Life Story: Edith Maude Eaton, aka Sui Sin Far (1865-1914)

Edith Maude Eaton was born on March 15, 1865 in Cheshire, England. She was the second of fourteen children. Her father was British and her mother was Chinese. They met when her father traveled to China for business.

As a child, Edith and her family moved several times for her father’s work. When she was less than one year old, they immigrated to the United States. They lived in New Jersey for two years before returning to England. Edith made her third trip across the Atlantic Ocean when she was seven. After passing through New York City, the Eaton family settled in Montreal, Canada.

Edith attended school until she was eleven, when her parents decided she should be educated at home so she could help care for her younger siblings. Edith also assisted her father in his work. When she was fourteen, she survived a severe case of rheumatic fever that resulted in lifelong breathing complications.

At eighteen, Edith took a job as a stenographer for the Montreal Daily Star newspaper. Although her work was mostly clerical, she used the opportunity to launch a writing career. Edith proved she could write in a variety of formats. Local papers published her humorous essays, short stories, investigative articles, and more.

In 1890 the Montreal Witness hired her to report on the Chinese community in Montreal. Although Edith was both British and Chinese, she had rarely interacted with the Chinese community beyond her immediate family. While reporting, she developed a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and heritage. By 1895 Edith was promoting the fair and equal treatment of Chinese immigrants through articles and letters in local, national, and international publications.

In addition to journalism, Edith also enjoyed fiction writing. The people she met while working as a reporter informed her short stories. While she published some work under the name Edith Maude Eaton, she frequently used pen names. One of her most famous was Sui Sin Far, a childhood nickname that means “water lily” in Cantonese.

Edith was fascinated with travel and believed that individuals should not be defined by the country in which they were born or lived. In 1896 she traveled to Jamaica to work as a journalist. After publishing over thirty articles in six months, she contracted malaria. Her breathing problems made her illness particularly dangerous, so she left Jamaica and moved to San Francisco. Edith called the US home for over fifteen years. During that time, she lived in California, Washington, and Massachusetts, and traveled across the continent by train at least twice.

Edith continued to support herself as a stenographer and journalist while completing bigger writing projects. She frequently visited Chinatowns to observe daily life and report on what she saw. Edith’s biracial identity played an important role in her ability to share the story of Chinese Americans. Her Chinese heritage gained her access to communities that were suspicious of white outsiders. Her British heritage gained her access to notable newspapers and magazines where she could publish her ideas. She was also easily able to immigrate to the US and to move freely across the border, privileges denied to most Chinese people in the era of Chinese Exclusion.

Edith reported on the challenges Chinese people faced in the United States. She reported on the specific ways the Chinese Exclusion Act and other laws shaped daily life for Chinese Americans. Edith went to great lengths to humanize her fictional characters, who were typically inspired by real people. 

Edith regularly highlighted the experiences of Chinese women, who had even fewer rights and opportunities than their male counterparts. In the story “In the Land of the Free,” a Chinese immigrant is separated from her toddler son when she does not have the proper paperwork upon arrival in San Francisco. In “Sweet Sin: A Chinese-American Story,” a teenage girl in California with a white mother and Chinese immigrant father commits suicide after realizing that she will never truly belong to either culture. In “The Daughter of a Slave,” a young woman tries to escape poverty in China by agreeing to an arranged marriage in the US. But when she arrives, she learns her new husband has deceived her family and that she will be just as poor in her new life as she was in China. Through such stories, Edith gave voice to immigrant women, criticized the bureaucracy that tore families apart, and explored the horrific impact of anti-immigrant racism on individuals’ lives. Although much of her writing focused on Chinese culture, she covered other topics related to identity, nationalism, and race.

Edith was also interested in the parallels between white and Chinese culture. She believed that the two cultures shared many similarities, and that it was only fear of the other that kept them apart. She publicly identified as a woman of mixed-race heritage, and wrote, “After all, I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than nationality.”

By her early forties, Edith was an established writer in the US. Many of her essays and stories were published in national magazines like Good Housekeeping. She received fan mail from admirers of her work. In 1909 she published her favorite short stories about Chinese Americans in a book named after one of her characters: Mrs. Spring Fragrance. It was the first fiction book in English published by a woman of Chinese descent. It was also one of the earliest popular books to present a sympathetic view of the Chinese American community.

Health complications forced Edith to return to Montreal in 1913. She died of heart disease less than a year later, on April 7, 1914. Mrs. Spring Fragrance went out of print shortly after her death. However, it was republished in 1995, and scholars who study Chinese American history still consider it an important resource today.

• Chinese Exclusion Act: A US law passed in 1882 that severely limited the number of Chinese immigrants who could enter the country legally. 
• pen name: A fake name used by a writer to keep their real name a secret.
• stenographer: An office worker who takes notes in shorthand.