Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912)

“Hsuan L. Hsu has done a great service to any reader interested in the work of Sui Sin Far, Chinese American life, or American racial attitudes. Hsu combines the complete text of Sui Sin Far’s groundbreaking fiction collection with a thoughtful selection of documents from the turn of the century that illuminate how Americans saw Chinese immigrants. The result is a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, and students.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen, University of Southern California

“Before this informative and meticulously researched critical edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, learning about Sui Sin Far was arduous, even though the number of publications on her work has been growing steadily since the 1990s. With this book in hand, readers who encounter Sui Sin Far for the first time have an enormous head start over those of us who worked with musty fragments scattered in distant archives. Hsuan L. Hsu gives us not only the story collection composed by Sui Sin Far herself, in which each story provides a context for the others; in the appendices he also provides a rich selection of period texts and images that will inspire teachers, students, and researchers.” — Dominika Ferens, author of Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances