69narrator remarks in A Japanese Nightingale, not
even the happiest of mixed marriages can prevent
“the Eurasian [from being] born to a sorrowful
lot,” condemned to prejudice from the “pure race”
people surrounding the child (90).
Surprisingly, this theme of miscegenation that
runs through almost all these “Japanese” works
gets short shrift in the few critical studies that
have been written on Eaton’s books. This is likely
due to the distraction provided by the elaborate
bindings, gilt-edged pages and copious illustra-
tions that mark—and even efface—the original
editions, making the pictures seem almost more
important than the texts. Yet if we place this eth-
nic tension at the center of our reading, we may
interpret Eaton’s choice of Japan as providing not
merely an excuse for exotica but a stage on which
to enact the difficulties she and her siblings faced
growing up biracial at the fin de siècle. After all,
none of the Eaton children seems to have been
comfortable with a Chinese-English ancestry. If
Edith presented herself as all Chinese, and Winni-
fred as Japanese, their sister May pretended to be
Mexican, while their oldest brother Edward posed
as an English aristocrat, joining “whites only”
clubs in Montreal.
Ultimately, Winnifred Eaton died en route to
Calgary, Canada, in 1954, having published 14
novels, two thinly veiled autobiographies, almost
countless articles, short stories, screenplays, and a
Chinese-Japanese cookbook. She married twice:
first, in 1901 to a New York journalist, Bertrand
Babcock, with whom she had four children; then
to a Canadian cattle rancher, Francis Fournier
Reeve, in 1917, after her divorce. She witnessed her
novel, A Japanese Nightingale, staged on Broad-
way and made into one of Hollywood’s first silent
films. By any measure, she achieved extraordinary
professional success. Yet Eaton herself seems to
have foreseen the difficulties her Japanese dis-
guise would pose to future generations of Asian
Americans. As her alter-ego Nora Ascough nar-
rates in the quasi-autobiographical Me, “When the
name of a play of mine flashed in electric letters
on Broadway, and the city was papered with great
posters of the play... I was aware only of a sense
of disappointment. My success was founded upon
a cheap and popular device... Oh, I had sold my
birthright for a mess of potage!” (153–154)
Despite her self-criticism, Eaton deserves credit
for her accomplishments. Writing at a time when
biracial unions were rare, Eaton posed power-
ful questions about what an “authentic” ethnicity
entails, demonstrating through both her books
and her body that race is as performative as any
other aspect of human identity. In so doing, Eaton
was less a trickster than a trailblazer. By exploring
themes that might otherwise have been taboo if
she had set her narratives in North America, she
chartered new literary territories: not only as the
first Asian-American novelist but as the first to in-
vestigate what it means to be Asian and Caucasian
at the same time.Bibliography
Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Win-
nifred Eaton. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2001.
Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton:
Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Eaton, Winnifred. A Japanese Nightingale. Two Orien-
talist Texts, edited by Marguerite Honey and Jean
Lee Cole, 81–171. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2002.
———. Me: A Book of Remembrance. With an After-
word by Linda Trinh Moser. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1997.
Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chi-
natown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Oishi, Eve. Introduction. In Miss Numé of Japan: A
Japanese-American Romance, xi–xxxiii. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Kay ChubbuckEchoes of the White Giraffe
Sook Nyul Choi (1993)
SOOK NYUL CHOI’s second novel, Echoes of the
White Giraffe is the sequel to her autobiographi-
cal first novel, YEAR OF IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES,
the story of Sookan Bak, who, with her youngerEchoes of the White Giraffe 69