水仙花文化身份.doc

Sui Xin Far’s Cultural Identity Formation in Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian ⅠIntroduction Sui Xin Far (1865-1914), originally named Edith Maud Eaton, is the first woman writer of Chinese descent in North America. She is celebrated as the “spiritual foremother of contemporary Eurasian writer” and the “ancestor of Chinese American literature”. Born to a Chinese mother and an English father, Edith Maud Eaton embraced her mothers nationality at a time when it was not advantageous to be Chinese and wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, which means narcissus flower in Chinese. Sui Xin Far’s writing, which is widely read and favorably received, is mostly about Chinese people in the North America and their experiences. Many of her stories are collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and others published in a variety of popular newspapers. Through describing Chinese people’s experiences of struggling to live in a Sinophobe environment, Sui Xin Far explored the complex issues of racism, ethnocentrism, and biculturalism, identity and individuality. Most of her works reflect her devotion to the cause of counteracting the hatred and prejudice against Chinese people and her effort to make a change by means of her pen, to be the pioneer in bridging the Occident and the Orient (Parks: 1995). In Sui Xin Far’s moving autobiographical essay written in her later years, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian, Far probed troubling questions about her hybrid identity and told the evolution of her own understanding of her cultural identity. The essay reveals the process of her cultural identity formation----from identifying herself as a half Chinese, half English woman- Edith Maud Eaton, to claiming her Chinese nationality as Sui Xin Far, and accepts her hybrid identity as a Eurasian at last. The process is a testimony to Stuart Hall’s theory about cultural identity, which claims that “cultural identity is a never complete and an ongoing process, and it’