ABSTRACT
Literary criticism of Sui Sin Far’s (1865-1914) writing is notably marked by contradiction around the issues of race and ethnicity. Addressing Sui Sin Far’s fictional characters and their relationships to cultural and racial conflict, for example, Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom conclude,
One might expect that with her compassion and understanding of both the Chinese and white American cultures, Sui Sin Far would create either complex characters that challenge the conflicts between the two cultures or supreme composite characters that exhibit the grandeur and virtues of both cultures. However, Sui Sin Far has not done so, not because of the anti-Chinese racism of the period but because of her personal belief in the mutual exclusiveness of both cultures. (165)
In sharp contrast, critic William F.Wu claims that Sui Sin Far “writes with well-defined characters and a clear understanding of bicultural pressures” (131), an assessment that does not confirm that Sui Sin Far believed the two cultures to be mutually exclusive. Contradictory evaluations of Sui Sin Far’s work are even more notable when literary critics address the attitude toward assimilation expressed in her stories. According to Dong and Hom, “she shows that Chinese culture is foreign and should be left to exist on its own…. Sui Sin Far’s stories clearly indicate that the Chinese will forever be Chinese and it is not possible to ‘Americanize’ them” (164). Again in contrast to Dong and Hom’s position, Amy Ling, in her landmark book Be tween Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, claims that Sui Sin Far “in her writing asserted [that] the Chinese are human and assimilable” (39). These contradictory readings prove even more surprising when we consider that these critics approach the author’s work from similar historical and theoretical perspectives: all of the evaluations quoted above were published within the past twenty-five years, and while Dong and Hom, unlike most critics, have an overall negative assessment of Sui Sin Far’s work, all of these critics approach Sui Sin Far’s writing with concerns about how she represents race, ethnicity, and gender in her short fiction. Why, then, are their conclusions so vastly different? Without directly addressing this question, Annette White-Parks offers a potential explanation in her essay “‘We Wear the Mask’: Sui Sin Far as One Example of Trickster Authorship.” In this essay, White-Parks argues that Sui Sin Far adopts the role of the “trickster” in her writing both to accommodate the racist views held by much of her audience and “write against the dominant racial and cultural ideologies of her time” (1-2). Adopting this “trickster” position, Sui Sin Far “teases us by presenting situations and characters that appear to fit stereotypes, then does a flip that we miss if we are not reading closely” (11-2). WhiteParks’s argument suggests that the contradictions in critical evaluation of Sui Sin Far’s work might be caused by certain critics missing the “flip” and consequently reading only one of the many layers of meaning that the author presents.
