China and the Fad for Japan in Onoto
Watanna’s Chinese-Japanese Cook Book
In 1914, popular novelist Onoto Watanna with her sister, Sara Bosse,
published Chinese-Japanese Cook Book, one of the very first Asian cookbooks
to be offered to the American public. According to Diana Birchall, Onoto
Watanna’s granddaughter and biographer, the text was probably written entirely
by Onoto Watanna, for Bosse was an artist and not a writer, and the novelist’s
unmistakable style is evident throughout the cookbook. It seems likely that
Bosse contributed many of the recipes which she could have obtained from
friends or from Chinese and Japanese restaurants in New York City where she
was a member of a circle of artists. Although most of the Chinese recipes had
been published earlier, in magazine articles ostensibly written by Bosse, these
were also probably written by Onoto Watanna. By this time, “the first Japanese
novelist in the United States” was famous; her romances set in Japan, written
over a fifteen-year period, had found a sizable audience during a time when
Japan and its art were in vogue in the United States. Most of her fans would
have been shocked to learn she was not Japanese, as she had repeatedly asserted,
but half Chinese and half English, a native of Montreal whose name was
actually Winnifred Eaton. Further, Eaton had had little contact with Asian
culture, her mother having been brought to England from China by an English
couple when she was a young child. She and her siblings had spent their
childhood in Montreal, having no contact with any Chinese outside their family,
living among working-class European immigrants.
In the 1890s, when the young Eaton launched her writing career, she
found it convenient to pose as Japanese in order to avoid America’s virulent
prejudice for the Chinese and also to take advantage of the ongoing fascination
with Japan. By the time she and Bosse would collaborate on the cookbook,
although demand for items in the Japanese style remained fairly high, had
become clear that Americans had discovered Chinese cooking. However,
although numerous Chinese restaurants had sprung up, Japanese dishes were
rarely available. Eaton interpreted this phenomenon as an indication that
America’s fascination with Japanese culture would eventually extend to the
Chinese. While the project of the cookbook was undoubtedly motivated by the
recent surge in the popularity of Chinese cooking, she clearly hoped to use her
power as Onoto Watanna to introduce Americans to Chinese and Japanese
dishes and to subtly influence them to overcome their prejudice for the Chinese.
Cultural critics today view turn-of-the-century America’s fascination
with Japan as an expression of “orientalism,” famously defined by Edward Said
as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
Orienf’ (3). Eaton’s novels, too, have frequently been connected with this form
of racism. Dominika Ferens, for example, observes that “By becoming Onoto