Articles : Onoto Watanna`s A Japanese Nightingale: Shifting Identities of the Pioneer Asian American Woman Writer

Asian American literature may be said to have had its beginning with the Eaton sisters` publication in the late nineteenth century. Although Edith Eaton may be the first Asian American writer who published short stories and journal entries with her Chinese pseudonym Sui Sin Far beginning from 1896, it was Winnifred Eaton, a novelist and Edith`s younger sister, who had a commercial, mainstream success in the American literary arena. Because of anti-Chinese sentiment and craze for things Japanese during the late nineteenth-century, Winnifred Eaton, a Chinese-British Canadian, had published her first novel, Miss Nume of Japan (1899), under the Japanese-sounding name Onoto Watanna. Her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), that was known to sell 200,000 copies and was adapted as a play and performed on Broadway to compete with David Belasco`s long-running one-act play, Madame Butterfly, swept her to fame. With her pseudonymity and her own representation in public, Winnifred Eaton`s original half-self as a half-Chinese had disappeared from public sight with the emergence of her created second self `Onoto Watanna.` A Japanese Nightingale is an interracial romance between a young American man and a Eurasian-Japanese woman. Unlike Madame Chrysanthemum (1887), the French progenitor of Madame Butterfly`s narrative by Pierre Loti, and Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo (1895) and Madame Butterfly (1898) by John Luther Long, Winnifred Eaton`s unique identity as a Eurasian-American woman writer provides her characterization with multiple dimensions and vitality. Winnifred Eaton`s identification with the characters constantly shifts between the position of the Western male hero and that of the Eurasian female protagonist. Despite the fact that Eaton`s novel has stronger female subjectivity, the masculine, Western perspective emerges victorious because that was the dominant mainstream perspective of women and Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. Onoto Watanna`s A Japanese Nightingale, as the first commercially successful novel written by an Asian American woman, provides a poignant illustration of a mentality of an ethnic minority who wished for a mainstream success in a literary arena.

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