Disability, Shared Vulnerability, and Care Communities in <i>Mrs. Spring Fragrance</i>

Edith Maude Eaton wrote “The Chinese Lily” and “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” while writing in a discursive context shaped by violent socio-political forces that encoded disease and danger in foreign bodies. The mainstream scholarship on Eaton’s life and work focuses on the author’s diasporic positionality, and the few scholars who explore disability in Eaton’s work approach it metaphorically, highlighting its negative attributes as a manifestation of imperial forces. Informed by disability studies and Asian American studies, this article examines two of Eaton’s short stories in which disability appears neither as a stigmatic label that marks inferiority or danger nor as a symptom of imperial violence, but as a fundamental part of human experience. Using the trope of shared vulnerability as an aesthetic and analytical frame, this article argues that Eaton’s immigrant figures use disability as a source of empowerment that allows them to share vulnerability, build unexpected care communities, and resist the combined forces of racism and ableism. Ultimately, the argument is that in Eaton’s literary reimagination of immigrant lives, sharing vulnerability is an act of resistance and subversion.