In the Land of Free

Chinese American History 1830s Chinese sailors and peddlers visit

New York. 1844 United States and China sign

treaty of "peace, amity, and commerce."

1847 Yung Wing and two other

Chinese students arrive in US for schooling.

1848 Gold is discovered in California

and a gold rush begins. 1850 Chinese American population in

U.S. is about 4,000 out of a population of 23.2 million. Chinese in California form associations for mutual protection.

1860 Chinese American population in

US is 34,933 out of a total population of 31.4 million.

1865 Central Pacific recruits Chinese

workers to build a transcontinental railroad.

1868 First transcontinental railroad is

completed. 1870 Anti-Chinese violence erupts in

Los Angeles and other cities. Such violence continues throughout the decade.

1882 Congress passes the Chinese

Exclusion Act of 1882.

1910 Chinese American population

in U.S. is 94,414 out of a total population of 92.2 million. Angel Island Immigration Station opens to process potential Asian immigrants.

1932 Anna May Wong, at the height

of her career, stars with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express.

1941 The United States declares war

after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. China is now an ally of the United States.

1943 Congress repeals all

Chinese exclusion laws, grants Chinese the right to become naturalized citizens, and allows 105 Chinese to immigrate to the US each year.

1945 World War II ends with

atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

1965 A new immigration act effectively removes racial bias from America's immigration laws.

1970 Chinese American population of the U.S. is 237,292 out of 179,323,175

1982 Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, is killed by two white Americans. Chin's killers are sentenced only to probation and a find of $3,000 plus court fees.

1987 TIME Magazine publishes a cover article

entitled "The New Whiz Kids". Many Chinese Americans express a concern about a "model minority" stereotype.

1990 Chinese American population of the U.S. is 1,645,472 out of 248,709,873.

1997 The Democratic Party finds itself embroiled in a fundraising scandal. Fundraiser John Huang is singled out for condemnation and suspicion, raising concerns that age-old prejudices against Chinese Americans are being revived.

1999 Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen working as a physicist in the weapons section of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories, is arrested on charges of spying for China. He spends 278 days in solitary confinement before being released with an apology from a US District Judge.

2000 Chinese American population of the U.S. is 2,879,636 out of 281,421,904.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California by the discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s thousands of Chinese laborers were enticed here to construct the mountainous western section of the transcontinental railroad.

Almost from the beginning, prejudice against them was strong. They were regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that made them unassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; and their hard-working, frugal ways, their willingness to work for lower wages than whites, rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of racial violence.

Chinese Americans Once in the United States, the laborers wer

e legally forbidden to live in white communities or marry outside of their race. After the completion of the railroad, strict hiring regulations, as well as employers’ personal discrimination against minorities, left only menial jobs like food service or laundering available to Chinese Americans.

Sui Sin Far (1865-1914)

Into this environment, Edith Eaton came as a small child from England, living first in Hudson City, New York, and later settling in Montreal. Though her writing career began on the Montreal newspaper, The Star, she was to make her mark in the United States (she lived most of her adult life in Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco), writing articles and short stories using the Chinese pseudonym Sui Sin Far.

Working in the heavily Sinophobic environment of the turn-of-the century, Far had to carefully choose her words. Any explicit criticism of the Chinese-American situation might have been considered subversive and unfit for publication. As a result, Far disguised her critique of American society under a surface of charming, ‘‘harmless’’ stories about Chinese-American life.

White Americans were indeed curious about the Asian Americans, and a number of books were published during this time that were intended to ‘‘inform’’ the dominant culture about the immigrants’ exotic lifestyles.

Sui Sin Far Now she is recognized as a foremother (Asian-

American writers and women writers of color) Sui sin Far’s stories are significant in many

respects. First, they present portraits of turn –of-the-century North American Chinatowns with well-intentioned and sincere empathy.

Second, the stories give voice and protagonist roles to Chinese and Chinese North American women and children, thus breaking the stereotype of silence, invisibility, and “bachelor societies” that have ignored small but present female populations.

Far wrote about the experience of Chinese immigrants in a politically sensitive environment. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States encouraged mass immigration of young Chinese men to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations and to California to build the first transcontinental railroad.

Any immigrant who did not plan to labor in these projects was often charged an exorbitant entry tax. Thus, the early Chinese immigrants were mostly bachelors or young men who left their wives and families overseas.

Finally, in a period when miscegenation was illegal in nearly half the United states, Sui Sin Far’s stories are the first to introduce the plight of the child of Asian and white parents.

In making public her ambiguous position between worlds, Sui Sin Far initiated a dialogue between Chinese and European North Americans and their multicultural, multiracial descendants.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance Sui Sin Far’s first and only collection of short stories,

Mrs. Spring Fragrance, published in 1912 ( reprinted in 1995).

The collection also contains twenty stories about children, collectively known as ‘‘Tales of Chinese Children.’’ As a whole, the collection discusses issues of racism, assimilation, and the alienation of Chinese Americans in North America. The other stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance also express the struggle of Chinese Americans to find identity in an oppressive society, particularly from a woman’s point of view.

"In the Land of the Free" In "In the Land of the Free," Sui Sin Far fo

cuses on the problems of a Chinese couple, Lae Choo and her husband Hom Hing, who become victims of U.S. immigration changes in the late nineteenth century.

"In the Land of the Free" The Chinese American couple spend 10 long months tryi

ng to get their two-year-old son back after US immigration officials detain him because the parents do not have proof of his identity. They are confused and unhappy, especially Lae Choo, because they cannot believe that the government in "the land of the free" would take away their child.

Finally, they have to get a lawyer named James Clancy to help them. He takes all of their money and Lae Choo's jewels to pay for his help. When they finally go to get their son back, but he doesn't remember his family or his language anymore.

"In the Land of the Free" "In the Land of the Free" is typical of

Edith Eaton's short fiction. Her themes are of utmost importance: racial insensitivity, the human costs of bureaucratic and discriminatory laws, the humanity of the Chinese.

Lae Choo Lae Choo is little more than maternity personifie

d, maternity victimized by racial prejudice. But the very portrayal of a Chinese woman in th

e maternal role--loving, anxious, frantic, self-sacrificing--was itself a novelty and a contribution, for the popular conception of the Chinese woman, whose numbers were few in nineteenth-century America, was that of a sing-song girl, prostitute, or inmate of an opium den.

In Lae Choo, Eaton gives the reading public a naive, trusting woman whose entire life is devoted to the small child that the law of "this land of the free" manages to keep away from her for nearly one year. By the end of the story, the irony of the title becomes forcefully apparent.

"In the Land of the Free" This story shows the tremendous suff

ering of Chinese immigrants in the late 1800's due to racism and exploitation.

 Far's use of irony throughout The Land of the Free reveals the truth about what immigrants found behind America's "golden door"

Reference “Edith Maud Eaton

(Sui Sin Far) (1865-1914)” Contributing Editor: Amy Ling http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/eaton.html