68
everywhere he is free and vigorous; he has an orig-
inal and poetic mind, and he loves life” (D5).
Bibliography
Kang, Younghill. East Goes West: The Making of an
Oriental Yankee. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1937. Chicago: Follett, 1965. New York:
Kaya, 1997.
Lee, Sunyoung. Afterword to East Goes West: The
Making of an Oriental Yankee. New York: Kaya,
1997.
Oh, Seiwoong. “Younghill Kang.” In Asian American
Autobiographies: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical
Sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 2001.
Wolfe, Thomas. “A Poetic Odyssey of the Korea That
Was Crushed.” New York Evening Post, 4 April,
1931, p. D5.
SuMee Lee
Eaton, Edith Maude See FAR, SUI SIN.
Eaton, Winnifred (1875–1954)
Better known under her pen name “Onoto
Watanna,” Winnifred Eaton was the first—and re-
mains the most prolific—Asian-American novel-
ist. The eighth of 16 children born to an English
landscape painter, Edward Eaton, and his Chinese
wife, Grace “Lotus Blossom” Trefusis, Winnifred
spent her early years in Montreal, Canada, in ex-
treme poverty that she lightened by telling stories
to her younger siblings. At age 20, with no for-
mal education, she left home for a brief stint as
a journalist in Jamaica, then moved to the United
States in 1896, where she spent the majority of her
life, writing novels, short stories, and ultimately
screenplays for Universal Studios in the early years
of Hollywood.
Although Winnifred Eaton was the first Asian
American to publish a sustained work of fic-
tion, until recently scholars ignored her in favor
of her older sister Edith Eaton, who wrote under
the pseudonym SUI SIN FAR about the hardships
Chinese Americans faced during an era of extreme
discrimination. This is because Winnifred con-
cealed her Chinese heritage in favor of what was
then a more fashionable—and thus, more market-
able—Japanese façade. Posing for publicity photos
in kimonos, with her hair done up in a Japanese
style, Winnifred wrote nearly a dozen “Japanese”
romances and insisted on her false Japanese iden-
tity, claiming to be descended from a Nagasaki no-
blewoman. Even so, Winnifred’s novels garnered
scant critical attention before the late 1990s; and
what little exists generally focuses on her decep-
tion. As Eve Oishi notes in an essay on Eaton’s
first novel, MISS NUMÉ OF JAPAN (1899), her ruse
is problematic not merely because she capitalized
on Western stereotypes of Asians but because “she
was instrumental in creating them” (xxii).
The question, though, is whether this percep-
tion of Eaton as a “traitor” or “trickster” derives
from the actual content of Eaton’s novels or just
their elaborate packaging by her publishers. Writ-
ten with great rapidity—as Eaton wrote to sur-
vive—these lavishly illustrated works include A
JAPANESE NIGHTINGALE (1901), The Wooing of Wis-
teria (1902), The Heart of Hyacinth (1903), The
Love of Azalea (1904), A Japanese Blossom (1906),
and The Honorable Miss Moonlight (1912). These
diaphanous titles suggest that Eaton equated Asian
women with birds and flowers, much like Pierre
Loti in Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and John
Luther Long in Madame Butterfly (1898).
Such an assessment, however, is too simplis-
tic. Unlike the purely Japanese heroines of these
earlier (and more famous) books, Eaton’s central
figures are often biracial, struggling to come to
terms with their mixed ethnicity in an otherwise
homogenous society. Indeed, in some cases such
as Tama (1910), the Japanese-American girl suf-
fers extreme persecution and attempted murder
due to her mixed-race background. Such eth-
nic tension is apparent as early as in Eaton’s first
known story, “A Half Caste” (1899), in which the
unwanted daughter of a Japanese teahouse dancer
revenges herself upon her unsuspecting father.
The ethnic tension remains evident all the way
to her last “Japanese” novel, Sunny-San (1926),
in which a biracial girl is literally purchased by
a group of American undergraduates. As Eaton’s68 Eaton, Edith Maude