SSF/EE AS STORYTELLER: LESSON PLAN

CREATED BY REILLY YEO COURTESY OF EDITING MODERNISM IN CANADA

1. SSF/EE was writing at a time of intensified virulent anti-Chinese sentiment (Ammon 105). Have students watch Chinese immigration: Not welcome anymore from the CBC archives; or visit The Ties that Bind; or, particularly for those in British Columbia, The Chinese Experience in British Columbia, 1850-1950. Optional: Ask students to make their own multimedia displays, blog posts or simple websites (using Tumblr or Wordpress or another simple content management system) that depict life for Chinese Canadians in the late 19th/early 20th Century, using local archives and reflecting on local experience if possible. Chinese were often represented as mysterious and inscrutable; dirty and rude; heartless and inhuman; and/or exotic and superstitious. While reading the three stories The Inferior Woman, A White Woman Who Married a Chinaman and Her Chinese Husband ask students to reflect on whether SSF/EEs characters are portrayed in line with the racism that was widespread at the time. Was she breaking or perpetuating popular stereotypes with her portrayals of Chinese North American immigrants and resident populations? (White-Parks 2) Does she rehearse or revise the cultural scripts for Chinese North Americans? (Spaulding 128) 2. Break the class up into groups of four. Have each group of students create a list of adjectives that describe the following characters in each of the stories: white women; white men; Chinese women; and Chinese men. Rotate the groups and have them join their lists together, seeing which adjectives are common between the groups. Ask students to consider the question: Do these adjectives still speak to the way we conceive of these groups today, or are they more representative of the time in which SSF/EE wrote?

3. The character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance (from The Inferior Woman) features in many of SSF/EEs stories; in fact, her name is the title of SSF/EEs story collection, published in 1912. Critics have disagreed about whether to interpret her as idealized, or as playing into harmful stereotypes (or both): An immigrant and the wife of a Chinese merchant living in Seattle, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is Far's paragon of all virtues. She is clever, witty, skilled at arranging love matches and at preserving the happiness of her husband even as she negotiates the constraints of "filial duty" and the dangers of New World freedom. (McCann 7) In the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far deflates the most common stereotype of the Chinese American wife, that of the docile, housebound, domestic ornament, only to play into the hands of another, that of the ever-cheerful manipulative busybody. (Ammon 112) Mrs. Spring Fragrance fails to realize that her white friends regard her more as a nonthreatening curiosity...They enjoy her abundant supply of humorous stories and sayings; she is not their equal but is a source of entertainment and comic relief. (Dong and Hom 154) Have students take the list of adjectives describing Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and reflect on one of the following questions, in small groups or in short written reflection papers.

.Mr. Spring Fragrance laughed heartily. You are no Chinese woman, he teased, you are an American.... What do you think makes Mr. Spring Fragrance say this? Does Mrs. Spring Fragrance have a lot in common with the white women in SSF/EEs stories?

"Ah, these Americans! These mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible Americans! I would put them into an immortal book!"

What do you think of Mrs. Spring Fragrances project to write a book? Why does she describe Americans as mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible?

Have students find a contemporary example of a female Chinese character from a book, television show, or movie. Compare and contrast the contemporary representation with the representation of Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

4. The representation of women in SSF/EEs stories is another interesting and complex feature of her work. As a woman who supported herself independently (often barely scraping by, as she recounts in Sui Sin Far, the Half-Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career) and remained a self-professed spinster until her death in 1914, SSF/EE had first-hand experience of the challenges faced by women during her time. She also, however, frequently writes unsympathetically about suffragettes and the womens movement: In addition to her major cause - rendering the Chinese human - Sui Sin Fars stories plead two additional causes: acceptance of the working class woman and of friendship between women...Sympathy lies with the hard-working, selfmade woman as opposed to the wealthy, privileged suffragette. (Ling 46) To Sui Sin Far standing behind Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the Inferior Woman is both the white working-class New Woman considered inferior by snobbish middle-class white feminists, and the Chinese American woman such as Mrs. Spring Fragrance who is widely considered inferior by the dominant culture...the simple image of the title The Inferior Woman gets complicated. Who is Inferior and who is Superior grows murky. (Ammon 113) These stories oppose the assertion that men and women are same and the implication that some women are superior to others by virtue of class and race, and instead work to emphasize the importance of womens labor on behalf of home and homeland. (Chapman 985)

