Who Are the Eaton Sisters?

Edith and Winnifred Eaton—or the “Eaton Sisters”—were born in the late nineteenth century to Chinese and English parents. In their writing, which transcended genres including poetry, short stories, journalistic articles, and travel nonfiction, the Eaton Sisters faced marginalization due to their mixed ethnic identities. Today, however, they are widely known as foundational figures in Asian American Studies, and their papers and writings are held made publicly available through institutions like the New York Public Library and the Winnifred Eaton Archive.

Though the Eaton sisters worked primarily in Western Chinatowns and Japan, their writing traverses and crosses into various spaces, particularly Afro-Asian spaces like Jamaica. Their time in Jamaica and exposure to Blackness, particularly in the Jamaican context, informed how they understood and performed their own ethnic identities—an understanding that is reflected in their later works. This essay provides a glimpse into their diasporic travel, publishing works, and textual networks in the Jamaica, which have not been given much focus to date.

Intimacies in the Eaton Sister’s Work

As part of my doctoral research, I created a StoryMap to show the geographically complex and multi-sited character of the Eaton Sisters’ publication strategy. This StoryMap shows some of the places the Eaton sisters published, what they published, where they published, quotes from publications, and how the content engages with social forces like race, class, and immigration. It also explores the geographies of these archival texts, drawing attention to Afro-Asian identities, networks, and their place in Caribbean Studies. For example, the poem “Sneer Not”—published by Winnifred Eaton in 1896 in Gall’s Daily News Letter in Kingston, Jamaica—argues that the act of sneering is not a result of wealth and class, but instead, of experience:

The goal of the map is to show the reach of the Eaton Sisters’ work and identify what I call Afro-Asian intimacies. Here, I follow Lisa Lowe’s definition of intimacy as forms of contact (such as colonization) that can bring geographically distant people into closer relations—and even “cross-racial alliances”—with one another. In the Caribbean, Afro-Asian intimacies were forged through practices like indentureship with Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century and the creation of Caribbean Chinatowns in Kingston.[^2] Some scholars even speculate that the Eaton Sisters lived in or near a preemptive Chinatown. What does it mean to think of these intimacies as a form of kinship that can transcend different spheres of identity—Asian American, African American, and Caribbean—all at once?

Mapping, Audience, and Intimacies

To better understand the Afro-Asian intimacies in the Eaton Sisters’ writing, I first assembled a dataset that describes where the sisters wrote, the pseudonyms they used, and metadata about their works (such as title, date, publisher, publication information, and genre). Edith often chose to publish her work under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, meaning “water lily” in Cantonese, and her sister Winnifred often chose to publish her work under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna.

While the sisters shared a heritage, they leveraged it in different ways. Edith used her identity as a biracial woman to contest social injustices in her writing, especially in relation to anti-Chinese prejudice. In contrast, Winnifred rejected her Chinese and English identity and instead claimed a Japanese persona for her writing. They both chose to write under these pseudonyms for different reasons, as Edith wanted to advocate for social justice, whereas it is speculated that Winnifred wanted social and financial capital. Winnifred leaned into a more Orientalist lens, catering to wealthier people and Americans and publishing in places such as Gall’s Daily News Letter, The Puritan, Carter’s Monthly, Christian-Science Monitor, and Metropolitan Magazine.¹ Edith centered her writing around “ordinary” people as she tried to humanize the Chinese experience, publishing in places like Overland Monthly, The Land of Sunshine, Out West, Good Housekeeping, and The Independent.²

Mapping some of the Eaton sisters’ publications demonstrates how Edith and Winnifred’s Asian American identities existed in multiple places at once, from New England to the Caribbean, by virtue of their publication strategies. Though Edith only lived in Jamaica for around six months and Winnifred around a year, their time in the Caribbean “shows an understanding of how they imagine their own subjectivities within a North American context.”³ As Dr. Julia Lee writes, “their negotiation and representation of what it means to be Chinese within the nation-state are formed and re-formed by their encounters within a racially stratified colonial society” in which “struggles of Chinese in the United States cannot be separated from racial politics of colonialism abroad.”

Examining the Afro-Asian intimacies in the Eaton Sisters’ publication record demonstrates how the Caribbean sits at the intersection of diaspora, dispossession, and citizenship. Mapping the Eaton Sisters’ publication record and styles of work-life-travel shows how concepts like “the nation” or “ethnic identity” are not static entities bound up in particular geographic locales; rather, they are often mutable and can be performed or enacted in a variety of places. This is also shown through the lasting impact that their time in Jamaica had on their perception of racialization and, more broadly speaking, the world.

Read the StoryMap

Notes