Sibling Hybridities: The Case of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna

Abstract

Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, sisters writing from within a shared familial and historical context, chose different ethnic authorial pseudonyms for their fictions and constructed their life stories with different emphases on their identity formations. While Edith's memoir-essay was a pioneering text on Chinese diasporic longings, inflected with complex negotiations of the mixed-race and gender ideologies of the late nineteenth century in the United States, Winnifred's memoir-novel elided her maternal Chinese origins and narrated a proto-feminist Kunstler-roman that critiqued the oppressive conditions for working-class women in Chicago in the early twentieth century. Their contrasting life writings, read through a cluster of theoretical concepts in which hybridity is understood as a matrix incorporating race, class, and gender categories, illuminate the permeable borders and transnational possibilities for mixed-race, Eurasian self-fashioning in the US at the turn of the century.