A Study Guide for Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829007

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Mrs. Spring Fragrance

Sui Sin Far

1912

Introduction

Mrs. Spring Fragrance is the title story in Sui Sin Far’s first and only collection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, published in 1912. The collection also contains twenty stories about children, collectively known as Tales of Chinese Children. As a whole, the collection discusses issues of racism, assimilation, and the alienation of Chinese Americans in North America. The title story describes the matchmaking tendencies of a recent arrival to the United States, who eagerly assimilates American customs and language and meddles in the lives of her neighbors. Through this character sketch of a young married Chinese woman, Far also subtly satirizes the patronizing attitude of the policies of the United States government and its citizens towards Asian immigrants. Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s wry and insightful observations of the incidents in her neighborhood are heavily ironic.

The other stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance also express the struggle of Chinese Americans to find identity in an oppressive society, particularly from a woman’s point of view. Sui Sin Far, a pseudonym of Edith Maude Eaton, was born of a Chinese mother and a British father and moved to the United States at a young age, eventually becoming a journalist in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada. Keenly aware of her heritage, Far embraced her Chinese roots in an era when many were quick to become as American as possible. Writing under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far instantly identified her as an immigrant, and lent credence to her writings, which were often social commentaries on the state of immigrant life in the still-growing United States.

Author Biography

Sui Sin Far was born in England in 1865 as Edith Maude Eaton. She was the eldest of fourteen children born to an English shipping merchant, Edward Eaton, and Grace Trefusis Eaton, a Chinese woman whom Edward met on his frequent business trips to Shanghai. Proud of her Chinese heritage, Far’s mother often went by the name Lotus Blossom. Far’s father had studied art in France, and her mother was an orphan raised by Christian missionaries in China. The Eaton family lived primarily in England and Canada, where Far went to school. Even though her given name was British, and her appearance was not markedly Chinese, Far she proudly claimed her Chinese identity. She recounts the painful anxiety of being a Eurasian in her