The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese Analysis

The protagonist, Laura Chin Yuen, represents the more Americanized second generation of Chinese Americans. She feels trapped between her own cultural traditions and the intense pressure of her parents to marry a Chinese man.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance serves as a cultural bridge between her two worlds, and she manages to facilitate Laura’s marriage without offending her parents.

Mrs. Spring Fragrance

As the title suggests, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is a character in a series of short stories by Edith Maude Eaton. She wrote this collection under the pen name Sui Sin Far and it was published in 1912. It was “the earliest book of fiction written by an American of Chinese descent.”

The stories in this collection all focus on the conflicts that arise between traditional immigrant values and the new world of America. Many of the stories are humorous, but some tackle more serious themes such as discrimination and xenophobia. For example, in one story Mr. Spring Fragrance and his wife are torn between preserving their culture and adopting the customs of their neighbors.

Another theme that is highlighted is the importance of appearance. In a few of the stories in this collection, the characters struggle to decide how to dress and what kind of accent to use. This is especially true of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, who at first refuses to learn English. But when her husband brings her a beautiful gown, she decides to change her mind.

Finally, the stories in this collection explore issues of class and culture. Several of the stories center around the conflicts between middle-class immigrants and their lower-class neighbors. This conflict often revolves around marriage, particularly arranged marriages. For example, in one story, Mrs. Spring Fragrance helps her daughter’s love interest to overcome her parents’ objections and marry his wealthy family.

The stories in this collection are also important for examining how the Asian American community responded to racism. The stories are told from an author omniscient perspective, which allows the reader to know what the characters are thinking and feeling throughout the story. This is particularly helpful when analyzing the racist comments made by the university student and Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s unconscious racial prejudice when she refers to Tennyson as an American poet. By allowing the reader to understand these characters’ thoughts and feelings, the stories in this collection help readers better evaluate their own reactions to racism.

Laura Chin Yuen

As the story progresses, Mrs. Spring Fragrance becomes more Americanized through her interaction with Laura Chin Yuen, the eighteen-year-old daughter of her Chinese neighbors. The Chin Yuens have a traditional Chinese culture but are also well-educated, and they want their daughter to marry a man they choose for her. However, Laura is in love with Kai Tzu, a young American who likes baseball and popular songs. Mrs. Spring Fragrance helps to free Laura from her arranged marriage and enables her to marry Kai Tzu. In doing so, she also undermines her husband’s beliefs about America as an inhospitable place for foreigners and especially for the Chinese.

Unlike Bret Harte, who often wrote about characters with three-dimensional depth, Sui Sin Far used ordinary family life and stories of love to bridge the gap between whites and Asians. Her sympathetic portrayals of Chinese characters living in the West allowed readers to understand and sympathize with their plight. Her stories satirized Western prejudice and gave to American letters a Chinese perspective on issues such as racial discrimination, economic harassment, and unfair immigration regulations.

The story begins with a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance in which they discuss their daughter’s arranged marriage to Ah Oi, the son of the schoolteacher. Mrs. Spring Fragrance is delighted to hear that her husband is reading poetry books by Alfred Tennyson, and she explains that “it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

After the discussion, Mrs. Spring Fragrance writes a letter to her daughter explaining that Ah Oi has been promised in marriage to another girl. Despite this, she wants her daughter to be happy and insists that Kai Tzu is the only suitable candidate for her. Her husband is surprised at her consent to allow their daughter to marry a man of her own choosing, and his doubt aggravates her bitterness.

When Kai Tzu arrives, he is a pleasant surprise to the Chin Yuens and their friends. He is handsome, ruddy, and American in appearance, and he enjoys playing baseball and singing popular songs. He is also a scholar of English literature. Nevertheless, the Chin Yuens believe that he is too “English” to be their daughter’s future husband.

Kai Tzu

The Chin Yuens’ daughter, so thoroughly Americanized that she goes by her middle name of Laura, loves a young American born in China named Kai Tzu. Though her parents have not selected him to be their daughter’s husband, he is the one she truly loves. She confides this to Mrs. Spring Fragrance, who decides to help her.

The story’s narrative structure reflects the tension between American culture and traditional Chinese values. The Chin Yuens’ home is furnished in American style and the family wears American clothing, but they still follow some Chinese customs and honor the ideals of their ancestors. At the same time, they are anxious to make their daughter conform to the social expectations of Americans and have arranged for her to marry the son of a government teacher in San Francisco at age fifteen.

When Mr. Chin Yuen suddenly consents to his daughter’s wish to marry Kai Tzu, it is a shock to Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and she grows doubtful of his motives. His explanation that he feels that “the old order passes away and a new one takes its place, even with the Chinese,” further substantiates her suspicions.

Sui Sin Far’s depiction of the plight of American-born Chinese was important for her cause, as she attempted to bridge the gap between whites and Asians by describing characters with whom her readers could identify. As the protagonist of this story, Laura represents the second generation of Asian-Americans who struggle to reconcile their traditional parents’ beliefs with their own American upbringing. The writer’s use of Laura’s Chinese name, Mai Gwi Far, meaning rose, may be her way of asserting identification with this character. Her name is also the same as Sui Sin Far’s, further suggesting an identity with this second generation of Asian-Americans caught between two worlds.

Mr. Chin Yuen

Although other writers, such as Bret Harte and Edith Maude Eaton, used Chinese characters in their stories, they presented them from a white perspective. Sui Sin Far’s mixed-blood perspective allowed her to write about the Chinese experience from a different angle. In her short-story cycle, she explores the plight of Chinese immigrants in America and their struggle to integrate into American culture.

Sui Sin Far’s goal is to bridge the gap between white Americans and Chinese immigrants. She does this through her writing, her activism, and her personal experiences. She is a pioneer in the field of Asian-American literature. Her stories portray everyday family life, love triumphing over or being thwarted by obstacles, and characters with three-dimensional depth. By doing this, she makes her audience empathize with the plight of the Chinese people.

Her stories focus on the complexities of Chinese and Western cultures in a time when racial prejudice was prevalent. Her writing aims to show that culture is more important than heredity, and that a person’s race is an accident of birth. She tries to convince her readers that the Chinese are human, and that they should be accepted as such by the whites.

While some of her stories are criticized for being overly sentimental, she still strikes a new note in American fiction. She tries to portray for her white readers the lives, feelings, and sentiments of the Americanized Chinese people of the Pacific coast and those who intermarried with them. This is a task that, in her opinion, requires well-nigh superhuman insight and the subtlest of methods.