"A polished and nuanced study that will make an extraordinary intervention into studies of Edith Eaton and scholarship about Asian North American writers. Mary Chapman has done a heroic act of recovery work, and developed a very strong argument about the significance of Eaton's writing." Martha Curtter, University of Connecticut "A major contribution that will be greeted with great enthusiasm by those familiar with Eaton's work and captivate the attention of new readers." Jean Lutes, Villanova University "Chapman has performed an exceptional work of recovery … [that] has added 150 uncollected texts by Eaton-more than doubling Eaton's known oeuvre to over 260 texts. Becoming Sui Sin Far raises pertinent questions about the meaning of citizenship, the crossing of borders, and the fluidity of the physical body and the construction of identity. Questions of race and gender pervade Eaton's work as well. Those historians who teach the US survey, the Gilded Age and Progessive Era, or courses on race and ethnicity may well find a story or two within this significant collection that will prompt discussion on events past and current." H-Net Reviews
"The pieces reproduced here persuasively support a number of Chapman's assertions, offered in a well-written introduction, about the ways Sui Sin Far's expanded oeuvre should affect our understanding of her as an author and of her work. Taken together, these works are likely to prompt not only greater interest in her writing but also a long-overdue revaluation of her artistry and legacy." *American Literary Realism *
"Becoming Sui Sin Far is an impressive achievement in research, recovery, argument, and editing. It will allow scholars of Edith Eaton to reexamine the author's life and work through an expanded oeuvre that repeatedly crosses boundaries of gender, geography, and genre. The collection will be of interest to scholars working on American women writers, border studies, and the interplay of literary and journalistic writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapman advances a strong argument regarding Eaton's transnational individualism, and the book raises new questions about the various identities Edith Eaton claimed as her own." MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
"The book offers an intimate portrait of Eaton's development as a journalist, a stenographer, a writer of fiction and travelogue, and one of North America's most nuanced commentators on Chinese diaspora, cross-racial affiliations, transnational crossings, race and gender intersections, and mixed race identity during the Exclusion era." Legacy
