Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton. Ed. Mary Chapman. Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen's University Press, 2016. lxxvi + 274 pp. $110 cloth/$34.95 paper.

Until recently, readers of Edith Maude Eaton, also known as Sui Sin Far, have focused on the Chinatown- oriented fiction collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), along with a handful of nonfiction essays and sketches. On the basis of these works, critics have established Eaton as an important antecedent for Asian diasporic mixed- race literatures as well as a sophisticated practitioner of literary regionalism, sentimental fiction, journalism, and memoir. Building on both earlier scholarship and her own extensive archival research, Mary Chapman's Becoming Sui Sin Far presents a broader picture of Eaton's career- a corpus of more than 260 texts (carefully documented in a comprehensive, chronological bibliography of Eaton's known works) that goes far beyond American Chinatowns and encompasses multiple and heterogeneous communities in (and in between) Canada, Jamaica, China, and the United States. Presenting dozens of newly discovered works that Eaton authored under a range of identities (from "Edith Eaton" and "E. E." to "Fire Fly," "Sui Seen Far," and the male merchant "Wing Sing"), Chapman's collection will shifthow scholars understand Eaton's experiments with the transgression of national, racial, formal, sexual, and gender boundaries.

In the volume's introduction, Chapman provides an invaluable overview of Eaton's biography, the "expanded oeuvre" of her previously uncollected writings, and major trends in the critical reception of her work (xxii). The introduction complements scholarly assessments of Eaton's cosmopolitanism and her cross- racial analogies with Chapman's striking discoveries about Eaton's family history: for example, her mother, Achuen Amoy,...