2. Agenda
Lecture: Sui Sin Far and Cherrie Moraga
12-Mar Discussion: Far and Moraga and
motivations for resisting the idea of
passing.
In-class writing: How and why do Far
and Moraga resist?
Discussion/Writing: Essay #4
3. Terms
Transsexuals: People who indicate that they are of one gender
trapped in the body of the other gender. A person who has
altered or intends to alter her/hir/his anatomy, either through
surgery, hormones, or other means, to better match her/hir/his
chosen gender identity. This group of people is often divided into
pre-op (operative), post-op, or non-op transsexuals. Due to cost,
not all transsexuals can have genital surgery. Others do not feel
that surgery is necessary, but still remain a transsexual identity.
a. Non-operative: People who do not intend to change their primary sex
characteristics, either because of a lack of a desire or the inability to do
so. They may or may not alter their secondary sex characteristics
through the use of hormones.
b. Pre-operative: People who have started the procedure to reassign
their primary sex characteristics, but have not yet had the surgery. This
covers both those people who have just begun the procedure and those
who are very close to the actual surgery.
c. Post-operative: People who have had the actual genital surgery
4. Transphobia:
The fear or hatred of transgender and
transsexual people. Like biphobia, this term
was created to call attention to the ways
prejudice against trans people differs from
prejudice against other queer people. There is
often transphobia in lesbian, gay and bisexual
communities, as well as heterosexual or
straight communities.
5. Persona: a character in drama or fiction or the
part any one sustains in the world or in a book.
Persona also denotes the “I” who speaks in a
poem or novel.
Plot: a plan or scheme to accomplish a purpose.
6. • Point of view: a specified position or method of consideration
and appraisal. It may also be an attitude, judgment, or opinion.
In literature, physical point of view has to do with the position in
time and space from which a writer approaches, views, and
describes his or her material. Mental point of view involves an
author’s feeling and attitude toward his or her subject.
Personal point of view concerns the relation through which a
writer narrates or discusses a subject, whether first, second, or
third person.
• Prose : the ordinary form of spoken and written language
whose unit is the sentence, rather than the line as it is in
poetry. The term applies to all expressions in language that do
not have a regular rhythmic pattern.
8. Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton, was
the first writer of Asian descent published in
North America
She was born in England, in 1865 to a Chinese mother and an
English (white) father. Eaton's mother was apparently schooled in
England although she returned to China after her education was
completed. Eaton's father was a merchant who did trading in China; it
was on one of his business trips that he met and fell in love with his
future wife. According to Eaton scholars, Amy Ling and Annette
White-Parks, "interracial marriage was taboo in both cultures[; thus,]
theirs was an unusual union." At age seven, Eaton and her family left
England and immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in the early
1870s, settled in a Montreal suburb. She went to school until age
eleven and then continued her education at home. As the second
child and oldest daughter of fourteen children, Edith Eaton spent
much of her childhood helping her mother care for her siblings as
well as selling her father's artwork in the city.
9. Eaton started her career at Hugh Graham's Montreal
Daily Star newspaper as a typesetter at age eighteen.
Her first short stories were published in the Dominion Illustrated
in 1888; she also maintained her administrative duties as well
as submitted newspaper articles. It was in her journalistic
writing that Eaton openly identified herself as a Chinese
American and explained her biracial heritage to her readers.
She wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a childhood
nickname that means "water lily" in Chinese. Her sister,
Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used Onoto Watanna as her
penname.
10. Yi Bu Wang Hua
In the mid 1890s, Eaton moved briefly to Jamaica, where she contracted
malaria, from which she never quite recovered. During the next ten years,
until 1909, she lived in Seattle and San Francisco. She wrote more articles
and short stories and gained a literary reputation. Chinese American
women were at the center of much of Eaton's writing, and she worked to
break down cultural stereotypes. In 1909, Eaton moved to Boston where
she compiled a full-length selection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance,
which was published in Chicago in 1912. In 1913, Eaton, stricken by
horrible rheumatism and bad health, returned to Montreal. She died on April
7, 1914 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. In gratitude for her
work on their behalf, the Chinese community erected a special headstone
on her tomb inscribed with the characters "Yi bu wang hua" ("The righteous
one does not forget China").
11. A Spiritual Foremother
Known as "spiritual foremother of contemporary Eurasian
authors," Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations,
a literary biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui
Sin Far scholars include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James
Doyle, and Annette White-Parks.
Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of
her time and place, in late nineteenth-century sinophobic
and imperialistic Euro-American nations, then we admit
that for her, a Eurasian woman who could pass as white, to
choose to champion the Chinese and working-class
women and to identify herself as such, publicly and in print,
an act of great determination and courage."
12. The Reception of Chinese by
White Americans
To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical and social
context, namely the reception of Chinese by white Americans before and during her
period. Though the Chinese were never enslaved in this country, as were Africans,
they were brought here in large numbers as indentured laborers. The Chinese
Exclusion Act (1882) was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for
Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians
were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California by the
discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s thousands of Chinese
laborers were enticed here to construct the mountainous western section of the
transcontinental railroad. Almost from the beginning, prejudice against them was
strong. They were regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that
made them inassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; their hard-
working, frugal ways and their willingness to work for lower wages than whites
rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of racial violence.
14. “Ah, indeed!” he exclaims. “Who would have thought it at first
glance? Yet now I see the difference between her and other
children. What a peculiar coloring! Her mother’s eyes and hair and
her father’s features, I presume. Very interesting little creature!”
