63 pages • 2 hours read
Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)Mrs Spring Fragrance
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Story Summaries & Analyses
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance”
“The Inferior Woman”
“The Wisdom of the New”
“Its Wavering Image”
“The Gift of Little Me”
“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese”
“Her Chinese Husband”
“The Americanizing of Pau Tsu”
“In the Land of the Free”
“The Chinese Lily”
“The Smuggling of Tie Co”
“The God of Restoration”
“The Three Souls of Ah So Nan”
“The Prize China Baby”
“Lin John”
“Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit”
“The Sing Song Woman”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Dual Identity Among Immigrants
Many of the characters in this collection are faced with integrating their Chinese identity with their American identity, and the way in which they do so differs from person to person.
Sometimes, the approach they take does not align with their spouse, causing riffs in marriages. While the Spring Fragrances seem compatible in their ability and desire to explore American customs while still retaining their Chinese culture, other couples have opposing ideas about how best to navigate American or Canadian society. “The Wisdom of the New” is the starkest example of how differing ideas on how and if to adapt to western culture can lead to a breakdown in the marriage, and worse.
For Pan, in “Its Wavering Image,” it is not a question of immigrating from one country to another. She was born in Chinatown to a white mother and Chinese father. When she makes her first white friend, he tells her that she cannot be both Chinese and white. While she previously had always been accepted for who she is in Chinatown, she is faced with a decision about her self-identity. As a member of the dominant culture, Mark can only accept Pan as a white woman, because he does not regard members of the Chinese community as his equals, as evidenced by his exposé on Chinatown.
In “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit,” both Tian Shan and Fin Fan are very individualistic and tend to rail against both Chinese and Canadian culture. While the two of them have been deported back to China where they will be expected to follow Chinese customs, they will at least have in each other a partner with a similar approach to handling pressures to assimilate.
Dominant Cultures Dictate the Standard of Beauty
In many of the stories, the Chinese-American husbands are unaware of how they have redefined their attitudes toward female beauty to adopt the dominant white culture as the standard bearer. Their wives, however, are fully aware of the shift, and it impacts their sense of self and makes them feel unvalued by their husbands.
In “The Wisdom of the New,” Wou Sankwei tries to have his Chinese wife, Pau Lin, model herself after his white friend, Adah Charlton. Pau Lin is immediately aware of the esteem that her husband holds Adah in, and it fuels her hatred, not just of Adah, or white American women, but of American culture itself. As she feels less and less valued by Wou Sankwei, Pau Lin convinces herself that America is evil, and her surviving child must be saved from its clutches.
Although equally oblivious, Wan Hom Hing’s apparent attraction to another Adah does not end in such tragic circumstances. In “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Wan Hom Hing’s insistence that Pau Tsu learn English, wear American-style dress, and put aside her modesty causes the young bride to feel unloved and unworthy of her husband. In her case, Pau Tsu runs off so that Wan Hom Hing can get a divorce and marry Adah Raymond. It is not until his wife disappears that he realizes he does not want her to change at all. As Adah lambasts him for how he has treated his wife, he wonders “how he could ever have wished his gentle Pau Tsu to be like this angry woman” (89).
Female Identity at the Height of the Suffragist Movement
While there are plenty of characters in this collection who seem antagonistic toward expanded rights for women, the author herself also seems to value the traditional roles of women as wife and mother over that of a woman in the workforce.
In “The Inferior Woman,” much is made of how Alice Winthrop is able to work her way up to a good position, but there is a sense that it is unfortunate that this is necessary in the first place, and there is something unnatural about a woman’s ascent in the workplace. When Mr. Spring Fragrance asks his wife about the “Superior Woman,” she says, “Ah, the Superior Woman! Radiantly beautiful, and gifted with the divine right of learning! I love well the Inferior Woman; but, O Great Man, when we have a daughter, may Heaven ordain that she walk in the groove of the Superior Woman” (27).
In “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” Minnie Carson is compared favorably to her husband’s bookkeeper, a woman who seems to dislike children and has broad shoulders and is “masculine-featured” (66). Minnie wants to be a wife and a mother, but her husband makes her “feel it a disgrace to be a woman and a mother” (66). When Minnie marries her second husband, Liu Kanghi, she often reassures him that he is her superior.
In the last story of the collection, “The Sing Song Woman,” an actress from Chinatown has her reputation and future saved when a man decides to make her his wife. Without his name and protection, Ah Oi would face a hard road of continued derision and abuse from her neighbors in Chinatown.
