"A Half Caste" and Other Writings (Asian American Experience)

Onoto Watanna (1875-1954) was born Winnifred Eaton, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother. The first novelist of Chinese descent to be published in the United States, she "became" Japanese to escape Americans' scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with things Japanese. The earliest essay here, "A Half Caste," appeared in 1898, a year before Miss Num: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her best-selling novels. The last story, "Elspeth," appeared in 1923. Of Watanna's numerous shorter works, this volume includes nineteen--thirteen stories and six essays -- intended to show the scope and versatility of her writing. While some of Watanna's fictional characters will remind today's readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, others foreshadow such types as the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey (a novel in which Onoto Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Watanna's characters are always capable, clever, and inventive--molded in the author's own image.