Four of nine Chinese-themed short stories (including the first and the last) that Eaton wrote for Charles Fletcher Lummis’ Los Angeles magazine between 1896 and 1900. Four separate issues, all in original wrappers, with Eaton stories ‘Ku Yum’ (June 1896), ‘A Chinese Feud’ (November 1896); ‘The Sing-Song Woman, A Chinese Story’ (October 1898); and ‘O Yam – Sketch’ (November 1900).
Called by her biographer “the first published Asian North American fiction writer”, Edith Eaton was born in England, the daughter of a British merchant and a Chinese woman, She came to Canada as a child, eventually moving to the United States, living in San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, while her periodical writing began to have a “Chinese theme” and was signed with a Chinese pseudonym. Fourteen years later, she published her only book, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”, an anthology of her collected stories, credited by literary historians as being the first book of Chinese-American fiction. While a less popular writer than her sister Winnifred, who wrote a shelf of romance novels under the Japanese pseudonym “Onoto Watanna”, Edith Eaton, at a time of rampant racist stereotypes, as her biographer notes, “courageously chose to write of the Chinese in North America as humorous, tragic, charming, and loving - in short, as human.”