Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 307mystery of her nature began to trouble her.” “Born a Bohemian,” as indeed Eaton
was, “exempt from the conventional restrictions imposed upon either the white or
Chinese woman,” Pan introduces Carson to Chinatown, the neighborhood, family,
and friends. Slowly, affection grows between them. As it does so, Carson sings to her
a song about the “wavering image” of the moon in the water, a “symbol of love.” He
also tells her that she has to decide what she will be, “Chinese or white,” adding, for
her benefit, “you do not belong here. You are white – white.” Pan resists his persua-
sions. “I was born here,” she reflects, “and the Chinese people look upon me as their
own.” Carson leaves for two months and, while he is away, an article by him titled
“Its Wavering Image” appears in the newspaper. It is based on all he has learned with
the help of Pan during their times together. Pan sees it as a betrayal of confidence,
the trust that she and her Chinese friends and relatives had placed in Carson. She
“would rather that her own body and soul had been exposed,” we learn, “than that
things, sacred and secret to those who loved her, should be cruelly unveiled and
ruthlessly spread before the ridiculing and uncomprehending foreigner.” We do not
learn what those things are – that is typical of Eaton’s delicate, allusive art. But they
are enough to make Pan rebuff a plainly bewildered Carson on his return. Appearing
before him in a Chinese costume, rather than the American dress she had habitually
worn in his company, she now insists, “I am a Chinese woman.” “I would not be a
white woman for all the world,” she adds, in answer to his protests. “You are a white
man. And what is a promise to a white man!” The strength of this story derives from
its imagining a clash of cultures that is none the less definite for being delicately
stated, none the less clear for being a matter of intimation rather than analysis. Its
pathos and quiet wit stem, in turn, from our sense that Pan has not resolved her
predicament by her act of will. She may say, and even think, that she is “a Chinese
woman” but, as the story intimates, she is rather more complicated, more conflicted
than that. In tales like this, Eaton used her own divided self to explore the divided
state of Chinese-Americans; she caught the wavering image of yet another America in
the fragile web of her writing. To that extent, she not only added another chapter to
the story of immigrant encounter; she prepared the way for other, later writers, par-
ticularly Asian-American ones, who have found themselves in exile in two different
lands – living between two countries, two cultures, and not really at home in either.GGray_c03.indd 307ray_c 03 .indd 307 8 8/1/2011 7:54:26 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 26 AM