Although the classification is difficult and imprecise, the first Chinese American writer to publish fiction and journalism is conventionally understood to be Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). At a time when few other writers of Asian ancestry were publishing--and these in a limited range of nonfiction genres such as polemic, travel writing, and anthropological studies--Sui Sin Far, a woman whose father was British and whose mother was half Chinese, wrote nearly forty insightful short stories based on the lives of Chinese immigrants in Canada and the United States. She also published several dozen factual accounts of the issues that confronted immigrants and peoples of mixed races in both countries. Near the end of her life she published two autobiographical sketches and collected her stories and sketches into a single volume, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). Her primary interest to literary scholars has been as a writer of short fiction...