Empire and the Mind of the Child: Sui Sin Far’s “Tales of Chinese Children”

Sui Sin Far's (Edith Eaton's) collection of short stories Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is composed of two sections. The first section contains stories for adults and describes numerous individuals caught between various racial and social identities: "white" and "Chinese," "American" and "Asian," "colonizer" and "colonized." Moreover, it is clear in this section that "American" identity is a problematic attribute for individuals of ethnic descent; full cultural citizenship is most often configured as belonging to white "Americans." The second section of this text, called "Tales of Chinese Children," focuses on different issues: children who seek playmates, children who are misunderstood, children who are lost, and so on. This essay examines two of Sui Sin Far's children's stories, however, to illustrate that in them dilemmas of colonization, racial identity, and cultural citizenship are inscribed repeatedly. The child is frequently the object of the Empire's control, as a story such as "Pat and Pan" demonstrates. However, the child can occasionally subvert this control, as "A Chinese Boy-Girl" indicates. These two stories move beyond the binary oppositions that structure hegemonic formulations of selfhood toward a more capacious concept of "Asian American identity." Sui Sin Far thus offers an innovative contribution to the conceptualization of children's literature in that she embeds complicated and non-hegemonic ideas of race and gender within her stories for children. (1) Yet would such a complex message be imbedded in stories intended only for children? Critics remain divided as to whether Sui Sin Far's "Tales of Chinese Children" are in fact stories for Chinese children or stories about Chinese children. (2) This essay argues that these stories have a dual audience in mind of children and adults. In fact, some of her "children's" stories may be intended to trick white, adult readers into hearing subversive messages; a parent might start reading these "quaint" or "exotic" stories to his/her children, only to be seduced into hearing messages aimed for an adult's ears. (3) This is not to say that these stories would have no resonance for children or for Chinese American readers. But for an adult Caucasian reader, the stories convey complicated messages about the instability of racial identities, about the illogicality of definitions of cultural citizenship, and about the need to create alternate categories than those authorized by hegemonic definitions of cultural identity. (4) Sui Sin Far employs a complicated narrative strategy in "Tales of Chinese Children," then, to enact change in how individuals perceive categories of race and gender. She utilizes the mind of the child, with its less rigid racial categorizations and hierarchies, to show how adult readers might reconfigure their own limited concepts of racial, cultural, and sexual "identity." Sui Sin Far herself knew how it felt to be caught between categories of identity. The daughter of a Chinese mother raised by missionaries in England and a British father, she was born in England and then moved to Canada at age four. Eventually the family settled in the United States, but throughout her short life Sui Sin Far migrated from place to place. One senses, then, in her writing a persistent alienation from the different geographical, racial, and cultural spaces she inhabited, but did not call home: "So I roam backward and forward across the continent. 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" (230). In terms of her racial and ethnic heritage, Sui Sin Far also constantly slipped from category to category. She describes herself as "Eurasian" and consciously chose to publish under her Chinese name, yet as an adult she was sometimes taken for "white" and forced to hear anti-Chinese propaganda. …