a. Ask students to compare the list of adjectives they have written down for the men in the stories with the one they have written down for women. Do they notice any key differences? What might account for the differences and the similarities between how men and women are portrayed? This exercise could be done with the full class, or in groups. b. It is the Superior Woman, the well-educated, upper-class Ethel Evebrook, who recognizes the actual superiority of the so-called inferior woman (Ling 46). In the two stories, how do women relate to each other? How would students describe the relationship between Ethel Evebrook and Alice Winthrop? If they had to describe it in one word, which word would they use? Have them write their answers on large post-it notes, then group the answers into themes. Can they think of a relationship between women portrayed in contemporary media that is similar? c. Mrs. Carman is your friend and a well meaning woman sometimes; but a woman suffragist, in the true sense, she certainly is not. Miss Evebrook says. Have students look up and then define suffragist in their own words. Why does Miss Evebrook say that Wills mother, Mrs. Carman, is not a true suffragist? d. Have students look at the version of The Inferior Woman from the 1912 publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance. In this version of The Inferior Woman, Mrs. Spring Fragrance ends by saying: I love well the Inferior Woman; but, O Great Man, when we have a daughter, may Heaven ordain that she walk in the groove of the Superior Woman!" Ask students to identify which ending makes more sense to them by raising their hand, then have them discuss which ending they prefer, and why. 5. Merchants comprised a small part of the Chinese immigrant population, about three percent of the demographic (Pan 96); yet in Sui Sin Fars stories, Chinese male characters are most often merchants. Have the students discuss the character of Liu Kanghi. What are his positive traits? Is he too idealized compared with James Carson, or

do you see ways that Carson is made to seem better than Liu Kanghi? How would the story have been different if Liu Kanghi was a laundryman or labourer? Americanized Chinese merchants are embodiments of transnational modernity, countering stereotypes of the Chinese as coolies, opium fiends, and prostitutes. (Pan 92) Rarely do her stories seek to render any but the highest reaches of the Chinatowns they fantasize, and for their heroes they turn especially to idealized images of the relatively wealthy merchants who monopolized political and social power in Chinese-American society throughout the first part of the centuryBut, despite the unusual structure imposed on it by America's racist immigration laws, the Chinese-American community of Far's day necessarily included many more laborers than it did merchants, and those people are all but invisible in her work. (McCann 84) Fully half the story explains her motivation for accepting the lot of the American wife of an humble Chinaman in America Although she loves her Chinese husband, she takes care to explain that she chose Lui Kanghi only after being driven from her abusive husband, James Carson. This insistence suggests that the act of miscegenation is highly unusual and difficult to justify except as an acceptance of defeat. (Spaulding 140) The fate of Americanized men in Sui Sin Fars stories perpetuates antimiscegenation. The message is clear: white and Chinese are mutually exclusive. Any Chinese trying to be Americanized will inevitably fail for treading on forbidden white grounds. (Dong and Hom 145) 6. Examine the copy of the 1912 publication of The Inferior Woman. This is taken from a story collection SSF/EE published in 1912, which also includes the stories about Minnie and Liu Kanghi. The book was imprinted with a Chinese style painting, and the Chinese characters for Happiness, Prosperity & Longevity appear in the righthand

margin (Ling 41, Ammon 119). How might this influence our reading of the book? Does it make The Inferior Woman seem different than it did in the 1910 publication? What would make the publisher choose to do this to the book? Works Cited / Further Reading
Ammons, Elizabeth. Audacious Words: Sui Sin Fars Mrs Spring Fragrance. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. <http://books.google.ca/books? id=0t3tWSzCQC8C&lpg=PA105&ots=olc6BUYRGY&dq=elizabeth%20ammons%20sui%20sin %20far&pg=PA105#v=onepage&q=elizabeth%20ammons%20sui%20sin%20far&f=false> Chapman, Mary. A Revolution in Ink: Sui Sin Far and Chinese Reform Discourse. American Quarterly 60.4 (December 2008): 975-1001. Dong, Lorraine and Marlon K. Hom. Defiance or Perpetuation. Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987. San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1987 Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990. McCann, Sean. Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far. Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (1999): 73-88. Pan, Arthur. Transnationalism at the Impasse of Race: Sui Sin Far and U.S. Imperialism. Arizona Quarterly 66.1 (Spring 2010): 87-114. Spaulding, Carol Vivian. "Blue-Eyed Asians: Eurasianism in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and Diana Chang." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 57.7 (1997): 3024-25. White-Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.