SOURCE: Yin, Xiao-Huang. “The Voice of a Eurasian: Sui Sin Far and Her Writing.” In Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, pp. 85-116. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Yin discusses Far's efforts to challenge existing stereotypes about Asian Americans through her short fiction. Yin examines Far's treatment of such themes as assimilation, interracial marriage, biracial identity, and cultural conflict.

I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant “connecting link.”

—Sui Sin Far

Thus Sui Sin Far [Edith Maude Eaton, 1865-1914], the first Chinese woman writer in North America, expressed both her feelings as a Eurasian and her keen desire to explain what kind of people Chinese Americans were.¹ Among early Chinese immigrant authors, she was virtually the only one who was engaged in writing imaginative literature rather...