Mark Twain in China 9780804794756

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Mark Twain in China

Mark Twain in China selina lai-henderson

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lai-Henderson, Selina, author.   Mark Twain in China / Selina Lai-Henderson.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-8047-8964-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Knowledge—Chinese Americans. 2. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 3. Twain, Mark, 1835– 1910—Appreciation—China. 4. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Influence. 5. Chinese Americans in literature. 6. Race relations in literature. I. Title.   ps1342.c48l35 2015   818'.409—dc23 2014042785 isbn 978-0-8047-9475-6 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/13 Galliard

For Seth Henderson and my family

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1. Sam Clemens the Missourian: Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”

11

2. From the Mississippi to the Big Sea: Voyages Across the Pacific

33

3. Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer: Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist

53

4. Lighting Out for the Pacific: Mark Twain’s Posthumous Journey Across China

75

5. Translation, Appropriation, and Continuation: Huck Finn’s Chinese Adventures in the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond

101

Epilogue

123

Notes Bibliography Index

131 149 159

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the unwavering support and guidance of two intellectual giants and dear mentors indeed—Kendall Johnson and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, whose vision, breadth of knowledge, and dedication have made many of my dreams become possible. Their provocative questions and insights have opened my eyes to refreshing approaches to American literature, the history of US-China relationships and attitudes, and studies of transnationalism. I thank Kendall for his presence and much needed encouragement during a most critical period of my research, and Shelley for her ample care, wisdom, and generosity during my Fulbright visit at Stanford University. Their belief in me until this day has given me the confidence to move forward. John R. Haddad, Renford R. Reese, Wayne Cristaudo, and Sander L. ­Gilman each played an indispensable role in shaping my research in its preliminary stages. Their wit and encouragement offered me an invaluable platform to start a work that would go many miles. I wish especially to thank Rob Wilson, whose encouragement from the start and insight on Mark Twain’s relationship with Hawaii have inspired me to continue to challenge my intellectual limits. I am equally indebted to Joseph Poon, who often took time away from his busy schedule to share his knowledge on issues concerning Chinese translation, China, and Sino-US relations. Thanks are due to Reid Mitchell and Adam Radford, who both read my work in its entirety, and provided me with some of the most perceptive thoughts I received on each of the chapters. I greatly appreciate the efforts of Gregg Camfield, Otto Heim, and Daniel Vukovich in going through my work with ­meticulous care, and raising questions that were crucial to the further development of my project. I am also deeply grateful for the

x  /  Acknowledgments

kindness and support of Tim Gruenewald, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Louise Edwards, Su Yun Kim, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Staci Ford, John Wong, Zhang Yun, Neil Drave, Page Richards, Stefan Auer, John Whalen-Bridge, Gordon Chang, Chris Suh, Jennifer S. Cheng, Selena Dramlic, Anna Costa, Doreen Dong Xiaoxi, Xu Guoqi, Julia Kuehn, Karin Chau, Martin Chung, John Young, Cindy Julien, Sanne Lim, Johanna Gereke, David Hill, Kathryn (Kate) Rogers, Jane Chen, Vivian Lai, Dominique Mas, Amy Ng, John Liu, Gigi Chung, Jenny Chan, Blair Reeve, Jeffrey Brown, and Akin Jeje, with whom I have shared a great many inspiring conversations about Mark Twain in China and around the world. I must extend a million warm thanks to my editors at Stanford University Press—Emily-Jane Cohen for her strong belief in the project, Gigi Mark for taking great care of the editorial and production work for the manuscript, Friederike Sundaram for providing prompt responses of all kinds, and Elspeth MacHattie for offering such meticulous editorial advice. Their support from the initial through the final stages of the publication of my work means the world to me. I thank Wang An-chi for sending me a beautiful copy of her recent translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Luo Xuanmin for responding to important questions about the reception of Mark Twain and his work in China. My gratitude is due to the Fulbright Program, the Hong Kong-America Center, Leslie Chung and the Philomathia Foundation, and Queensland University’s Three Minute ­Thesis competition for sponsoring my research at Stanford University. My year at Stanford veritably broadened my horizons, not only in academic research, but also in teaching and collaboration. My family has been immeasurably patient over the course of my research. I am deeply indebted to their understanding and care while I was away from home, and their undivided support through the years. Last but not least, my journey would not have been the same without my husband, Seth Henderson. The tremendous amount of conversation we have had about Twain and China has made my work a truly special experience. I also thank him for spending endless hours editing my work and offering impartial advice. His compassion, patience, love, and faith in me are the most valuable gifts I could ever receive.

