds more newspapers and magazines were created and each of them focused on a kind of niche audience, maybe a children's magazine or a family magazine, a men's magazine, a woman's magazine. Huntsman rifle user, you know, all kind of hobbyists, etc. So, so all of these magazines had a hunger for content and all of these magazines wanted to grab content that that someone, another magazine that they competed with wouldn't get. Some of her earliest publishers were actually magazines that were were the railroad equivalent of what we think of today as an in flight magazine. So if you're on an airplane, remember that when we used to travel. So you pull the in flight magazine out of the little pocket and you read and it kind of transports you to places that the that the airlines would like you to be interested in visiting. So they were really the railroads when they were trying to foster transcontinental travel and also immigration to some of the western states Washington state California or again. They really wanted to feature some content that maybe showed some of the more exotic or fascinating unusual aspects of these locations. So a story that depicted San Francisco or Los Angeles Chinatown or Seattle Chinatown by Swiss and bar would be very appealing. So she kind of got her start because that kind of content would be appealing to to non non Chinese non Asian readers. She had some great connections with Chinese print cultural workers writers and editors, et cetera. And I'm pretty confident that her her work or references to her appeared in some of these Chinese language publications in the US. But to answer your question about, you know why I would or who would read her and why even as early as 1900 some male student attending Dartmouth writes her a fan letter and really wants to have her autograph. And so that's years before she's really developed a national reputation and the published a book. So so very early there's kind of uptake and popularity. And is this a way for her to earn a living? The narrative that the biography has tended to advance is that she struggled she was poor as a church mouse. No, you know she couldn't earn a living by her writing. I think as more and more of these texts have been discovered like I think my research is kind of tripled or quadrupled her over. And I see that there are definitely phases in her career where she is working full time as writer as a journalist and as an author. She certainly takes time off from her stenography career in the 19 teens to prepare the manuscript that becomes Mrs spring fragrance. And that's being published. She's at work on another book length project that unfortunately disappears. We don't quite know what that was and where it went. I think she earned an impressive living at many stages of her life and supported the extended family that continue to need support particularly you know at times when when her dad was in jail, etc. But some of the pieces that you discovered that I read in your book becoming suicide far are very funny the early ones. They're also funny but also very unsettling. There's one about a couple have a little misunderstanding and then they go out and it's kind of about a relationship. The one just about going in a horse car which is as if you were going to subway or an attack or an Uber today or something and seeing people with other people. I guess Uber share. But there's a lot of humor and then there's one story that as you know I like a lot in the land of the free. Earlier, she was a realistic piece called the land of the free very brief but there's a later piece in the land of the free about a young couple and the woman returns from China where she spent some time to tend I think to her parents and she returns with a baby. And the customs officials at San Francisco port sees the baby from this American couple and take the baby away. And it's a really heartbreaking story and what I found amazing how navigates identities across sort of the Americas and the customs officials basically apologize and say well we just have to do this. This is a law and they take the baby away and it nearly bright up the marriage so there's kind of humor and there's also something else that we would read in a certain way as political but I actually think it's maybe not read as political of the mother. Yes, political at the moment is just a story that is universal. It's about parent having to give up a child. Yeah, that story got a lot of attention over the last few years because the American government has been separating children from their parents or whatever reasons. That's it's a very timely story but as you say it's it's heartbreaking it's full of pay those I mean people are struggling to be given the right to have a family to enjoy their family to be with their children and then separated not only separated but when the child is reunited with the mother. Possibly the most heartbreaking thing about that story the Land of Free is that when the child is finally reunited with the mother. He doesn't speak Chinese isn't wearing his Chinese clothing. He regards her as a stranger so that the bond has been dramatically severed by the intervention of customs officials and other you know other pro bonktries. And to stay with the story for a moment I also thought it was incredible that the mother speaks English in a slightly different way from the officials she's probably she probably didn't grow up in the US the way I understand the story at least so she's using language to indicate sort of someone's identity position and then this is kind of insurmountable divide this couple and they're against the American government. And then there's a kind of ruthless lawyer in between who just profits off the case and says I'm going to read in Washington I'm going to make money and there's a very moving scene where the woman actually says I'm going to give you all my jewelry to pay you and he said that. and on Tangerual, right? And so I said, well, actually, I'll take a Joule. So there's the American