Mixed Race Studies

“Citizen Sure Thing” or “Jus’ Foreigner”?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 1, February 2010
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.0.0067
pages 81-105

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In “a contract” (1902), one of Winnifred Eaton’s popular orientalist romances published under the pen name Onoto Watanna, O-Kiku-san, a young Japanese woman, explains to her suitor, the Japanese-born but racially white businessman Masters, the difference between citizenship and belonging. She tells him, “You Japanese citizen sure thing . . . all the same you jus’ foreigner, all the same.” Masters protests, insisting, “You are trying to rob me of my birthright. Am I or am I not Japanese?” (56). Kiku’s answer is unwavering: “Japanese citizen, yes. . . . Japanese man? No, naever” (56). Speaking as a full-blooded Japanese woman in Japan, Kiku articulates the vast gap between legal rights and social recognition, between being a “sure” citizen under the law while nevertheless (“all the same”) being perceived as “jus’ foreigner,” one who is virtually indistinguishable from all other foreigners (as indicated by the repetition of “all the same”). In this scene, Masters wants to be recognized as Japanese, and the most effective means by which he imagines achieving recognition is to marry a Japanese woman, with the hope that “the next of our line possibly may be partly Japanese, and the next” (56). In this story, as throughout Eaton’s body of work, those who look different on account of race—whether as a white man in Japan or a biracial woman in the United States—are perpetually seen as “jus'” foreigners. The white man’s status as perpetual foreigner in Japan neatly reverses the far more common experience of Asians in early-twentieth-century America, particularly since Kiku’s judgment of Masters’s foreignness is also based on his apparent failure to assimilate: he was educated in the West and lives in the English colony within Japan. Here, as throughout Eaton’s fiction, mixed blood is the primary measure of and means to cultural acceptance, more powerful than the legal rights granted by citizenship and more persuasive than residency.

Eaton’s formulation of the “citizen sure thing” who is nonetheless a perpetual foreigner complicates Lisa Lowe’s now-paradigmatic account of the ways that “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally.” Again and again in Eaton’s fiction, the route to recognition is imagined through romance, breeding, and familial ties, embodied by the figure of the “half-caste,” the offspring of a white man and a Japanese woman. With her focus on the plight of the biracial figure born of the West’s previous encounters with the East, Eaton’s stories should be read as aggressive dramas of national belonging in which white men desire mixed-race women, and mixed-race children demand recognition in the U.S. family. In the story “A Half Caste” (1899) in particular, Eaton merges the interracial love story with a familial reunification plot in order to make the controversial claim that the threat of incest may be productive, serving as the means by which the half-caste can secure her rights as daughter and citizen. In Eaton’s fiction, the moment of incestuous desire and its disclosure occasions recognition of the half-caste’s rights as a member of the family and, by extension, as a citizen of the American “fatherland.”

The term “half-caste,” which was invented to define the mixed-race children of European fathers and Indian mothers on the subcontinent, relies upon the entrenched gendering of raced bodies and the racialization of women. In America as in Europe, masculinity and fatherhood have long been associated with the West, while femininity and motherhood have been aligned with racial and cultural Otherness. In the United States, ever since Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japan to American trade in 1853, American audiences have responded enthusiastically to the image of an American captain penetrating the mystical, oriental East via military and economic might—symbolized by the cannons extending from Commodore Perry’s ships when he entered Tokyo Bay. This “scenario” of Western political-sexual conquest, to use Diana Taylor’s term for the “predictable, formulaic, hence repeatable” forms that tropes of…

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Me: A Book of Remembrance

University Press of Mississippi
1997 (Originally published in 1915)
368 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0878059911 (9780878059911)
Paper ISBN: 087805992X (9780878059928)

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954)

Afterword by:

Linda Trinh Moser, Professor of English
Missouri State University

A Chinese-Eurasian’s autobiographical novel tracing a woman’s dual quest for a writing career and romance

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry.

In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora’s search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton’s reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry.

Despite the silence of the text, Me: A Book of Rembrance reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored,” she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America’s Anglo preference.

Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances

University of Illinois Press
2002
240 pages
6 x 9 in.
14 black & white photographs, 7 line drawings
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02721-5

Dominika Ferens, Professor of American Literature and Writing
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pursued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the pen name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred presented herself as Japanese American and published Japanese romance novels in English under the name Onoto Watanna. In this invigorating reappraisal of the vision and accomplishments of the Eaton sisters, Dominika Ferens departs boldly from the dichotomy that has informed most commentary on them: Edith’s “authentic” representations of Chinese North Americans versus Winnifred’s “phony” portrayals of Japanese characters and settings.

Arguing that Edith as much as Winnifred constructed her persona along with her pen name, Ferens considers the fiction of both Eaton sisters as ethnography. Edith and Winnifred Eaton suggests that both authors wrote through the filter of contemporary ethnographic discourse on the Far East and also wrote for readers hungry for “authentic” insight into the morals, manners, and mentality of an exotic other.

Ferens traces two distinct discursive traditions–-missionary and travel writing–-that shaped the meanings of “China” and “Japan” in the nineteenth century. She shows how these traditions intersected with the unconventional literary careers of the Eaton sisters, informing the sober, moralistic tone of Edith’s stories as well as Winnifred’s exotic narrative style, plots, settings, and characterizations.

Bringing to the Eatons’ writings a contemporary understanding of the racial and textual politics of ethnographic writing, this important account shows how these two very different writers claimed ethnographic authority, how they used that authority to explore ideas of difference, race, class and gender, and how their depictions of nonwhites worked to disrupt the process of whites’ self-definition.

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press
January 2013
240 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5462-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5463-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5464-8

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.

By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

The Heart of Hyacinth

University of Washington Press
2000 (Originally published in 1903)
288 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Paperback ISBN: paperback (9780295979168

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) (1875-1954)

Introduction by:

Samina Najmi, Professor of English
California State University, Fresno

The Heart of Hyacinth, originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory-of racial constructions and fluidity-in the service of an avant-garde feminism.

Onoto Watanna (pen name for Winnifred Eaton) was a popular writer of American romance novels. Daughter of a Chinese mother and English father, she used her own mixed heritage to explore diverse social issues and exploited the Orientalist fantasies of her readership to become a best-selling author. Samina Najmi is visiting assistant professor in English at Wheaton College and has written extensively on women and race in Asian American literature.

Ambivalent passages: racial and cultural crossings in Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring 2009)
pages 211-229
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0004

Huining Ouyang, Professor of English
Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin

Appearing in the early fall of 1903 in time for the Christmas season, The Heart of Hyacinth, like other Japanese romances by Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), was widely promoted as a holiday gift book, enchanting readers with its “exquisite” Japanese design and its “delicate,” “charming” tale of Japan. For many, their pleasure in the novel’s Japanese appearance and sentiment was enhanced by their knowledge of its author’s alleged Japanese nativity or ethnicity. As one reviewer emphasizes: “We have a childish pleasure in things Japanese. . . . There is, therefore, a piquant pleasure for us in a story of Japanese life written by a native” (Heart, Republican). Similarly, another reviewer opens by introducing the author as “Onoto Watanna, the dainty little gentlewoman from Japan, who writes so delightfully of her native country” (“Heart,” Banner). Others, on the other hand, attribute the author’s “sympathy with Japanese life” (Kinkaid) or her portrayal of Japanese life “as seen from the inside” (Heart, Register) to her half-Japanese parentage. Thus, still largely convincing to the reading public, Watanna’s Japanese writing persona continued to allow her to dissimulate as an exemplar of the feminine, simple aesthetic and authentic ethnographer of Japan.

Watanna’s performance of Japaneseness, through her “Japanese” romances and especially her Japanese authorial persona, links her with the practice of “passing,” or the crossing of identity boundaries by those on the racial and cultural margins. An act of transgression, passing allows an individual in the liminal position, as Elaine K. Ginsberg puts it, to “assume a new identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other” (3). As a woman of Chinese and English descent living and writing in an era of virulent anti-Chinese sentiments in North America, Onoto Watanna devised strategies of passing not only to escape personal and racial persecution but also to achieve authorship in a white-male-dominant literary marketplace. By appropriating the popular genre of Japanese romance and adopting the guise of an exotic half-Japanese woman writer, she exploited her white reading audience’s orientalist fantasies and enabled herself to achieve visibility and authority in a field dominated by such luminaries as Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, and John Luther Long.
 
