74
Sui Sin Far was compelled to spend much of her
time caring for her younger siblings. When her
family’s financial situation deteriorated, Sui Sin
Far was obliged to abandon her formal schooling
before the age of 12 in order to contribute to the
family funds.
In 1883, when she was about 18 years old, Sui
Sin Far went to work for the Montreal Daily Star.
She eventually became a stenographer, a career that
would provide her with a limited source of income
throughout her life. In the mid-1880s she opened
her own office and was able to secure employment
as a freelance journalist. Although Sui Sin Far was
not fluent in any language other than English and
would have been forced to rely on interpreters, this
work brought her into contact with Montreal’s
Chinese immigrant population and thus marked
a crucial stage in Sui Sin Far’s developing sense of
her dual ethnic identity. During this time she be-
came increasingly aware of the racist laws under
which the Chinese suffered. Her reporting from
this period, most of it unsigned, shows a degree
of sympathy toward her Chinese subjects, absent
from the writing her contemporaries produced
on this topic. For instance, in an 1896 letter to the
editor, “A Plea for the Chinaman,” signed “E. E.,”
Sui Sin Far denounced the new onslaught of laws
targeting the Chinese, while defending the Chi-
nese against the racist charges used to justify the
legislation.
Yet at this point in her literary career, Sui Sin
Far did not deal with Chinese subject matter in fic-
tion. Her first stories, written between 1888 and
1889 and published in the nationalistic Canadian
magazine Dominion Illustrated, were signed “Edith
Eaton” and dealt with European-American char-
acters and themes. Sui Sin Far’s first work to ad-
dress Chinese-American subject matter did not
appear until 1896, when several short stories on
Chinese immigrants to North America appeared
in the New York journal Fly Leaf, the Kansas City
journal Lotus, and the Los Angeles-based Land of
Sunshine. From this point on, Sui Sin Far would
devote herself to Chinese themes, creating stories
that presented the Chinese living in America in a
sympathetic light and often assumed the vantage
point of a Chinese-American protagonist.
In 1897 Sui Sin Far left Montreal to accept a po-
sition as a reporter for a newspaper in Kingston,
Jamaica. About six months later she contracted
malaria and was forced to return to Montreal, but
shortly after her return she moved again, this time
to the United States. Sui Sin Far arrived in San
Francisco in 1898 and soon made contact with in-
habitants of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest
and largest Chinese community in North Amer-
ica. For the next decade, Sui Sin Far produced a
number of short stories centered on the Chinese
in North America, relocating several times in
order to report on the Chinese communities in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Between
1898 and 1900, she was able to place a number of
her short stories in West Coast periodicals, such
as Land of Sunshine, Overland, Monthly and Out
West, all edited by Charles Lummis. In 1903 a se-
ries of her articles on the Chinese in Los Angeles
appeared in the Los Angeles Express. In 1909 the
Seattle monthly The Westerner ran a serial by Sui
Sin Far entitled “The Chinese in America.”
Sui Sin Far clearly hoped to reach a national
audience, but initially her efforts in this direction
met with only limited success. In 1902 her story
“The Coat of Many Colors” appeared in Youth’s
Companion. “A Chinese Boy-Girl” was published
in Century in 1904. In 1905 the Chautauquan pub-
lished the story “Aleteh.” Given the prominence of
Century among the literary periodicals of its day,
Sui Sin Far’s publication in this magazine marks
a milestone in her literary career. Unfortunately,
her repeated efforts to secure future publication in
this periodical met with disappointment. There is
some speculation that the absence of publications
between the year 1905 and 1909 is evidence of a
hiatus in Sui Sin Far’s literary output, perhaps due
to her frustration over repeated rejections. But it is
also possible that work from this period has yet to
be discovered.
In 1909 Sui Sin Far’s career took a turn for the
better. Her autobiographical essay, “Leaves From
the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” appeared
in 1909 in The Independent, an established liter-
ary periodical with a national circulation. Around
1910 she moved to Boston in order to be closer to
national publishing centers, a decision that seems74 Far, Sui Sin