Mrs. Spring Fragrance | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Mrs. Spring Fragrance Critical Overview

Working in the heavily Sinophobic environment of the turn-of-the century, Far had to carefully choose her words. Any explicit criticism of the Chinese-American situation might have been considered subversive and unfit for publication. As a result, Far disguised her critique of American society under a surface of charming, "harmless" stories about Chinese-American life. White Americans were indeed curious about the Asian Americans, and a number of books were published during this time that were intended to "inform" the dominant culture about the immigrants' exotic lifestyles. The D. Lothrop Publishing Company in Boston published a group of works entitled "When I Was a Boy in . . ." that included Lee Yan Phou's When I Was a Boy in China (1887), New Il-Han's When I Was a Boy in Korea (1928), and Sakae Shioya's When I Was a Boy in Japan (1906). The books in this series rarely touched on the...
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