“A Half Caste” and Other WritingsPosted in Anthologies, Asian Diaspora, Books, Media Archive, Novels, Women on 2011-04-07 03:40Z by Steven |
“A Half Caste” and Other Writings
University of Illinois Press
2003
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07094-5
Onoto Watanna (1875-1954)
Edited by:
Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University
Elizabeth Rooney
Previously uncollected short stories and essays by the first fiction writer of Chinese ancestry to be published in the U.S.
“What did it mean to be a ‘half caste’ in early twentieth-century North America? Winnifred Eaton lived that experience and, as Onoto Watanna, she wrote about it. This collection of her short works—some newly discovered, others long awaited by scholars–ranges from breathless magazine romance to story melodrama and provides a riveting introduction to a unique literary personality.”—Diana Birchall, author of Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton Onoto Watanna (1875-1954) was born Winnifred Eaton, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother. The first novelist of Chinese descent to be published in the United States, she “became” Japanese to escape Americans’ scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with things Japanese. The earliest essay here, “A Half Caste,” appeared in 1898, a year before Miss Numé: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her best-selling novels. The last story, “Elspeth,” appeared in 1923. Of Watanna’s numerous shorter works, this volume includes nineteen—thirteen stories and six essays—intended to show the scope and versatility of her writing. While some of Watanna’s fictional characters will remind today’s readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, others foreshadow such types as the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (a novel in which Onoto Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Watanna’s characters are always capable, clever, and inventive—molded in the author’s own image.