A Note on Translations All of the English translations from Chinese materials in this book, unless stated otherwise, are my own.

Mark Twain in China

Introduction

Adventure is a path. Real adventure—self-determined, self-motivated, often risky—forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind—and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white. Mark Jenkins, A Man’s Life: Dispatches from Dangerous Places

In the midst of writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Mark Twain remarked that “my tank has run dry; it was empty; the stock of materials was exhausted; the story could not go on.”1 Little did he imagine that this novel and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), would become one of his most remembered and still studied texts today. By the time he passed away on April 21, 1910, he had published an overwhelming body of work that has continued to inform and enrich the literary scene in ­America and elsewhere. Apart from over thirty books and pamphlets and easily three to four thousand newspaper and magazine articles, he also wrote hundreds of thousands of words in letters and other documents that he did not publish. In libraries and private collections around the world, there are at least nine thousand personal and business letters of his—a fifth of the approximately fifty thousand letters he penned—and new ones are still being found every week.2 In 2010, a century after his death, this American writer was again making headlines with the release of his autobiography.

2  /  Introduction

Twain had stipulated that the unpublished parts of this memoir not be released until 2010. At that time Robert H. Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, remarked that “more than half of it has still never appeared in print.” 3 As of this writing, the first two volumes have been published, in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and the remaining volume is expected to be released in 2015. Mark Twain is ubiquitous; his work can be found in many bookstores and his name is familiar to people in many corners of the world. Yet while much has been said about this great American writer, much has still been left unsaid. While a simple Google search on the name “Mark Twain” easily generates an impressive 69,000,000 results—with topics ranging from The Complete Works of Mark Twain, the Mark Twain Award, the Mark Twain Circle of America, Halley’s Comet (which was visible at the time of Twain’s birth and death), Hal Holbrook’s one-man show Mark Twain Tonight, Val Kilmer’s recent performance of Citizen Twain in Los Angeles, the Mark Twain Cave Complex (in Hannibal, Missouri), Mark Twain’s New York Walking Tour, an essay called “Mark Twain and the Art of Swearing,” and Mark Twain classroom activities from PBS to even Mark Twain’s Insurance Services (in Stockton and Angels Camp, California), and Mark Twain’s Pizza (in Metairie, Louisiana)—none of the results detail his lifelong interest in and relationship with the Chinese. Just as his countrymen have long claimed him as the “quintessential American writer,” many others across the Pacific have embraced him as a brave American author who spoke up on many occasions on behalf of the Chinese.4 Lu Xun (鲁迅), widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature, writes in his preface to the 1931 Chinese translation of Twain’s Eve’s Diary: Twain became a humorist in order to live, but he imbued humor with bitterness and sarcasm in order to show that he was not satisfied with that kind of life. This little bit of revolt, however, is enough to make the children of New Land [the Soviet Union] laugh and claim: Mark Twain is ours.5

Lao She (老舍), the first Chinese writer to be selected for the Nobel Prize in literature (in 1968), commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Twain’s death by highlighting Twain’s bravery in speaking up against American imperialism: “Twain always stood on the side of the American people and the people of the world as well. As we are commemorating him today, we feel as if he were still standing among us, struggling side by side with us against the imperialists headed by the United States.”6 Twain is widely studied

