306 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900“Chinese instinct” in particular, as something that made her “a pioneer”; “and a
pioneer,” she reflected, “should glory in her suffering.” The more problematical side
was not just the slights and humiliations she tells us she experienced when she
refused to “pass” as white or Japanese, although, given her appearance, she could
have. It was her sense that she inhabited a neutral territory, a cultural hinterland. “So
I roam backward and forward across the continent,” Eaton concludes her little
autobiography. “When I am East, my heart is West. When I am West, my heart is
East. Before long I hope to be in China. As my life began in my father’s country it
may end in my mother’s.” “I have no nationality,” she admits, but her consolation is
that she is not “anxious to claim any.” It is also that she is still her own person – and
“individuality is more than nationality” – and that, with her equivocal cultural status
she may, after all, supply a “connecting link” between cultures, giving, as she puts it,
“my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals.”
The achievement of the stories Eaton wrote for the magazines and collected in
Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is that they negotiate the cultural hinterland inhabited
by their author with wit, passion, and pathos. With their shifting narrative
perspectives, fragmented structures, and rapid changes of mood, as well as with
their preference for allusion and intimation rather than emphatic statement, these
tales tell us what it is like to be a person of multiple identities in a racist society. The
ironically titled “In the Land of the Free,” for instance, describes the plight of a
Chinese couple who have their son taken from them by immigration officers. The
couple have lived in America for many years and the man is a successful merchant in
San Francisco. But, when his wife became pregnant, he tries to explain to the
impatient officers, he realized that he wanted his son “to be born in our country.”
And she returned to China to give birth. After considerable delay and expense, the
couple finally acquire the papers permitting their son to stay. When they go to collect
their son, however, he does not want to leave with them. “The Little One shrank”
from his mother, we are told, “and tried to hide himself in the folds of the white
woman’s skirt,” one of the mission nurses who has been taking care of him. “ ‘Go
’way, go ’way,’ he bade his mother”: he has already begun to be a person with “no
nationality.” “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” the title story in Eaton’s collection, adopts a
more gently humorous approach as it explores cultural difference. Through the tale
of misunderstandings resolved between a Chinese-American couple, Mrs. Spring
Fragrance and her husband, Eaton measures the distance between Chinese and
American attitudes to marriage. She quietly reveals, however, how both forms of
marriage can involve love and how, as one Chinese character regretfully observes,
“the old order is passing away, and the new order is taking its place, even with us who
are Chinese.” The slippery narrative frame here alerts us to a world in which
experience is changing as well as fragmented, and people are consequently caught
between different times as well as different cultures.
A story like “Its Wavering Image,” in turn, is more keenly autobiographical. It tells
of “a half-white, half-Chinese girl” called Pan who lives in the Chinatown district of
San Francisco. She meets a young white journalist called Mark Carson, her “first
white friend.” “It was only after the coming of Mark Carson,” we learn, “that theGGray_c03.indd 306ray_c 03 .indd 306 8 8/1/2011 7:54:26 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 26 AM