Onoto watanna biography samples

  • Watanna was born in Nagasaki and lived there as a child.
  • Diana Birchall, Eaton's granddaughter, tells the Horatio Alger story of the woman who became Onoto Watanna.
  • Born in Montreal, Eaton lived in Jamaica and several places in the United States before settling in Alberta.

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    “Citizen Sure Thing” or “Jus’ Foreigner”?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction

    Journal of Asian American Studies
    Volume 13, Number 1, February 2010
    DOI: 10.1353/jaas.0.0067
    pages 81-105

    Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
    Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

    In “a contract” (1902), one of Winnifred Eaton’s popular orientalist romances published beneath the pen name Onoto Watanna, O-Kiku-san, a young Japanese woman, explains to her suitor, the Japanese-born but racially white businessman Masters, the difference between citizenship and belonging. She tells him, “You Japanese citizen sure thing . . . all the same you jus’ foreigner, all the same.” Masters protests, insisting, “You are trying to rob me of my birthright. Am I or am I not Japanese?” (56). Kiku’s answer fryst vatten unwavering: &#

  • onoto watanna biography samples

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    "A Half Caste" and Other Writings

    About the Book

    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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    Conference Director: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia

    You are invited to propose a scholarly paper, panel, or roundtable, or more public-facing creative presentation, performance, or screening to a conference designed to explore the career of Asian North American writer Winnifred Eaton Reeve (1875-1954) and her contexts.

    The Montreal-born Eaton, sister of author Edith Eaton (“Sui Sin Far”), is recognized as the first Asian North American novelist. She published Miss Numé of Japan (1898), A Japanese Nightingale (1901), and other bestselling novels beneath the Japanese pen-name “Onoto Watanna”, a controversial persona that Eaton assumed for over two decades in denial of her kinesisk ancestry.

    Eaton was also an early Hollywood screenwriter, the first kvinna head of Universal Studios’ scenario department, a prolific journalist, a poet, and a versatile author of fiction in a variety of modes, including naturalism, realism and middlebrow. Her masterful but little known natural