Abstract

Despite the transnational studies of Sui Sin Far’s oeuvre, few critics have studied the fictional Chinese merchant families in her short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) and their relation to what Anne Cheng terms global ornamentalism. In Cheng’s account, Asian femininity is part and parcel of the global racialized discourse of the ornament, which has been identified with the Orient or Asian communities since antiquity. On the one hand, Sui Sin Far aligns women of the Chinese merchant class in her stories with chinoiserie, Orientalist jewelry and clothes, and even the Oriental bazaar itself to dramatize the dissolution between subject and object and to show the characters’ desire to conform to the repressive discursive systems of ornamentation that construct Asian womanhood. On the other hand, she attends to those moments when these women break from ornamentalism or employ ornamentation for their benefit in the face of spectacle ethnographic entertainment, such as the slum tours and immigration exposés popular in turn-of-the-century Western media. Ultimately, she manipulates the exhibitory nature of ornamentalism in her narratives, showing the contradictory ways her characters negotiate the terms of ornamentalism while also critiquing media representations of China and its people as despotic and primitive.

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