WEEK 10 CLASS 1EWRT 1B

Agenda

Lecture: Sui Sin Far and Cherrie Moraga 12-Mar Discussion: Far and Moraga and

motivations for resisting the idea of passing.

In-class writing: How and why do Far and Moraga resist?

Discussion/Writing: Essay #4

Terms Transsexuals: People who indicate that they are of one gender

trapped in the body of the other gender. A person who has altered or intends to alter her/hir/his anatomy, either through surgery, hormones, or other means, to better match her/hir/his chosen gender identity. This group of people is often divided into pre-op (operative), post-op, or non-op transsexuals. Due to cost, not all transsexuals can have genital surgery. Others do not feel that surgery is necessary, but still remain a transsexual identity. a. Non-operative: People who do not intend to change their primary sex

characteristics, either because of a lack of a desire or the inability to do so. They may or may not alter their secondary sex characteristics through the use of hormones.

b. Pre-operative: People who have started the procedure to reassign their primary sex characteristics, but have not yet had the surgery. This covers both those people who have just begun the procedure and those who are very close to the actual surgery.

c. Post-operative: People who have had the actual genital surgery done. These people may identify as a man, woman, an FTM transsexual or an MTF transsexual.

Transphobia: The fear or hatred of transgender and

transsexual people. Like biphobia, this term was created to call attention to the ways prejudice against trans people differs from prejudice against other queer people. There is often transphobia in lesbian, gay and bisexual communities, as well as heterosexual or straight communities.

Persona: a character in drama or fiction or the part any one sustains in the world or in a book. Persona also denotes the “I” who speaks in a poem or novel.

Plot: a plan or scheme to accomplish a purpose. In literature, this is the arrangement of events to achieve an intended effect consisting of a series of carefully devised and interrelated actions that progresses through a struggle of opposing forces, called conflict, to a climax and a denouement. This is different from story or story line, which is the order of events as they occur.

• Point of view: a specified position or method of consideration and appraisal. It may also be an attitude, judgment, or opinion. In literature, physical point of view has to do with the position in time and space from which a writer approaches, views, and describes his or her material. Mental point of view involves an author’s feeling and attitude toward his or her subject. Personal point of view concerns the relation through which a writer narrates or discusses a subject, whether first, second, or third person.

• Prose : the ordinary form of spoken and written language whose unit is the sentence, rather than the line as it is in poetry. The term applies to all expressions in language that do not have a regular rhythmic pattern.

Sui Sin Far

Edith Maud Eaton

1865-1914

She was born in England, in 1865 to a Chinese mother and an English (white) father. Eaton's mother was apparently schooled in England although she returned to China after her education was completed. Eaton's father was a merchant who did trading in China; it was on one of his business trips that he met and fell in love with his future wife. According to Eaton scholars, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, "interracial marriage was taboo in both cultures[; thus,] theirs was an unusual union." At age seven, Eaton and her family left England and immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in the early 1870s, settled in a Montreal suburb. She went to school until age eleven and then continued her education at home. As the second child and oldest daughter of fourteen children, Edith Eaton spent much of her childhood helping her mother care for her siblings as well as selling her father's artwork in the city.

Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton, was the first writer of Asian descent published in North America

Eaton started her career at Hugh Graham's Montreal Daily Star newspaper as a typesetter at age eighteen.

Her first short stories were published in the Dominion Illustrated in 1888; she also maintained her administrative duties as well as submitted newspaper articles. It was in her journalistic writing that Eaton openly identified herself as a Chinese American and explained her biracial heritage to her readers. She wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a childhood nickname that means "water lily" in Chinese. Her sister, Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used Onoto Watanna as her penname.

Yi Bu Wang HuaIn the mid 1890s, Eaton moved briefly to Jamaica, where she contracted malaria, from which she never quite recovered. During the next ten years, until 1909, she lived in Seattle and San Francisco. She wrote more articles and short stories and gained a literary reputation. Chinese American women were at the center of much of Eaton's writing, and she worked to break down cultural stereotypes. In 1909, Eaton moved to Boston where she compiled a full-length selection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which was published in Chicago in 1912. In 1913, Eaton, stricken by horrible rheumatism and bad health, returned to Montreal. She died on April 7, 1914 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. In gratitude for her work on their behalf, the Chinese community erected a special headstone on her tomb inscribed with the characters "Yi bu wang hua" ("The righteous one does not forget China").

A Spiritual ForemotherKnown as "spiritual foremother of contemporary Eurasian authors," Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations, a literary biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui Sin Far scholars include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James Doyle, and Annette White-Parks.

Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of her time and place, in late nineteenth-century sinophobic and imperialistic Euro-American nations, then we admit that for her, a Eurasian woman who could pass as white, to choose to champion the Chinese and working-class women and to identify herself as such, publicly and in print, an act of great determination and courage."

The Reception of Chinese by White Americans

To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical and social context, namely the reception of Chinese by white Americans before and during her period. Though the Chinese were never enslaved in this country, as were Africans, they were brought here in large numbers as indentured laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California by the discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s thousands of Chinese laborers were enticed here to construct the mountainous western section of the transcontinental railroad. Almost from the beginning, prejudice against them was strong. They were regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that made them inassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; their hard-working, frugal ways and their willingness to work for lower wages than whites rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of racial violence.

Spring Fragrance and Other WritingsBy Sui Sin Far

This text includes “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”

“Ah, indeed!” he exclaims. “Who would have thought it at first glance? Yet now I see the difference between her and other children. What a peculiar coloring! Her mother’s eyes and hair and her father’s features, I presume. Very interesting little creature!”

