"Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasion" is a short autobiographical memoir by Edith Maude Eaton, who published work under the name Sui Sin Far. To call herself "Eurasian" is really to simplify Far's racial heritage; she was a British-Chinese-Canadian-American, and her experiences of never fitting into any of these racial groups or communities forms the basis of both her life and her memoir. Although she penned the memoir in 1890 it was not published until almost twenty years later, in 1909.
Far was born in the north of England, in a working town, to Edward Eaton, a merchant, and Grace "Lotus Blossom" Trefusis, the daughter of missionaries. The two met in Shanghai whilst Edward was on a business trip. They had fourteen children, and Far was the second oldest. Far's childhood was very nomadic, and whilst her experiences in each of the nations that her parents settled them in was similar - constantly having to learn the ropes of everyday life and meet new friends in each new place - they were also similar in the way that Far felt the effects of prejudice against her in every one of them. They left England in the early 1870s, living first in New York then in Montreal, where they struggled financially (after all, fourteen growing children are not cheap to feed) and where the older children left school in order to work and help support the family. They were instead home schooled and their home environment was one which intellectually stimulated all of the children. Both Far and her sister Winifred became successful authors, both drawing on their ancestry and their current experiences for their work, both fiction and non-fiction.
Far wrote both fictional stories and journalistic observational pieces, and was one of North America's first successful novelists of Chinese-American heritage.
