* Coffee….the smell of a fresh brew makes me want to go on a long road trip…up and down the West Coast of the US of A…
* The Eaton Sisters …
I’m reading about the Eurasian sisters and writers Edith and Winnifred Eaton – who wrote under the pen name “Onoto Watanna”. I’m reading Diana Birchall’s biography on Winnifred at the moment and am completely fascinated by her life story. Birchall is Eaton’s grand daughter. Edith and Winnifred were one of 14 children born to a Chinese mother and English father. Both became writers but whereas Edith chose to identify with her mother’s people and write about Chinese people as an almost insider, and under the pen name Sin Siu Far, Winnifred chose to construct a half-Japanese persona and write about Japanese people and culture – though also as a Eurasian almost insider.
Reading about these two women reminded me of 1996 (?) Eric Liu’s musings, in The Accidental Asian, on how his Eurasian children will have the option to identify with, claim, discard their Chinese/White identities because they are visibly bi-cultural. I’m completely in awe of Winnifred’s audacity. She must have been quite a character. Birchall biography documents her later life and she had very sad and complex relationships with her sons. There’s the argument that Edith’s writing is more contemporary in that she writes about race and cultural issues the way someone in this era would, and that Winnifred’s plays into what we now identify as very Orientalised images of the East…but I don’t think that we have broken out of the latter. I can see how it happens. The audience almost expects it. Edith published one short story collection because she died relatively young. Winnifred died in her 80s. She also wrote under an Irish pen name later on in life.
* Victorian Mental Asylums in Epsom, Surrey.
I spent some of my formative years in Epsom because my parents were migrant workers at the asylums there.
Here’s a BBC story about how typhoid female patients were locked up at Long Grove. They were sane to begin with… It would have been so scary being locked up with the criminally insane. I remember Dad said there were older patients there who weren’t mentally ill, at least not to begin with, but may have been placed there because they couldn’t speak English. He mentioned a Polish patient who remained in England after one of the wars.
The people we knew were all nurses or domestics from the hospital, and all were non-English. They did the work no one else wanted to do. My parents knew people used the work visa as a stepping stone to other occupations or life choices. In fact a few of them were so embarrassed that they ever wiped a mental patient’s arse and do such menial work, that they denied ever having lived in the town after they became bankers and stock brokers etc.. One of them was my bank manager uncle. Our family friends were Irish, Spanish, Italian, Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese…There were possibly other ethnic groups but I don’t remember.
I’m looking for more information about these asylums as this is where I spent a lot of my childhood…waiting for my parents to finish work. I was in the creche, smuggled into the kitchens. I remember the Great Hall. I remember picking apples and chestnuts off the orchard trees. Maybe I’m romanticizing the English meadows, but I remember driving along a road lined with large oak trees or maybe they were willow trees. I’ve never been much of a botanist. Most of all, I remember being completely fascinated by the patients. There are two occasions that I remember quite vividly and I think it’s because they were the only occasions where people were acting “insane”. I remember hanging around one of my cousins who worked there briefly and taking swigs of his Guinness whilst walking in and out to watch him attempt to tinkle with the engine of his Morris Minor.
It’s funny how up until recently, I never really thought about my time in England. I seem to have more of a connection to a place I have no conscious memories of than I do of England. I forget that my experiences growing up here and feeling rather alien isn’t just because of my ethnic background – it was because not only did I look different, I also sounded different. That and I stopped hanging out at insane asylums.