In The Heart of Hyacinth, however, passing serves as not only a tactic of ethnic female authorship but also an important narrative strategy that governs both theme and plot. Although reviewers have variously described it as “an ideal gift-book,” “a Japanese idyll,” or a delicate “Japanese love story,” Watanna’s novel weaves, in effect, a complex narrative of identity in which she negotiates with orientalist binary constructions of the East and the West and explores through the Eurasian figure the promise and perils of boundary crossing. As its title suggests, Watanna’s novel centers on the tale of Hyacinth, a white American “orphan” who has been adopted and reared by a Japanese woman and who discovers her white racial origin when her American father attempts to claim her seventeen years after her birth. Although she eventually comes to terms with her white parentage, her heart belongs to her Japanese adoptive mother and to Komazawa, the Eurasian foster-brother she grew up with and with whom she now falls in love. However, like Watanna’s first novel, Miss Numè of Japan, The Heart of Hyacinth tells more than what its title seems to imply. Hyacinth’s struggles with her familial, cultural, and racial allegiances intersect with her adoptive Eurasian brother’s negotiations of his own mixed heritage. Despite her discovery of her white heritage, Hyacinth claims a Japanese identity and resists Western colonial paternalism, while Komazawa passes into British society and navigates his biraciality with apparent ease in his endeavors to become “English.”

A coming-of-age narrative of two Eurasians, one actual and the other metaphorical, Watanna’s novel thus imagines passing in two different forms. On the one hand, through Komazawa’s physical and…

Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model

McGill-Queen’s University Press
2012-03-19
410 pages
21 b&w photos
6 x 9
Paper (077353962X) 9780773539624

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954)

Introduction by:

Karen E. H. Skinazi, Lecturer
Princeton Writing Program
Princeton University

The daughter of an English merchant father and Chinese mother, Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) was a wildly popular fiction writer in her time. Born in Montreal, Eaton lived in Jamaica and several places in the United States before settling in Alberta. Her books, many of them published under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, encompass the experiences of marginalized women in Canada, Jamaica, the United States, and a romantic, imagined Japan. Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model is Eaton’s only book that explicitly deals with being “foreign” in Canada.

The novel follows the life of “half-foreign” Marion Ascough—a character based on Eaton’s own sister—while never identifying her “foreignness.” Escaping the unrelenting racial discrimination her family endures in Quebec, Marion follows her dream of being an artist by moving to New York, where she becomes “Canadian” instead of ethnic – a more palatable foreignness. Having successfully stripped herself of her ethnicity, Marion continues to experience discrimination and objectification as a woman, failing as an artist and becoming an artist’s model. Karen Skinazi’s introduction to Eaton’s fascinating narrative draws attention to the fact that although the novel uses many of the conventions of the “race secret” story, this time the secret is never revealed.

This new edition of Marion: The Story of An Artist’s Model brings back into print a compelling and sophisticated treasure of Asian Canadian/American fiction that offers a rare perspective on ethnicity, gender, and identity.

Stand Back Ladies and Gentlemen! The Wonders of the World! Conformity and Confrontation in Winnifred Eaton’s Freak Show Setting in “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid”

Winnifred Eaton Project Symposium
2007-03-15 through 2007-03-16
Owens Art Gallery
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

2007-03-16

Christine Mayor
Mount Allison University

The freak show claims true wonders but encourages fraud, offers multicultural exhibits only to reinforce white supremacy, and asserts authenticity while promoting an exotic and aggrandized racial performance. While many have critiqued Winnifred Eaton’s false persona, questioned her authenticity as an “armchair ethnographer,” and accused her of reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes, this essay will concentrate on her deployment of the freak show in the short story “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid” to challenge widely held American values at the turn of the century. As Pat Shea argues, Eaton’s fiction skilfully balances “concession and resistance,” ensuring commercial success and readership while parodying and subverting white supremacy (19). Eaton capitalises on the potential of the freak show to entice and entertain readers, thus giving her freer reign to critique aspects of the nation, the ideology of whiteness, and the entertainment industry, while playfully exploring her own sideshow hoax as Onoto Watanna.

