This document provides biographical information about the writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton), who was the first writer of Asian descent published in North America. She was born in England in 1865 to a Chinese mother and English father. Her family immigrated to the US when she was young. She started her career as a journalist and used the pen name Sui Sin Far. Her stories focused on the experiences of Chinese American women and sought to challenge stereotypes. While she faced challenges due to racism and her biracial background, she is now recognized for helping to give voice to Chinese American experiences. The document discusses the historical context of anti-Chinese sentiment in the US during her lifetime.

2. Daily Agenda
 Vocabulary Exam: re-take or make-up
 Terms list 4: (The terms exam will be on the last
class day of the quarter. It will include a
comprehensive terms test, which will emphasize the
new terms.)
 Discussion: Trickster Characters from our reading
In-class writing: Essay 4: outline and thesis
 Author lecture: Sui Sin Far

4. Terms for Exam 4: A Comprehensive Test
 Gender Identity: The sense of “being” male or “being” female. For some
people, gender identity is in accord with physical anatomy. For
transgender people, gender identity may differ from physical anatomy or
expected social roles. It is important to note that gender identity,
biological sex, and sexual orientation are not necessarily linked.
 Heterosexism: The concept that heterosexuality is natural, normal,
superior and required. A system of beliefs about the superiority of
heterosexuals or heterosexuality evidenced in the exclusion, by omission
or design, of gay, lesbian and bisexual persons in assumptions,
communication, policies, procedures, events, or activities.
 Heterosexual: A person who is primarily and/or exclusively attracted to
members of a gender or sex that is seen to be “opposite” or other than
the one with which they identify or are identified.

5. • Homosexual: A person who is primarily and /or exclusively attracted to
members of what they identify as their own sex or gender. Because the
term possesses connotations of disease and abnormality, some people
do not like to identify as homosexual. Still others do not feel that it
accurately defines their chosen identity.
• Lesbian: One who identifies as a woman who is primarily or exclusively
attracted to others who identify as women.
• Sex Reassignment (SRS): A surgical procedure that modifies one’s
primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. This process was formerly
called a “sex change operation,” a phrase now considered offensive.
• Sexual Orientation: A person’s emotional, physical and sexual attraction
and the expression of that attraction with other individuals. Some of the
better-known labels or categories include “bisexual,” “multisexual,”
“pansexual,” “omnisexual,” “lesbian,” “gay” (“homosexual” is a more
clinical term), or “heterosexual.”

6. • Trans: Abbreviation for transgender, transsexual, or some other form of
trans identity. “Trans” can invoke notions of transcending beyond,
existing between, or crossing over borders.
• Transgender: An umbrella term used to describe people who do not fit
into traditional gender categories, including transsexuals, transvestites or
cross-dressers, intersexuals or hermaphrodites, and sometimes, even
people who identify as butch or femme. Can invoke notions of
transcending beyond, existing between or crossing over borders.
• Transition: The period when one is changing from living as one sex or
gender to a different conception of sex or gender. Transitioning is
complicated, multi-step process that may include surgically and/or
hormonally altering one’s body.

8. The Prompt
 For this essay, consider trickster tales and trickster or
trickster-like characters from our reading. Do they meet
the criteria to be categorized as “tricksters”? Which
measuring stick do we use to determine if they do or
not? Who or what are they in a modern society? When
and why do they appear? Is there a relationship between
tricksters and gender and ethnicity? Do these modern
tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us “better understand
ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of
ourselves that respond to the trickster’s unsettling and
transformative behavior”? How? Or, do these trickster
tales and trickster or trickster-like characters serve
another purpose? Which?

9. Break it down!
 Do the trickster characters from our reading meet the criteria to be
categorized as “tricksters”?
 Which measuring stick do we use to determine if they are or not?
 Who or what are they in a modern society?
 When and why do they appear?
 Is there a relationship between tricksters and gender and ethnicity?
 Do these tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us “better understand ourselves,
and the perhaps subconscious aspects of ourselves that respond to the
trickster’s unsettling and transformative behavior”? How?
 Or, do these trickster tales and trickster or trickster-like characters serve
another purpose? Which?

10. Do the trickster characters from our
reading meet the criteria to be
categorized as “tricksters”?
 How do we answer this? Which
measuring stick do we use to determine
if they do or not?
 How do we convince others that these
are indeed modern tricksters?

11. Do the trickster characters from our reading
meet the criteria to be categorized as
“tricksters”?
 How do we answer this?
 Yes, the characters from our reading meet the criteria to be categorized
as “tricksters.”
 No, the characters from our reading do not meet the criteria to be
categorized as “tricksters.”
 How do we know if the meet the criteria?
 We do research on trickster characters. Then we compare their traits
and purposes to those of the characters we read this quarter.
 How do we convince someone else that they do (not) exist?
 We explain our process of researching and comparing characters.
 We offer evidence and analysis to support our assertions.

