SOURCE: White-Parks, Annette. “Pacific Coast Chinatown Stories.” In Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, pp. 101-43. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

In the following essay, White-Parks discusses Far's treatment of the themes of assimilation, cultural pluralism, and the experiences of Asian-American women in her short fiction.

Enabled on the one hand to write, to create new worlds and to recreate what should have been home, many writers find the other hand shackled by the expectations and rules of the world of words they have chosen to inhabit. For some, however, the ambiguity and paradoxes inherent in finding a place to write are at least partly resolved by finding a home in writing itself.

—Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, Women's Writings in Exile

Sui Sin Far's migration from Montreal to the U.S. West Coast, with a year's interlude in Jamaica, marks a juncture in...