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Onoto Watanna

Diana Birchall

University of Illinois Press

2006

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In 1901, Winnifred Eaton arrived in New York City with literary ambitions, journalism experience, and the manuscript for A Japanese Nightingale, the novel that would make her famous. Her writing and gift for reinvention would set her apart from other women authors of her time and make her a fascinating early figure in Asian American literature. Diana Birchall, Eaton's granddaughter, tells the Horatio Alger story of the woman who became Onoto Watanna. Born to a British father and a Chinese mother, Winnifred capitalized on her exotic appearance-and protected herself from Americans' scorn of the Chinese-by "becoming" Japanese. Her popular Japanese-themed romance novels thrust her into the glittering world of New York's literati. From there she leapt to Hollywood to become a scriptwriting protÉgÉe of Carl Laemmle at Universal Studios. Yet her boldness and talent masked a sometimes-desperate personal life that included a troubled first marriage and the sudden end of her Hollywood career. A compelling saga of the shifting boundary between life and art, Onoto Watanna reveals the conflicting stories, personal tempests, and remarkable accomplishments of a woman whose career was sensational in every sense.

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"a Half Caste" and Other Writings

Onoto Watanna

University of Illinois Press

2002

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Born Winnifred Eaton to a British father and Chinese mother, Onoto Watanna was the first novelist of Chinese descent published in the United States. Eaton "became" Watanna to escape Americans' scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with all things Japanese. This volume includes nineteen of Watanna's shorter works, including thirteen short stories and six essays. "A Half Caste," the earliest essay, appeared in 1898, a year before Miss NumÉ: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her bestselling novels. The last short story, “Elspeth,” appeared in 1923. Some of Watanna’s fictional characters will remind readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, while others foreshadow types like the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (where Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Throughout, Watanna tells stories of people very much like herself-capable, clever, and endlessly inventive.

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The Heart of Hyacinth

Onoto Watanna

University of Washington Press

2000

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The Heart of Hyacinth, originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory—of racial constructions and fluidity—in the service of an avant-garde feminism.

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