government. We can say they're kind of the bad guys. But there's someone else who profits of this whole system, a young and serious lawyer. And the language and the story, I think, that's really remarkable. And I actually, I think the New York Times reviewed Miss Spring Freigwens and some of them mixed review and says, but it's a new voice or new tone in American literature. And I kind of think for my students, it was really important to say this is how she's trying to capture someone's speaks at this moment. And they're incredible duress. I mean, they're taking a baby away from her, and I'll just send away from her. But she's also having to make herself understood in a world where mainstream English is associated with power and authority. And this family doesn't have a lot of power and authority at this moment. Yes, exactly. She's almost a new kind of subjectivity in American literature. In some ways, I'm often reminded of Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the sense that her very popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin really urged white women to see across racial difference, to see the humanity of people they regarded as strangers, as aliens, as not people. So in this story, I think everyone can see the humanity of Beechew. And identify with her desire to be reunited with her child. That scene you describe where the lawyer accepts all her jewels. Not only are they little pieces of property that she's throwing into the mix, they all have incredible sentimental value. They're about family, about parents, about gifts from her husband, about marriage. They're Jade bracelets that she may have had from childhood. So what she is throwing into the mix and sacrificing in order to get her child back is basically everything she has. So that's a steep price. And it's not one that the lawyer calculates in the same way. He's just kind of grabbing what he thinks he can-- I don't know, sell that upon shop or something. So yeah, it is a heartbreaking story. But it's a great point you're making. It's kind of something like a new subjectivity. And the story starts when they're coming into San Francisco harbor and she says to a little son who's a baby, see a little one, the hills and the morning sun. This is their home for years to come, which is almost like a poem. It's like arriving in America, having to give up and sacrifice anything you own, anything that ties you back to your family, to your parents, to your marriage, the price to pay. But at the end of the story, the little son has in a strange way almost become Americanized and doesn't even respond to his mother. So in the days of this little tiny short story, I think you get one of the great dilemmas of Americans. How do you become American who counts as American? Why do some people have to sacrifice so much to be Americans supposedly and still not be recognized and break up, as you said, there's several of the bonds in their own family. So I think this is really, in many of our stories, there's so much going on in the space of a few pages that can then be unpacked. And as you said, the story has been read now, of course, in light of the administration's policy of separating children from families. And as we know, there's still hundreds and hundreds of children who they cannot locate. So we've just been taking families. Can we shift to another question which is really-- it's also going to be my invitation for a whole second hour on the podcast. She has a sister who's also a writer. And then I wanted to ask before we just one sentence about the sister, when I said, is she making money at this point? She's selling stories, new saying she's opening up a part of American-American readers who have downtime when they're traveling. What about the whole dimension of Orientalism? That's kind of the flip side of what is the same side of the pervasive anti-Asian racism that she uses this name. Her sister will also assume a different name. How do you think they are received and read from that side? You're right. That in fantasy agriculture in the West, there was a deep interest in Asia. It's exodicism, I guess. So we have Madame Butterfly. And we have Asian textiles and ceramics and lots of people furnishing their homes with Shinwazuri. So all kinds of levels of interest in both Chinese and Japanese culture. I think politically, the Japanese were seen as sort of a stronger, more pure nation to the US, a kind of imperial nation of intense sophistication. The level of immigration to the US by Japanese was slight, compared to the level of immigration by Chinese. And yet the Chinese who emigrated were largely from the peasant class initially when they were helping build the railroad. And so there are almost two classes of Asian in the American imagination. So I think the Orientalism tends to be more fascinated by Japan because it sees Japan as a more elite and aesthetically sophisticated culture. And then it's interesting that just as if there's kind of-- in many of these relations, there's a kind of a double sort of the good and the bad. There's a kind of the yellow peril, the kind of continual threat of formation. And then there's a kind of elevation or celebration of two-man and butterfly, which is published right before the turn of the century, the kind of fetishization of the other. Which probably happens in some regards. And can you say just tell or listen to one thing about the sister who also becomes a writer and a writer quite successful as well? And I know we talked before that we could talk about the two sisters. And I said, no, I really want to talk about-- so we said, far from one whole hour, then we can talk about a sister for another hour. OK. Well, the woman we've been talking about, Edith Eaton, was born in 1865. 