I had been called from play for the purpose of inspection. I do not return to it. For the rest of the evening I hide myself behind a hall door and refuse to show myself until it is time to go home.

Why does Far hide after this experience?How does this moment contribute to her identity development?

“Look!” says Charlie. “Those men in there are Chinese!” Eagerly I gaze into the long low room. With the exception of my mother, who is English bred with English ways and manner of dress, I have never seen a Chinese person. The two men within the store are uncouth specimens of their race, drest in working blouses and pantaloons with queues hanging down their backs. I recoil with a sense of shock.“Oh, Charlie,” I cry. “Are we like that?”“Well, we’re Chinese, and they’re Chinese, too, so we must be!” returns my seven year old brother.“Of course you are,” puts in a boy who has followed us down the street, and who lives near us and has seen my mother: “Chinky, Chinky, Chinaman, yellow-face, pig-tail, rat-eater.” A number of other boys and several little girls join in with him.“Better than you,” shouts my brother, facing the crowd. He is younger and smaller than any there, and I am even more insignificant than he; but my spirit revives.“I’d rather be Chinese than anything else in the world,” I scream.

Why does Far fight after this experience?How does this moment contribute to her identity development?

The greatest temptation was in the thought of getting far away from where I was known, to where no mocking cries of “Chinese!” “Chinese!” could reach.

Here Sui seems to want to disappear. Given her desire to escape prejudice, why does she become a champion of the Chinese instead of “passing” as we know so many others do during this time? In other words, which of her life experiences compel her to refuse to pass as white? How does she become the woman who speaks the lines below?

With a great effort I raise my eyes from my plate. “Mr. K.,” I say, addressing my employer, “the Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to understand that I am—I am a Chinese.”

WHAT INSIGHTS, QUESTIONS, OR COMMENTS

CAN YOU BRING TO THIS DISCUSSION?

Sui Sin Far

Cherrie MoragaCherrie Lawrence

1952-

Cherrie Moraga, born Cherrie Lawrence, is often considered one of the foremost Chicano playwrights of her generation

Moraga was born on September 25, 1952, one of three children of an Anglo father and a Mexican-American mother in Whittier, California. Her father deserted the family while she was still very young, leaving her mother as sole supporter. As a result, Moraga was raised with Mexican traditions at home and exposed to white American influences at school. Describing herself as “La Guera”—which translates to “fair-skinned”—she was able to “pass” as Anglo throughout much of her upbringing, something her mother encouraged. Wanting to enable her children to succeed where she had not in a white society, Moraga's mother did not pass along her own Spanish fluency to her children nor did she expose them to her own family as much as Moraga might have liked. Thus, Moraga felt detached from her Chicano heritage during much of her early childhood; however, when she was nine, her mother moved the family back to the San Gabriel Valley where much of her large extended family was situated, and Moraga immersed herself in la familia by listening to the stories of her elders, influences that can be traced through her current work.

Even among her family, however, she still felt the conflict of having to live between two cultures. But it was in part due to the advantages of their familiarity with white culture that Moraga and her siblings became part of the first generation of her family to go to college. Graduating with a B.A. from a small private college in Hollywood in 1974, she pursued a graduate degree at San Francisco State in feminist writing, which she attained in 1981. It was during her time in college that Moraga began to recognize and accept herself as a lesbian. By finally acknowledging her lesbianism, she was able to accept herself as a confident whole person, a decision that Moraga has said enabled her to fully reconnect with both her Chicana mother and her own proud heritage as a Chicano woman. Finding greater confidence in herself and her writing, she became active in feminist causes in San Francisco, but felt like an outsider in the mostly white, heterosexual movement. To combat what she felt was a neglect of the needs and issues of both women of color and lesbians by the larger feminist community, she joined with Gloria Anzaldúa to publish a collection of essays, letters, poems, and conversations by a largely unpublished group of women of color in the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1986.

Moraga is artist-in-residence and instructor of theater and creative writing at Brava Theatre Center of San Francisco. She is also president of the board of directors of Latin American Theatre Artists, teaches at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and lectures around the country.

She will be speaking at De Anza College on Tuesday, May 8th at 1:30.

Loving in the War YearsBy Cherrie Moraga

This text includes the essay “La Guera.”

• What does this tell us about the young Cherrie Moraga?

• Do you find this to be an unusual position for a woman like her?

• How is she like or different from the young Far?

Discuss this section in terms of the development of Moraga’s racial and feminist identities.Why and how do you think she changed after her epiphany?

What do you understand from this idea of Moraga’s about the danger in ranking oppressions? Do you agree?

WHAT INSIGHTS, QUESTIONS, OR COMMENTS

CAN YOU BRING TO THIS DISCUSSION?

Cherrie Moraga

In-class writing: How and why do Far and Moraga resist passing?

• Like Far, Moraga refuses to pass as white. Why? What do they share that convinces them to consciously and intentionally reveal their racial identities?

• Consider how their motivations might differ: They were born a century apart. Surely some motivations must be different. What might those be? Why do you think so?

• Consider how each resists passing. Which behaviors can you specifically identify? Do they use the same strategies or different ones?

Questions about Essay #4?

Speak now because we are almost out of time!

Homework Studying: Vocab/Terms Writing: Work on Essay #4

Post your works cited page Respond to the following:

• Like Far, Moraga refuses to pass as white. Why? What do they share that convinces them to consciously and intentionally reveal their racial identities?

• Consider how their motivations might differ: They were born a century apart. Surely some motivations must be different. What might those be? Why do you think so?

• Consider how each resists passing. Which behaviors can you specifically identify? Do they use the same strategies or different ones?