"The Japanese in America"

16 March 2022: “Sometimes I dream of the day when all of us will be world citizens—not citizens merely of petty portions of the earth, showing our teeth at each other, snarling, sneering, biting, and with the ambition of the murderer at our heart’s core—every man with the savage instinct of the wild beast to get the better of his brother—to prove his greater strength—his mightier mind—the superiority of his color." --Onoto Watanna, "The Japanese in America," p. 177

I've been working on my book's entry on Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) and boy, is she interesting. The lines above--from the closing of an essay first published in 1907--are striking for a number of reasons. For instance, they make me think of works by her contemporaries like Zitkala Sa or W.E.B. DuBois who also speak of dreams of racial equality. 

But they also stand out to me because--spatially--she spends so much more time on the nastiness (from "showing our teeth" onward) than the dream. She was a Canadian/American with British and Chinese roots who presented herself as Japanese writer, a fraught choice that gave her access and some degree of agency. She knew how to speak to white writers with essentialist notions, exploiting them to sell books and pay her bills. She was, in fact, quite good at it. But those very choices that led to her success must have left her feeling quite cynical at times, which we can see, I think, in those lines above.  

Work Cited

Watanna, Onoto. “A Half-Caste” and Other Writings, edited by Linda Trinh Moser, U of Illinois P, 2003.