I had been called from play for the purpose of inspection. I do not
return to it. For the rest of the evening I hide myself behind a hall
door and refuse to show myself until it is time to go home.
Why does Far hide after this experience?
How does this moment contribute to her identity development?
15. “Look!” says Charlie. “Those men in there are Chinese!” Eagerly I gaze into the long low
room. With the exception of my mother, who is English bred with English ways and
manner of dress, I have never seen a Chinese person. The two men within the store are
uncouth specimens of their race, drest in working blouses and pantaloons with queues
hanging down their backs. I recoil with a sense of shock.
“Oh, Charlie,” I cry. “Are we like that?”
“Well, we’re Chinese, and they’re Chinese, too, so we must be!” returns my seven year
old brother.
“Of course you are,” puts in a boy who has followed us down the street, and who lives
near us and has seen my mother: “Chinky, Chinky, Chinaman, yellow-face, pig-tail, rat-
eater.” A number of other boys and several little girls join in with him.
“Better than you,” shouts my brother, facing the crowd. He is younger and smaller than
any there, and I am even more insignificant than he; but my spirit revives.
“I’d rather be Chinese than anything else in the world,” I scream.
Why does Far fight after this experience?
How does this moment contribute to her identity development?
16. The greatest temptation was in the thought of getting far away from where I was
known, to where no mocking cries of “Chinese!” “Chinese!” could reach.
Here Sui seems to want to disappear. Given her desire to escape prejudice, why does
she become a champion of the Chinese instead of “passing” as we know so many
others do during this time? In other words, which of her life experiences compel her to
refuse to pass as white? How does she become the woman who speaks the lines
below?
With a great effort I raise my eyes from my plate. “Mr. K.,” I say, addressing my
employer, “the Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be
altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to
understand that I am—I am a Chinese.”
19. Cherrie Moraga, born Cherrie Lawrence, is often
considered one of the foremost Chicano playwrights of
her generation
Moraga was born on September 25, 1952, one of three children of an Anglo
father and a Mexican-American mother in Whittier, California. Her father
deserted the family while she was still very young, leaving her mother as
sole supporter. As a result, Moraga was raised with Mexican traditions at
home and exposed to white American influences at school. Describing
herself as “La Guera”—which translates to “fair-skinned”—she was able to
“pass” as Anglo throughout much of her upbringing, something her mother
encouraged. Wanting to enable her children to succeed where she had not in
a white society, Moraga's mother did not pass along her own Spanish fluency
to her children nor did she expose them to her own family as much as
Moraga might have liked. Thus, Moraga felt detached from her Chicano
heritage during much of her early childhood; however, when she was nine,
her mother moved the family back to the San Gabriel Valley where much of
her large extended family was situated, and Moraga immersed herself in la
familia by listening to the stories of her elders, influences that can be traced
through her current work.
20. Even among her family, however, she still felt the conflict of having to live
between two cultures. But it was in part due to the advantages of their
familiarity with white culture that Moraga and her siblings became part of the
first generation of her family to go to college. Graduating with a B.A. from a
small private college in Hollywood in 1974, she pursued a graduate degree at
San Francisco State in feminist writing, which she attained in 1981. It was
during her time in college that Moraga began to recognize and accept herself
as a lesbian. By finally acknowledging her lesbianism, she was able to
accept herself as a confident whole person, a decision that Moraga has said
enabled her to fully reconnect with both her Chicana mother and her own
proud heritage as a Chicano woman. Finding greater confidence in herself
and her writing, she became active in feminist causes in San Francisco, but
felt like an outsider in the mostly white, heterosexual movement. To combat
what she felt was a neglect of the needs and issues of both women of color
and lesbians by the larger feminist community, she joined with Gloria
Anzaldúa to publish a collection of essays, letters, poems, and conversations
by a largely unpublished group of women of color in the groundbreaking This
Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which
won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1986.
21. Moraga is artist-in-residence and instructor of theater and creative writing
at Brava Theatre Center of San Francisco. She is also president of the
board of directors of Latin American Theatre Artists, teaches at Stanford
University in Palo Alto, and lectures around the country.
She will be speaking at De Anza College on Tuesday, May 8th at 1:30.
22. Loving in the
War Years
By Cherrie Moraga
This text includes the
essay “La Guera.”
23. • What does this tell us about the young
Cherrie Moraga?
• Do you find this to be an unusual position
for a woman like her?
• How is she like or different from the young
Far?
24. Discuss this section in terms of the development of Moraga’s racial and feminist
identities.
Why and how do you think she changed after her epiphany?
25. What do you understand from this idea of Moraga’s about
the danger in ranking oppressions? Do you agree?
27. In-class writing: How and why
do Far and Moraga resist
passing?
• Like Far, Moraga refuses to pass as white. Why?
What do they share that convinces them to
consciously and intentionally reveal their racial
identities?
• Consider how their motivations might differ: They
were born a century apart. Surely some
motivations must be different. What might those
be? Why do you think so?
• Consider how each resists passing. Which
behaviors can you specifically identify? Do they
use the same strategies or different ones?
29. Homework
Studying: Vocab/Terms
Writing: Work on Essay #4
Post your works cited page
Respond to the following:
• Like Far, Moraga refuses to pass as white. Why? What do they
share that convinces them to consciously and intentionally
reveal their racial identities?
• Consider how their motivations might differ: They were born a
century apart. Surely some motivations must be different.
What might those be? Why do you think so?
• Consider how each resists passing. Which behaviors can you
specifically identify? Do they use the same strategies or
different ones?
