A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Books in Reviewthis poem, both the "sable and saffronbeauties of the West Indies" are praised asdesirable objects. Edwards made quite clearin his colonial text that he would condonesuch an attitude only for commercial reasons;otherwise, white men desiring native womenwould be "a violation of all decency anddecorum." To Young, this is an instance of"the corrupt conjunction of... hybridizedsexual and economic discourses" which hasfuelled the concept of race.The last chapter of Colonial Desire seemsto be a brief revisit of subjects Young hasdiscussed in his previous book, WhiteMythologies (1990). Indeed, his latest bookwill read very well as a companion volumeto the earlier one.One of the products of cultural contactsis the children of mixed-racial origins.These results of "miscegenation" historicallyoccupied a position fraught with anxietyand shame within European society. SuiSin Far, an Anglo-Chinese writing at theturn of the century, addresses this situationin some of her writings. Born Edith Eaton,Sui Sin Far came from a large Victorianfamily of shabby gentility. Unable to make acomfortable living in England, Mr. Eatonmoved his family to Montreal in 1872/73. Atan early age, Edith Eaton tried to supporther family by writing. She changed her nomde plume to Sui Sin Far when she began toexplore more exclusively the world ofChinese immigrants in Montreal and alongthe Pacific coast. Mrs. Spring Fragrance andOther Writings is a selection from her journalisticand fictional works, edited by AmyLing and Annette White-Parks.This collection is divided into two parts.Part 1 contains short stories from Mrs.Spring Fragrance, published in 1912, andPart 2, newspaper articles and other uncollectedstories. As the name of the eponymouscharacter suggests, there is anold-fashioned quaintness in all the stories.That Sui Sin Far herself did not know theChinese language contributes considerablyto this stylistic archness. Writing to herhusband, Mrs. Spring Fragrance coyly pens,"Greeting from your plum blossom, who isdesirous of hiding herself from the sun ofyour presence ..." The writer no doubtwas desirous to convey the syntax of a foreignlanguage; the effect is to render thecharacters cartoonish.In contrast, her newspaper and magazinearticles are written in an unembroideredstyle, and are some of the most interestingrecords of early Chinese immigrant lives inCanada and in California. One can detect ashift in allegiance in Sui Sin Far's writings.In her reports in the early 1890s, Sui Sin Farsees the Chinese immigrants with an outsider'seye. But her later pieces, such as "APlea for the Chinaman" (1896), prove thatshe had come to identify more stronglywith the Chinese side of her background.Annette White-Parks' Sui Sin Far/EdithMaude Eaton is an exhaustive and generousbiography of this Eurasian writer. The bookprovides a detailed account of the Eaton'sfamily life as well as an analytical summaryof Sui Sin Far's writings. The biographer iswell aware of the question of quality whichbesets any evaluation of non-canonicalwriters, and she returns to this issue periodicallythroughout the book. For White-Parks, Sui Sin Far's pioneer status as thefirst Eurasian woman writer in NorthAmerica itself merits critical attention."[T]he issue of quality in [Sui Sin Far's]writings cannot be addressed in the absenceof the cultural and literary contexts withinwhich she wrote," contends White-Parks.Thus the first two chapters of Sui SinFar/Edith Maude Eaton deal with the beginningsof the Anglo-Chinese union betweenEdward Eaton and Lotus Blossom inShanghai in the 1860s, and the large family(fourteen children) which they eventuallyengendered. This marriage alone deservesthe interest of Asianists. How did LotusBlossom meet Eaton, and what kind ofcourtship did they conduct, during the very186