10 years later, her sister Winifred is born. So there's a significant gap in age between them. But her sister follows along the same path. Their paths overlap in really interesting ways. So in the 1890s, when Edith Eaton, Sui Siddharth, is publishing in Montreal magazines and newspapers, Winifred Eaton is also publishing. She has a story accepted by a Montreal magazine in 1896. She's a little bit more of a hustler than her sister. So she volunteers to go to Jamaica for a journalism job in 1896. She doesn't stay very long. She stays for about five months. But very shortly after returning to North America from Jamaica, she assumes the pseudonym Anato-Watana, which is kind of Japanese, but sort of a foe. We could call it a foe Japanese name. She assumes this name as the pen name of another identity she assumes. So she pretends to be a Japanese noble woman named Kitashima Takahashi, which she spells very badly by any Japanese standard. She assumes this identity and then says that as Kitashima Takahashi, she is assuming the pen name Anato-Watana, and she is going to write stories about Japanese girls, Japanese young women. et cetera. And that's the start, you know, basically 1896. She publishes a story by Anatoa Watana. And from 1896 until, you know, 1922, she continues to publish as Anatoa Watana, even as this complete racial masquerade is exposed in, you know, 1903, 1904. She doesn't care. It's a it's a good hook. She calls it a cheap device later. She acknowledges it's a cheap device. But for a while, she profits unbelievably. So where where Edithe in her sister, probably sort of made a living from her writing, you know, had a pretty good output, et cetera. Win of red becomes a blockbuster success. Her works, her novels are translated into 20 languages, you know, they're made into films, they're made into plays. She is a real success story under the brand Anatoa Watana. I think it's really worth pointing out that she's profiting of a kind of craze for sort of, as we say, maybe pseudo Asian product and away content. She becomes actually a major consultant for the studios, she goes to Hollywood. She's really a really big success story. Also not quite that common for a woman at that point to become a sort of to become that recognized and established. But I think it opens another interesting aspect that these identities that we retrospectively bestow on that Asian American would not even probably have been entirely comprehensible to them. That Canadian Asian Canadian that these categories of course shift over time. And I would I would like to sort of ask you because as you know, I'm interested in these kinds of stories that in our greatest certain tradition, there's always complications like this is probably the first novel published by an Asian American. Sui Sinfar is usually considered to be the first short stories published by an Asian or Asian American writer. But I did it shift. You are understanding of literary history itself of the Canon you were taught. We started out by saying how you were looking for new texts to teach when you were in graduate school and published all today. How do you think it changed your understanding? I'm really just asking because this completely did two things. It changed my understanding of American literary history. And it made me realize that I was told to liberally a very different history where these people did not figure in at all. And just where was handed down. So I'm kind of just interested how it shifts your perception of what we call the Canon or the history of American writing. Yeah, thanks. That is the question that drives my research. I think I've spent most of my career as a recovery scholar. So trying to recover the works of American women writers. I edit the section of the legacy journal that's addressing the recovery of texts that people haven't had access to whether they've been published and forgotten or sort of our gathering dust in the archive. And I think my overall sense from all the research I've done, recovering American women writers, is that the literary history we've been taught is deeply, deeply wrong. It's not even, uh-oh, it left a few people out. It's more a strong, active, deliberate misrepresentation of what has been true. So even when we think about somebody like Winifred Eaton, you mentioned that she goes to Hollywood as a consultant. She actually headed the script department of Universal Studios for many years. During the period that she did that, um, as recent film scholars, film history scholars are discovering, women were actually really central in Hollywood. They were fantastic dialogue writers. They were the authors of popular novels and plays that could be easily converted into movies. And, uh, some book that my grad student told me about said that it looked at a staff directory. I forget which studio, but one of the movie studios from early on and 80% of the names were women. Now we might think, okay, they're probably all the secretaries, you know, like 10 men getting great salaries and then sort of, you know, scores of women doing all the work. But they seem to be directors, actors, uh, stenographers, screenwriters, um, sort of, anyway, if that, that is sort of a staggering new discovery in the Hollywood world. And I think what I have discovered, I'm not a film scholar, but in the adjacent world that I'm looking at, I see that early 20th century fiction was dominated by women writers. The type of poetic that was popular in the 1900s, 19 teens, 1920s. Again, was dominated by women writers. So, and then we see these two sisters as fairly popular players in the sort of ethnic American literature. So I think it's pretty clear to say, uh, it's clear to see that the narrative that we've all been taught that is starting to change because of anthologies like yours has excluded a lot of people. But Mary, I really appreciate this because you actually just corrected and it's really important. You corrected my own sense of it was unusual for, or not a Wattana, or, you know, to actually work in Hollywood. You say, no, not at all, not at all. But then I'm thinking, so how did I come up with this, um, wrong idea? And why did I sort of assume, well, women, as you said, were probably just in supporting roles. And you said, no, they were directors, they