Sunny-San

This volume was published in 1922.. Notes about the author:. Winnifred Eaton was born in Montreal Quebec in 1875. However she lived most of her life in New York Hollywood and Calgary. Winnifred's father Edward Eaton was a silk merchant who traveled around to major Asian trading towns particularly Shanghai. There he met his wife Grace Lotus Blossom Trefusis. She was a Chinese woman adopted and educated by English missionaries. Winnifred was the eighth of fourteen children. She became an author who published many novels a Chinese-Japanese cookbook short stories newspaper articles and motion picture screenplays. At age fourteen she published her first story in a Montreal newspaper. At that young age she was already establishing a name for herself in the United States with articles in American Youth Ladies Home Journal and Metropolitan Magazine.. Her works were popular because they were romances not only giving Americans a flavor of the Orient but also drawing upon the Orientalist clichés of her time. Eaton was able to explore diverse social issues and exploit Oriental fantasies. Eaton used a Japanese pen name when she wrote even though she was of Chinese descent. She used the name Onoto Watanna because she wanted to create for herself a persona of a Japanese noblewoman. At that time in America there was a more favorable perception of Japanese than Chinese. The name Watanna can be dissected into two parts- wata[ru] to cross and na which means name. Winnifred put these two ideograms together for an intentional purpose. Her sister the eldest girl in the family was also a writer named Edith Maude Eaton. She wrote fiction and was a journalist. She too had a pen name which was Sui Sin Far or Water Lily which she said was a pseudonym of a prominent Americanized Chinese merchant from Los Angeles.. Sunny-San the last Japanese novel published some 10 years after the previous one takes place mostly in New York City; its heroine only one quarter Japanese is a vigorous woman. . Passage from the book:[Sunny's father] had acquired a sentiment not merely for the land but for the woman he had taken as his wife; above all he was devoted to his little girl. His marriage to the mother of Sunny had been more or less of a mercenary transaction. She had been sold to the American by a stepfather anxious to rid himself of a child who showed the clear evidence of her white father. The result was to breed in him at the outset a feeling that he would not have analysed as contempt but was at all events scepticism for the seeming love of his wife for him. He deluded himself into believing that his Japanese wife like her dolls was incapable of any intense feeling. [On his announcing his intention to divorce her and leave Japan] her smiling mask betrayed no trace to the American agents of the anguished turmoil within. Indeed her amiability aroused indignant and disgusted comment and she was pronounced a soulless butterfly. (pp. 74-76). Sunny's mother refuses compensation and refuses to give up her daughter and becomes a beggar fleeing her former husband's agents; she eventually becomes an acrobatic performer at a teahouse and dies young leaving her fourteen-year-old daughter to take her place. . Sunny is rescued from the teahouse and adopted by a young American Jerry whom she eventually follows to New York. Although he is engaged to Miss Falconer he and Sunny fall in love. When Jerry's mother and Miss Falconer discover this they confront Sunny and send her forth into the New York City streets with a broken heart. Only after this scene does Miss Falconer tell Mrs. Hammond that she no longer intends to marry Jerry. . Other novels by this author: - A Japanese Nightingale - Daughters of Nijo A Romance of Japan - Me A Book of Remembrance - The Honorable Miss Moonlight - The Love of Azalea