12. Address these questions.
Consider both the texts we read
for class and your research
 Who or what are they in a modern
society?
 When and why do they appear?
 Is there a relationship between
tricksters and gender and ethnicity?

13. How you will answer this part of the
prompt?
 Do these tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us
(as individuals, cultures, nations) “better
understand ourselves”?
 How do they help?
 What do we learn from them?
 Does the trickster perform fundamental
cultural work?
 What is it?

14.  In understanding the trickster better, do we
better understand our limitations? Our culture?
Our biases? Or boundaries? Or something else?
 Do these tricksters help us understand “the
perhaps subconscious aspects of ourselves that
respond to the trickster’s unsettling and
transformative behavior”?
 What is the “Trickster’s unsettling and
transformative behavior”?

15.  What “subconscious aspects of ourselves
[do] respond to the trickster’s unsettling
and transformative behavior”?
 How do tricksters help us (as individuals,
cultures, nations) understand subconscious
aspects of ourselves?
 How does understanding the subconscious
aspects of ourselves differ from the
conscious learning that tricksters promote?

16. Or, do these trickster tales and
trickster or trickster-like
characters serve another purpose?
Which purpose do they serve?
How do you know?

17. The Prompt
 For this essay, consider trickster tales and trickster or
trickster-like characters from our reading. Do they meet
the criteria to be categorized as “tricksters”? Which
measuring stick do we use to determine if they do or
not? Who or what are they in a modern society? When
and why do they appear? Is there a relationship between
tricksters and gender and ethnicity? Do these modern
tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us “better understand
ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of
ourselves that respond to the trickster’s unsettling and
transformative behavior”? How? Or, do these trickster
tales and trickster or trickster-like characters serve
another purpose? Which?

18. The Prompt
the Thesis
 Do the characters from our reading meet the criteria to be categorized as
“tricksters”? Which measuring stick do we use to determine if they are or
not? By comparing twentieth century passing characters’ behaviors to
traditional definitions of tricksters, it is clear that characters from
modern stories can be called tricksters. Who or what are they in a
modern society? cultural heroes and teachers. When and why do they
appear? They appear when oppression squeezes people into the margins
of society so that those people can find a place in the world. Is there a
relationship between tricksters and gender and ethnicity? Because of
social biases, gender and ethnicity play a part in creating the trickster
character. Do these tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us “better understand
ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of ourselves that respond
to the trickster’s unsettling and transformative behavior”? These
trickster characters are key to helping us understand how issues,
otherwise distant or hidden from us, affect our culture and institutions
How? By illustrating both oppressions and the desperate measures people
will go to to avoid discrimination. Or, do these trickster tales and
trickster or trickster-like characters serve another purpose? Which?

19. The Thesis
 By comparing twentieth century passing characters’
behaviors to traditional definitions of tricksters, it is
clear modern tricksters exist in our literature as cultural
heroes and teachers. They appear when oppression
squeezes people into the margins of society, forcing those
people to find a safe place in the world; Because of social
biases, gender and ethnicity play a part in creating these
trickster characters, many of whom are key to helping us
understand how issues, otherwise distant or hidden from
us, affect our culture and institutions. These trickster
characters illustrate both oppressive behaviors and the
desperate measures people will go to to escape them.

20. The Prompt: Try it!
 For this essay, consider trickster tales and trickster or
trickster-like characters from our reading. Do they meet
the criteria to be categorized as “tricksters”? Which
measuring stick do we use to determine if they do or
not? Who or what are they in a modern society? When
and why do they appear? Is there a relationship between
tricksters and gender and ethnicity? Do these modern
tricksters, as Lock asserts, help us “better understand
ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of
ourselves that respond to the trickster’s unsettling and
transformative behavior”? How? Or, do these trickster
tales and trickster or trickster-like characters serve
another purpose? Which?

22. Are there remnants of this early definition
of the trickster in our modern day
characters? Which?
 “Everywhere one looks among premodern peoples, there
are tricky mythical beings alike enough to entice any
human mind to create a category for them once it had
met two or three. They are beings of the beginning,
working in some complex relationship with the High God;
transformers, helping to bring the present human world
into being; performers of heroic acts on behalf of men,
yet in their original form. or in some later form, foolish,
obscene, laughable, yet indomitable” (Robert D. Pelton,
The Trickster in West Africa 15).

23. Does this definition resonate with us
in terms of our modern trickster
characters? How?
 According to [Paul] Radin, “Trickster is at one
and the same time creator and destroyer,
giver and negator, he who dupes others and
who is always duped himself. . . . He
possesses no values, moral or social, is at the
mercy of his passions and appetites, yet
through his actions all values come into
being” (xxiii).