Historically, the freak show is not simply a form of entertainment, but is also a powerful tool for defining the self through negation, and “allow[s] ordinary people to confront, and master, the most extreme and terrifying forms of Otherness they could imagine” (Adams 2). In the public setting of a sideshow, each audience member is encouraged to identify with the uniform, “normal”, mass, and is distanced from the exotic, disabled, and/or freakishly skilled “Other”. As Robert Bogdan argues,

Americans viewing such displays of non-Western people did not confront their own ethnocentrism…[but]merely [had] confirmed old prejudices and beliefs regarding the separateness of the “enlightened” and “primitive” worlds; they left the freak show reassured of their own superiority by such proofs of others’ inferiority. (197)

…In this manner, Eaton’s image of the freak show may serve as a metaphor for the entertainment industry and a defence of her own passing as Japanese. Eaton, as a mixed-race subject, stands in as a “racial freak” that aggrandizes and exoticises her own identity to gain wider marketability and popularity. Ferens explores in detail Eaton’s conceit of the freak show, stating, “The dime museum may be usefully interpreted as a trope for the popular publishing industry of which Winnifred was, by 1903, a seasoned worker. The two businesses have a similar social function and structure: a metropolitan location, a publisher/manager, a press agent, a stable of expendable writers/performers, and a broad, unsophisticated customer base” (147). The ease with which these two industries can be paralleled further highlights the various ways in which difference is produced and staged to be profitable. Eaton describes in her fiction, the tactics used by the sideshow manager to increase the interest in the acts, which are strikingly similar to the way Eaton packaged herself as an artist. Eaton created for herself a Japanese persona presented through a pen-name, pictures in exotic dress, and authority through racial and familial authenticity. Eaton’s Japanese persona was her commodity and allowed her work to be judged apart from Western literary standards, as, “The naïveté and lack of literary technique that would have disadvantaged her as a white writer suddenly became part of what reviewers recognized as the “peculiar charm” of her untutored style” (Ferens 118). Eaton’s passing thereby allowed her to simultaneously critique and exploit the dominant system, as well as forcing readers to question how we understand and construct the identities of others. Eaton’s playful and cynical arguments that appearances are all that matter in either industry, and that each person must compete as best they can, serve as a critique of the discriminatory American capitalist system and defend her own elaborate hoax…

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“As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed”: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity

MELUS
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2007)
pages 31-53

Karen E. H. Skinazi, Instructor of English
University of Alberta

At the tum of the twentieth century, Quebec-born Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese British woman who used the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna,” was writing romances in New York, experimenting with the popular genre of Japonisme—the craze for all things Japanese. As Eaton advanced in her career, however, she became disgruntled with her writing, observable both by virtue of her shift in focus and in reading the words of her alter ego, Nora, in her autobiographical novel. Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915). Nora frowns on her own success, “founded upon a cheap and popular device,” and declares, “Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!” (153-54). As Me reveals, Eaton had a new project, one that was her true birthright. Without specifically identifying her own Chinese heritage, or retuming to her fabricated Japanese identity, she nonetheless created clearly non-white Canadian characters in Me and its spin-off, Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), auto/biographical tales of American immigration and adventure. In doing so, Eaton extended and revised the Canadian American rhetoric—and literature—that focused on the white, Anglo-Saxon bond or “brotherhood” between Canadians and Americans.

Eaton was not a political novelist, and her characters face neither head taxes nor Chinese Exclusion Acts when they cross the Canadian-American border. Yet Eaton made an important innovation in Canadian American immigrant literature by revealing the experience of immigrating as a double outsider: as a racialized figure, and a Canadian. Some critics, knowing Eaton’s background, wonder at the seeming “whiteness” of the characters of Me and Marion. In her study of Eurasian writers, Carol Spaulding, for example, notes: “The . . . narratives [apart from Diary of Delia] written in the first person are Eaton’s autobiography. Me, and her sister’s biography, Marion. All of these are white narrators” (198). Similarly, Dominika Ferens, in her excellent account of the two well-known Eaton sisters, Winnifred and Edith, says Marion, written by both Winnifred Eaton and her sister Sara. Bosse, is “a novel that paradoxically has an all white cast, although we know now that the title character was based on Winnifred’s older sister [Sara]” (141). As Ferens also points out, however, the protagonist of Marion is clearly marginalized because she is not white; both Eaton and Sara/Marion “performed the exotic difference that mainstream society inscribed on their bodies, but they tried to maintain a distance between the role and their sense of self—a distance that allowed them to always keep in sight and occasionally parody the sexist/orientalist frame within which they posed” (142)…

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“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.