SOURCE: Yu, Ning. “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice.” Women and Language 19, no. 2 (fall 1996): 44-7.

In the following essay, Yu discusses the significance of Far's lack of a literary predecessor and role model as a Chinese-American fiction writer, and contrasts Far's short stories with the fiction of Fanny Fern.

The lack of a role model, as Alice Walker points out, “is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect—even if rejected—enrich and enlarge one's view of existence” (4). The first Chinese American fiction writer, Edith Maude Eaton, or Sui Sin Far, had to cope with this “hazard” when she started her literary career near the turn of the century. Born in 1865 to an English father and a Chinese mother, Edith Maude Eaton grew up in an era notorious for...