were screenwriters, they were script editors, they were ideas people. Um, the other thing you just said, which is interesting. An American fiction at this time is, there's a lot of women writing and one of the books that you wrote earlier, um, which I also really find in remarkable book is about sentimentality. It's called sentimental men, masculinity and the politics are perfect in American culture. I think, will you talk about how there has been a way to dismiss the sentimental or to assign it to the status of that sense on the side of the feminine. Therefore, we don't take it seriously. And I'm always really interested in actually the sentimental or the melodramatic. It can be a very powerful way to say things that shouldn't be said. And a lot of the fiction from this time we know has this, this dimension to say something that had not been accepted or has not been, not being said. Um, your recovery effort is, part of it is also to bring this to the public. So you, I think you are the, the, I don't know what to call the host or the creator when you're when a friend eat an archive correct. Is that right? And then the director of the website, the director, thank you. And, and that is really essential for people to find these texts to find information. Um, because I believe that one of the really important places where these works need to be read are high school and college classrooms. So, and access is so important, right? We need to make these texts available to people. And that's what you've done in a way so people can go on the website, find information, find what's in public domain and assign these texts. Um, and when you think now what's your, um, your role as a kind of, uh, custodian of this legacy, I did a podcast on Kate Chopin the other day. What would Sui's in far think today that she has been in a certain way? Um, I guess the word is recovered or we discovered by scholars, some of them you named today and by you, what would Xiaowichan do you think she would think about the fact that, um, people are discussing her as having this role in American letters? I, I think the focus on sentimentality is really interesting and relevant. event to Suisse and Far, she did not deride it as a method for political intervention. However, the reason we have inherited a sort of negative stance towards sentimentality is because some male writers in the early 20th century actively maligned the sentimentals. So I'm thinking here of somebody like Ezra Pound, sentimental slither, flowery language. You know, these are things he rejects in many of his kind of manifesto-like writing. But the fact remains that we're humans, we have emotions, we are empathetic creatures, and part of the reason we read, literature, and we enjoy it is because we identify with the people we read about. So I think that was a very central project for Edith E. Suisse and Far, and I think she would be delighted to see that her broader career is now being acknowledged. I mean, she was one of the unfortunate people whose career was interrupted, you know, sort of cut off to early by a premature death. She lived alone, she didn't have children to kind of retain her legacy or partner to retain her legacy. And she died in 1914, which is a weird moment in literary history where a lot of things got lost because we have World War I, we have a sudden shift to privilege modernism, and it's not the category that she fits in exactly. But I think she would be delighted to know that people are revisiting her works and getting a fuller picture of the range of ways in which she intervened in yellow peril discourse, ethnic American literature, et cetera. Yeah, I tend to think that actually these writers somehow are okay away, I hope that if we can close with your project, as we said, you're writing a family history intimate empire of the Edith family, and then the website that you're directing which makes available to people, a lot of these really discoveries. Yeah, the Winifred Eaton archive has lots of tech, lots of photos from the family. The part of this resource that I'm most proud of is actually the biographical timeline because the availability of digitized sources, the crowdsourcing, the generosity of Edith scholars across the world, has allowed us to tweak, revise, correct some errors that had circulated prior, and so that biography is growing and the timeline is growing, and it offers me some of the coordinates from which to write this intimate empire book, which is going to be very much focused on family relationships, but also the broader cultural relationships that the family are kind of embedded in, as mixed-rays, immigrant, transnational, cultural producers. Right, I really want to thank you, it's such an incredible resource, and for me it was really just eye-opening to find this and to direct my students to it, and Mary, I want to thank you for being a guest today. There's a lot more we could touch upon, but I really want to just tell listeners, it's a great start to read some of Suicin for short stories, and then to consult Dr. Mary Chapman's book, "Becoming Suicin for Early Fiction Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Martin Eaton," and again to repeat this, you are a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and then Kuhver, we're conducting this, of course, over Zoom during the pandemic, but I really want to thank you, and all the other scholars you acknowledge, but use work you presented to make available something that really, as I said before, I was really just not aware of, and I went to pretty decent schools, but somehow this had never come across my curriculum, so I'm really happy to discover it now with you. Well, thank you so much for inviting me and giving me a chance to share my research with your listeners. I welcome their emails, their suggestions, their questions. I really regard my research as crowdsource, crowd-shared, and I look forward to hearing from your listeners. Think about it. Deep conversations with Uli Bear on big ideas and great books.