In the following excerpt from a longer essay, White-Parks compares the stories "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" and "The Inferior Woman" in an effort to highlight the various cultural influences on the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

. . . Printed four months apart in Hampton's Magazine (January and May 1910), "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" and "The Inferior Woman" deal with many of Sui Sin Far's central themes and develop her most obvious trickster figure. Mrs. Spring Fragrance is the main character in both stories. "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" presents a comic fantasy world, ruled over by the "quaint, dainty" Mrs. Spring Fragrance, or "Jade," a young immigrant wife who, when she "first arrived in Seattle . . . was unacquainted with even one word of the American language"; "five years later, her husband speaking of her, says: 'There are no more American words for her learning."' Unlike Chinese Americans in other Sui Sin Far stories, the...