Mrs Spring Fragrance

            Probably because I went to bed after midnight on Wednesday, only five and a half hours after getting up from a siesta that I couldn’t get to sleep. On top of that I suddenly had a pain in my right shoulder that made it very difficult to lie on my left side because I couldn’t find a comfortable position for my right arm. Of course I couldn’t turn onto my right side as an alternative either. This was a similar problem to the one that I had four years ago in approximately the same part of my body, though I think the pain is more pronounced this time. Back then I went to physiotherapy for a while though I’m not certain that it did any good. Maybe the physio is why the problem eventually went away or maybe it just subsided. If it persists over the next few weeks I might consider the physio again.

            The next morning the ache was still there but it didn’t prevent me from doing any yoga poses or playing my guitar. In the afternoon, when I went to bed for a siesta, that moment of lying down was the most excruciating limitation. I was able though to find one position for my arm that did not cause me pain and so I got some rest.

            I woke up just in time to get ready to leave for English class. It was too warm to wear my leather jacket, so I stuffed my long sleeved shirt in my backpack, but after that I still had nine minutes, so I went out to the liquor store and bought a can of Creemore, just in case the professor let us out at 21:00 this time. I got home with three minutes to spare and rode downtown.

            I sat in the courtyard of 160 College and noticed there is a bird nest in the shiny glass tower between the windows of two floors. One of the many older students whose name was Steve was sitting just to my left on the bench and struck up a conversation. He asked if I’d read the Sui Sin Far story and wanted to know what I’d thought of it. I told him that it was an interesting study of the situation for first generation middleclass Chinese immigrants in North America. I liked the way she used the translation of the Chinese surname for Mrs Spring Fragrance.

            Steve wondered why only a small group of people make comments in class. I observed that most of the people that speak up are older like we are and that the reason the younger ones don’t do so is because it’s really their first time out in the world after living with their parents their whole lives. Middle-aged people have the advantage of having lived on their own for a long time and learning over the years how to make themselves heard.

            In the first half of class we looked at the ending of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and at how Edna’s apparent drowning was foreshadowed early on. Like Cather’s “Paul’s Case”, the story is another example deterministic Naturalism and Realism.

            Realism is the opposite of the idealism of romantic fiction, with ordinary people as opposed to noble heroes. Realistic characters could exist and their situations could occur. Naturalism makes the cultural and circumstantial situations more powerful than the characters to the point that the characters ultimately lose. Nobody did realism better than the Russians, but also Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy and Stephen Crane.

            Use of alliteration in the description of the sea at the beginning and the end. Her first swim foreshadows her last. Her whole life flashes before her in the end.

            She strips naked for her final swim in the sea. The sea as mother and Edna naked as she was born. The water is another character in the story. Caressing, mythical, Biblical and rapture inducing.

            The end does not seem like an awakening. Was it an awakening to futility?

            What would people think if they found her body? They'd think she was crazy for swimming naked.

            Edna might be pregnant and so the help that the doctor had referred to may have been an abortion.

            Cather thought the story was sordid and trite. She felt the same about Madame Bovary. We are more in Edna's head than in Bovary’s though.

            Was Edna's end a punishment? Does all women's empowerment in the literature of this era have to end in death to be acceptable. For men as well, suicide is a grand gesture fort literary heroes. The decision was made for Edna.

            Why does Robert not marry her? It would compromise his social standing to steal another man's wife.

            Edna seems French to me. There's an eccentricity about her that doesn't was with her character being Anglo Saxon Protestant.

            Gloria Steinem was asked how things have changed for women. Her answer was, “We don't have to think we're crazy anymore.”

            We took a break. The basement washroom was flooded but not enough to penetrate my boots.

            The smell of Purell was very strong in the classroom when I returned.

            After the break we looked at Sui Sin Far, who was the first Asian voice in US literature.

            She was half Chinese and identified as Eurasian. It wouldn’t have earned her favour to do so, especially when she published “Mrs Spring Fragrance” in 1912 when Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories featuring racist depictions of Chinese people were first published. Her family moved from England to New York and then Montreal when she was a child. She became a working writer in Montreal and then travelled and published throughout the United States where she spent a lot of time in the Chinese communities, learning the culture but never fully the language. She infused her writing with exoticism to impress white audiences. Because of ill health she finally returned home to Montreal where she died at the age of 49. The Chinese community of Montreal erected a monument for her where she is buried in the Mount Royal Cemetery. Scott says there’s a statue of her in a park in Montreal, but I can’t find a reference.

            Mrs. Spring Fragrance has learned English till there are no more words for her learning. She has fully assimilated. She is a hybrid who has learned to adapt and plays the traditional matchmaker but in a modern North American way.

            I was wrong that “Spring Fragrance” is a translation of their Chinese surname. But looking this up I see that husbands and wives tend not to have the same last name in Chinese marriages. The wife keeps her surname to honour her father. Mrs Spring Fragrance’s husband though is called Mr. Spring Fragrance. Maybe it’s a literary device to show that she is the dominant personality.

            In the United States the anti-Miscegenation laws were applied until 1967. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first anti immigration law enforced in the United States and it lasted until 1943. But the act allowed for the naturalization of family members of Chinese US citizens and so Chinese immigrants benefited from the fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because it set off a mass influx of Chinese workers to California.  The aftermath of destroyed documents set off a massive immigration scam that brought thousands of Chinese over from Asia. With so many citizenship documents destroyed, thousands of Chinese immigrants without citizenship came forward to claim that theirs had been lost as well. In the wake of the disaster, the immigration officials had no choice but to take the claimants on their word. A lucrative underground immigration document forging system came into being on both sides of the Pacific, which coordinated to create fake family histories. So even with a ban on Chinese immigration, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants got through anyway.

            Mr and Mrs Spring Fragrance were wed as a result of a traditional arranged marriage but before their wedding they had seen one another’s photographs and each fell in love with the other’s image.

            The reference to Tennyson being “an American” poet seems to be a dig at the British. It was maybe also a “they all look alike” joke.  Tennyson’s famous line, “T'is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” from “In Memoriam A.H.H.” is most frequently applied to romantic love, though it’s about the death of a friend rather than a lover. The quote has so much meaning in its original context but seems silly when applied, as it usually is, to romance.

            Mrs Spring Fragrance has lost two children in a community where children are a rarity and yet she still seems happy go lucky. This is a light story that is not trying to convey trauma.

            The letter she sends to her husband is part of the 18^th Century tradition of conveying realism through letters. She is manipulative without being negative, which makes it funny.

            Mr Spring Fragrance’s brother is referred to as being in a detention house in San Francisco. This is probably San Quentin Prison. Mrs Spring Fragrance’s letter urges her husband to forget to remember this. Things are worded this way to make them sweet and easier to swallow. Her humour is similar to that of Mark Twain. This story is meant to be a light comedy of manners.

            Mrs Spring Fragrance navigates a racist culture by being marked as other and dismissed.

            After I got home I heard an argument out on O’Hara. There was a loud couple as well as the Rastafarian guy that hangs out across from the CoffeeTime with his dog. The Rastafarian has suddenly been inflicted with a roughness of voice that might result from some kind of lung problem. At one point I heard screaming and looked out to see the woman running down the street screaming with her boyfriend running after her shouting, “Give me back my phone!” She tossed the phone in the air behind her and it landed on the streetcar tracks. Later they were standing together in the driveway, reconciling. The Rastafarian guy walked by, saying goodnight to them. A little later the boyfriend said to the girlfriend, “At least I’m not a nigger!”