Yoonmee Chang has a master's degree in English and American literature from the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate. She works on contemporary Asian-American literature and in the following essay she discusses the subtexts of Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" that critique America's history of often legalized oppression of Asian-American immigrants.

As a writer of Chinese ancestry writing about the Chinese-American experience, Sui Sin Far, pseudonym of Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914), would have found it easier at the turn-of-the-century to write about anything else. Her first and only collection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, was published in 1912, just thirty years after the Chinese Exclusion Act and twenty years after its 1902 renewal. Once their labor was no longer needed on the first transcontinental railroad or the Hawaiian sugar plantations, the Chinese in America were considered undesirable by politicians who wanted to...