Ning Yu (Essay Date Fall 1996)

SOURCE: Yu, Ning. "Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice." Women and Language 19, no. 2 (fall 1996): 44-47.

In the following essay, Yu compares the work of Sui Sin Far with Fanny Fern, noting that Fern provided a model upon which Sui Sin Far developed her literary voice and critique of racism, establishing a female literary tradition followed by subsequent Asian American artists such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Judy Syfer.

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...