Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues.
If students are to appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, they must be given its historical and social context. Namely, the reception of Chinese by dominate Americans before and during her period. Students should know that though the Chinese were never enslaved in this country, as were Africans, they were brought here in large numbers as indentured laborers or coolies. The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship for Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American Indians were recognized as American citizens.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 unable to assimilate in a nation that wanted to remain white. Their hard-working, frugal ways, their willingness to work for lower wages than whites, left them an economic threat and thus targets of racial prejudice and Violence.
Into this environment Edith Eaton came as a small child from England, living first in Hudson City, New York and later settling in Montreal. Though her writing career began on the Montreal newspaper, The Star, she was to make her mark in the United States. She lived most of her adult life in Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco, writing articles and short stories using the Chinese pseudonym Sui Sin Far.
Edith Eaton's autobiographical essay and her stories, of which "In the Land of the Free" is an example, show what it was to be a Chinese woman in the white man's world. Though Eaton herself was only one-half Chinese (and one-half English), she was devoted to her mother and to the cause of counteracting the hatred and prejudice against her mother's people that was so pervasive during her own formative years.