24. Do we see our trickster characters
in this more contemporary
definition? Who?
 [The trickster] actually is immoral (or at least amoral)
and blasphemous and rebellious, and his interest in
entering the societal game is not to provide the safetyvalve that makes it tolerable, but to question,
manipulate, and disrupt its rules. He is the consummate
mover of goalposts, constantly redrawing the
boundaries of the possible. In fact, the trickster
suggests, says Hyde, “a method by which a stranger or
underling can enter the game, change its rules, and win
a piece of the action (204)” (Hyde qtd. in Lock).

25. Can we revise this idea to
apply it to our texts or
characters?
 “Not just any rogue or anti-hero can properly be termed a
trickster. The true trickster’s trickery calls into question
fundamental assumptions about the way the world is
organized, and reveals the possibility of transforming them
(even if often for ignoble ends). In this regard it is not
surprising that innovative uses have been made of the
modern incarnation of the trickster in American novels
produced by writers of dual ethnic or cultural backgrounds,
in whose worlds boundaries have continually to be mediated
and assumptions challenged” (Lock).

26. Are our modern passers “a more
sophisticated trickster”?
 The self-reflexivity associated with the [contemporary
trickster] is absent in the ancient “unconscious”
trickster, like Wakdjunkaga, whose hands fought each
other and who was unaware that his anus was part of
his own body. The contemporary trickster, by
contrast, is largely self-aware, unlike his/her archaic
counterpart. “[T]he pressures of experience produce
from that somewhat witless character a more
sophisticated trickster” (Lock).

27. A New Age of Tricksters?
Are they tricky? Or in
Earnest?
 [A] new age brings a transmutation and a new
repertoire of tricks. In fact, we may now have
reached the stage of ultimate ambiguity, where the
trickster’s self-awareness and self-reflexivity call
into question even what is a trick and what is in
earnest, or on what side of the boundary truth lies,
if indeed there are any more “sides” or any
unequivocal truths (Lock).

28. Sui Sin Far
Edith Maud Eaton
1865-1914

29. Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton, was the first
writer of Asian descent published in North
America
She was born in England, in 1865 to a Chinese
mother and an English (white) father. According to
Eaton scholars, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks,
"interracial marriage was taboo in both cultures[;
thus,] theirs was an unusual union." At age seven,
Eaton and her family left England and immigrated
to Hudson City, New York, and in the early 1870s,
settled in a Montreal suburb.

30. Eaton started her career at Hugh Graham's Montreal
Daily Star newspaper as a typesetter at age eighteen.
Her first short stories were published in the Dominion
Illustrated in 1888; she also maintained her administrative
duties as well as submitted newspaper articles. It was in her
journalistic writing that Eaton openly identified herself as a
Chinese American and explained her biracial heritage to her
readers. She wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a
childhood nickname that means "water lily" in Chinese. Her
sister, Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used Onoto Watanna as
her penname.

31. Yi Bu Wang Hua
Far gained a literary reputation. Chinese American
women were at the center of much of Eaton's writing,
and she worked to break down cultural stereotypes. In
1913, Eaton, stricken by horrible rheumatism and bad
health, returned to Montreal. She died on April 7, 1914
and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. In
gratitude for her work on their behalf, the Chinese
community erected a special headstone on her tomb
inscribed with the characters "Yi bu wang hua" ("The
righteous one does not forget China").

32. A Spiritual Foremother
Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations, a literary
biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui Sin Far scholars
include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James Doyle, and Annette WhiteParks.
Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of her
time and place, in late nineteenth-century sinophobic and
imperialistic Euro-American nations, then we admit that for her,
a Eurasian woman who could pass as white, to choose to
champion the Chinese and working-class women and to identify
herself as such, publicly and in print, an act of great
determination and courage."

33. The Reception of Chinese by White Americans
To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical
and social context during her period. Though the Chinese were never
enslaved in this country, as were Africans, they were brought here in large
numbers as indentured laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 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 inassimilable in a nation that wanted
to remain white; their hard-working, frugal ways and their willingness to
work for lower wages than whites rendered them an economic threat and
thus targets of racial violence.

34. Looking Forward
 Class 20: Film
 Class 21: Discussion of Far and Film
 Questions about Essay #4
 Self-evaluation directions
 Class 22
 Exam: Terms (Comprehensive)
 Research Essay #4 due
 Revision of essay #2 or #3 due
 Self-evaluation is due

35. Homework
 Reading: Far “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio
of an Eurasian”
Post #27 Outline and thesis for Essay #4
Studying: terms