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...more engaging. With dramatic flair ("I was love's passionate pilgrim" [Eaton 346]), the heroine describes her ill-fated affair with a wealthy married man, an unwelcome kiss from a black Jamaican politician, a lecherous doctor's advances, and her simultaneous engagement to three men (she is too kind and inexperienced to refuse their proposals). The Toronto Star reported that, "while shocking the sensibilities of many of the old subscribers," Me's racy subject matter "increased [Century]'s circulation considerably"; publicity also fueled sales as New York City subway advertisements and billboards asked, "Who is the author of Me?" ("Famous"; Birchall 116). (1) Reviewers responded to both Me's sensational content ("if all is true therein, the orthodox will find comfort in that the book ends with the heroine at prayer" [Clipping, Star]) and to the question of the author's identity ("the author of 'Me' is probably much more clever and fascinating than during the impulsive maidenhood of which she writes" [Clipping, Times]). (2) The speculation ended with the New York Times Book Review article entitled "Is Onoto Watanna Author of the Anonymous Novel Me?" in which the writer deduced the author's nationality, and ultimately her identity, from various clues (including a scene featuring the heroine's kissing a man's sleeve, which the writer claimed was a Japanese custom [cited in Birchall 116]). (3)
While the article satisfactorily resolved the mystery for readers, it served another, more important purpose by safeguarding the actual identity of the author, as "Onoto Watanna" itself was a pseudonym for the more pedestrian and distinctly Western-sounding Winnifred Eaton. The Canadian-born Eaton, whose father was British and mother Chinese, assumed a Japanese authorial persona in order to bypass late-nineteenth-century North American Sinophobia and exploit the Japonisme fad, dissociating herself from stereotypes of the Chinese as debased and unassimilable and appealing to the seemingly more benevolent stereotypes of the Japanese as exotic yet civilized. A prolific author whose fiction and non-fiction appeared in magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Redbook, her principal success stemmed from the popularity of Watanna's "Japanese" romance novels and short stories, most of which were published between 1898 and 1922 and featured picturesque settings, naive and childlike Japanese heroines, and the occasional act of hari-kari.
A significant departure from the Japanese novels, Me is nonetheless a narrative befitting its chameleonic author. In addition to depicting Eatong romantic exploits, the account details the crucial year in which the seventeen-year-old leaves her familial Canadian home to pursue a writing career and charts her travels to Jamaica, Richmond, Chicago, and New York. Although the plot essentially follows the events of Eaton's life, many other details are fictionalized, especially those related to the author's racial identity. Eaton refers to herself throughout Me as "Nora Ascough" and avoids mentioning her mother's Chinese heritage in a rather unconvincing attempt to "pass" as white (as evidenced by the New York Times Book Review "expose"). (4) Further conflating fact and fiction is Me's evocation of various literary genres, including Bildungsroman, fairy tale, and not surprisingly, the romance novel. Her dependence upon other genres and her predilection for melodramatic phrasing ("[fate] was a black, monstrous thing, a thief in the dark that hid to entrap me" [346]) often propels the autobiography into implausibility and reflects Eaton's treatment of her identity as merely another device that could be manipulated, fabricated, or exploited.
Present-day critics generally characterize the text and its author as little more than literary novelties. Amy Ling wryly notes that the "boundary between fact and fiction [in Me] is not at all clear" (32), while James Doyle derides Eaton for "perpetuat[ing] an artificial and ethnically false legend about herself" (55). Caroline Sin limits Eaton's literary legacy to the creation of a "lucrative market for a particular kind of Orientalist exotica written by Asian or Eurasian Americans" (180), exemplified today by authors such as Amy Tan. Within the current scholarly schema, then, Eaton is remembered as an author whose works, including Me, perpetuated rather than subverted racist stereotypes and ideologies, especially in light of the Asian American literary tradition that has since developed. As Tomo Hattori says, "There is not much at first glance that recommends [Me] for canonization as Asian American literature, women's literature, or literature" (236).
The text that is considered the seminal Asian American autobiography, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, indeed seems to be Me's ideological opposite. A serious treatise of racial and gender identity formation and a radical departure from the traditionally linear autobiography narrative structure, The Woman Warrior is hailed by critics as an exemplar of Asian American literature's subversive nature as well as an emblematic feminist Bildungsroman in which "Kingston transforms her victim's state of cut frenum into a victor's state of full-throated song" (Ling 130) in her attempt to "find a uniquely Chinese American voice to serve as a weapon for her life" (Kim 207). By contrast, Me appears to be a simple hoax, an often fictional autobiography written by a Chinese-North American woman "passing" as white, and an example of one author's false consciousness regarding issues of identity, gender, and race. (5)
I argue, however, that it is possible to examine Me as an Asian American autobiography without divesting these literary categories of meaning. Feminist critics have revised traditional autobiographical studies by refusing to privilege a poetics of "truth" that centers around an autonomous autobiographical "I," instead emphasizing selfhood as a communal and cultural process. Thus, rather than obscuring or embellishing the autobiography's truthfulness, The Woman Warriors distinct blend of fact and fiction reveals the dizzying array of cultural narratives that bombard the young Maxine. (6) Similarly, I view Me's mediation between Nora's story and the storytelling conventions she employs as illustrating the cultural orientations that inform her personal and artistic maturation. When situated within a feminist framework, then, Eaton's autobiography presents thematic concerns that anticipate those of Kingston's work, especially the complex engagement between women autobiographers and dominant social and literary forces.
More significantly, Me brings into sharp relief aspects of The Woman Warrior that...
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