Sui Sin Far, née Edith Maude Eaton, was born to an English father and Chinese mother from Shanghai who met while her mother was in a traveling circus. Eaton spent her early years in England, but her family soon moved to the United States, and then to Montreal, Canada. Despite having been wealthy while in England, the Eaton family was quite poor by the time they moved to Canada, requiring Edith to work early on in her life, first by selling her lacework from door-to-door, then by becoming a stenographer. Because Eaton was sickly due to an enlarged heart, her work options were limited; she could not do anything too physically demanding. As such, her work as a stenographer suited her and she moved on to become a journalist and author. Eaton spent much of her adult life moving between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, documenting the lives of Chinese immigrants and communities in these cities.
Having been born to a Chinese mother and being of mixed heritage, Eaton was very sympathetic to the plight of Chinese immigrants and communities and made them the focus of most of her writings throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time Eaton was writing, Chinese peoples were facing immense hostility and discrimination in North America. Although Chinese immigrants were welcomed with open arms during the 1850’s Gold Rush years in the United States, many American workers changed their tune when those same immigrants became a source of cheap labor due to their own economic needs; their willingness to work for less threatened to push American-born workers out of their jobs, resulting in hostility that bubbled into overt discrimination and racism as time went on. By the time Eaton began writing and adopted her Chinese pen name of Sui Sin Far, discrimination and racism against Chinese immigrants and communities was entrenched in American society through the implementation of anti-Chinese immigration legislation including the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and required all Chinese people travelling into or out of the country to carry papers documenting their work status. Furthermore, the passing of the Scott Act in 1888 made it impossible for any Chinese person to return to the U.S. if they left, even if they had been living legally in the U.S. for many years.
Although Eaton’s works focused on the Chinese American experience, she was not always devoted solely to that single theme in her writing, but was encouraged to do so by friends. In a letter to the associate editor of The Century Magazine, Eaton says, “Though I myself prefer to branch out, so many friends seem to think that the Chinese should be my only theme” (Manuscripts, 1903-1907). Most certainly, the Chinese experience in the U.S. has been her most widely praised theme. Eaton was unusual in her serious depiction of Chinese people at this time and in her honest treatment of their plight amidst immense prejudice in the U.S. She had such an impact on the Chinese communities of North America that, upon her death, the Chinese community of Montreal, where she had spent much of her childhood and visited regularly during her adult years, erected a monument on her grave site.
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- “Chinese Immigration.” PBS. Accessed February 18, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/chinese-immigration/#:~:text=Chinese%20immigrants%20first%20flocked%20to,Americans%20were%20considered%20cheap%20labor (link opens in new tab).
- “Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts.” Office of the Historian. Accessed February 18, 2022. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration (link opens in new tab).
- Luo, Michael. “America Was Eager for Chinese Immigrants. What Happened?” The New Yorker. August 23, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/america-was-eager-for-chinese-immigrants-what-happened (link opens in new tab).
- Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Eaton, Edith.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1903-1907. Accessed February 18, 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b75b4c40-d1ec-0134-a1a2-00505686d14e (link opens in new tab).
- McMullen, Lorraine. “Eaton, Edith Maude.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. University of Toronto, 1998. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/eaton_edith_maud_14E.html (link opens in new tab).
Sui Sin Far 