Sui Sin Far was a Canadian author known for her writing about Chinese people in North America and the Chinese American experience. "Sui Sin Far", her pen name, is the Cantonese name of the narcissus flower, popular among Chinese people. Sui Sin Far's literary projects examined issues of hybridity, institutional racism and sexism. She illustrated the confusion of being both Chinese and English.
Background
Ethnicity:
Her father was an Englishman and her mother was a Chinese.
Sui Sin Far (born Edith Maude Eaton) was born on March 15, 1865 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, United Kingdom. Daughter of Edward Eaton and Grace "Lotus Blossom" Trufusis. Eaton's mother was apparently schooled in England although she returned to China after her education was completed. Eaton's father was a merchant who did trading in China; it was on one of his business trips that he met and fell in love with his future wife. At the age of seven, Eaton and her family left England and immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in the early 1870s, settled in the Montreal suburb of Hochelaga. Far had a younger sister Winnifred Eaton, who also became a successful writer wrote under the pen name Onoto Watanna. As the second child and the oldest daughter of fourteen children, Edith Eaton spent much of her childhood helping her mother care for her siblings as well as selling her father's artwork in the city. In the mid 1890s, Eaton moved briefly to Jamaica, where she contracted malaria, from which she never quite recovered.
Education
She attended private school in the United Kingdom and public school in Montreal, Canada until the age of eleven. Because of their poverty, at a young age, Far left school to work in order to help support her family. She continued her education at home.
Career
Eaton began writing as a young girl. She worked as a stenographer in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in c. 1884-1890. Her articles on the Chinese people were accepted for publication in Montreal's English-language newspapers, the Montreal Star and the Daily Witness. She eventually left Montreal to live in the United States, first in San Francisco, then in Seattle, before going to the east coast to work in Boston. While working as a legal secretary she continued to write. She was a freelance writer between 1898 and 1912. In 1909 Eaton moved to Boston where she compiled a full-length selection of short stories "Mrs. Spring Fragrance". In 1913 Eaton, stricken by horrible rheumatism and bad health, returned to Montreal and died there on April 7, 1914.