In the Land of the Free

Edith Maude Eaton was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, in 1865. Her father was a British merchant who met her mother, a Chinese woman, while traveling in Shanghai. Their family eventually moved from England to North America, settling in Montreal, Canada. Eaton was well educated, but her family was poor, which led her to find work and support herself. She worked in the newspaper industry as a typesetter before eventually becoming a correspondent and journalist. She published much of her early work anonymously and in 1896 began publishing under her Chinese pen name, Sui Sin Far, which is the Cantonese word for the narcissus flower.

Eaton is largely considered to be one of, if not the first, Asian writers in North America. As a mixed-race woman living in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she would have both witnessed and experienced racist and sexist discrimination. Additionally, her identity and her role as a journalist would have granted her knowledge of the legal system’s racist structures in the United States and North America more broadly. Her journalistic articles exposed the systemic inequities faced by immigrants and non-citizens, particularly those of Asian descent. She used her fictional works to explore the same issues and themes, intending to illuminate the Chinese and immigrant experience in the