Introduction  /  3

and discussed in Chinese classrooms and scholarship, and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are among the foreign works most frequently translated into Chinese. Huckleberry Finn alone has been translated into Chinese no fewer than ninety times. Including the reprints of some of the translations would bring the number to over a hundred different editions traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is certainly hard to imagine the number of translations of this one work of Twain’s coming close to such a staggering figure anywhere else in the world. The continuing popularity of Twain in China has much to do with an interesting connection that he had with the country and its people throughout his life. Although he never visited China, he played a vital role in speaking up for the Chinese in America and abroad. Twain’s relationship with China is intriguing not only because it is little known to the ­public, but also because it reveals a significant transition that he underwent in his attitude toward the Chinese as a result of his global travels. At the age of seventeen, when the young Samuel Langhorne Clemens left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, he described the Chinese that he saw for the first time in New York as “human vermin.”7 About a decade later, in 1864, while working as a journalist in San Francisco, he can often be found commenting on racism toward the Chinese in America. The oppression of the Chinese people by the police and by Irish workers that he was regularly witnessing in San Francisco led him to question attitudes involving race that ran counter to the founding ideals of his country. Upon returning home in 1900 from his trip around the world and longtime stay in Europe, Twain experienced yet another major shift in his ­racial attitudes, this time inflected by his disgust with Western ­imperialism. Announcing himself as an anti-imperialist and a Chinese Boxer against American and European imperialism, he also became vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League. In one of his anti-imperialist writings, “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), he urged American missionaries to leave China, for they should “come home and convert these ­Christians!”8 From ridiculing the American oppression of Chinese immigrant workers in his early writings, such as “What Have the Police Been Doing?” (1866) and “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad again” (1870), to strongly denouncing European and American aggression in the Far East, Twain showed sustained attention to the social conditions of the Chinese diaspora. While most Chinese scholars and readers tend to neglect Twain’s early perception of and prejudice toward the Chinese, this book calls attention to the important correlation between the writer’s moral journey and the

4  /  Introduction

posthumous impact of his work in China, and also emphasizes the necessity to consider this transition as we examine the reasons for Twain’s lasting popularity there. Indeed, should Clemens have never left the South, it is unlikely that he would have felt the need to write about his country’s unfair treatment of the Chinese in the West, let alone speaking up for them and against America’s aggression in the Far East upon returning home from his decade-long sojourn in Europe. Rather than being viewed largely as a humorist, as he is in the United States, Twain is seen in China as a courageous anti-imperialist and a dear friend; this salient image continues to appear frequently in Chinese scholarship and prefaces to his translated works. Half a century after the appearance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), at a banquet held by the International Mark Twain Society on November 30, 1935, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Twain’s birth, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthused: Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas. There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than mountains to look at with his restless eyes—he wanted to find out about men and how they lived together. And because he turned back we have him forever.9

Fitzgerald’s remark about Huck’s journey, crossing the American frontier then looking back at St. Petersburg, is evocative as it invites important discussions of how Huck’s travels influence the ways he looks at where he comes from. When Fitzgerald wrote “the perspective of the west,” he was essentially referring to the perspective Twain adopted, as Huck has never been to the West in the novel. Nevertheless, Huck’s travel across state borders from St. Petersburg, Missouri (which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain grew up), to Pikesville, Arkansas, and his moral adventure of helping Jim attain freedom reflect a similar journey that involves a few transitions that Clemens himself went through regarding race and slavery. As William Dean Howells, Twain’s good friend, remarks in “Mark Twain: An Inquiry” (1901), “one of the most notably Southern traits of Mark Twain’s humor is its power of seeing the fun of Southern seriousness, but this ­vision did not come to him till after his liberation from neighborhood in the vaster far West.”10 While going West helped Clemens begin to view his Southern hometown with more objectivity, going abroad allowed him to look back at America with a more critical eye. Tellingly, and contrary to what most people believe, Twain’s first writings against American racism dealt with the oppression of the Chinese rather

Introduction  /  5

than that of black Americans. Growing up in an environment where people of Anglo-Saxon descent were assumed to be superior and black people were believed to be natural servants, Clemens understandably had “no aversion to slavery.” His immediate family owned slaves, and so did his uncle, of whom he spoke highly as a person. His mother, too, however kind-hearted and compassionate, as he later recalled in his autobiography, “was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation.”11 In other words, if the racism that he witnessed in California had targeted black people instead of Chinese, it is indeed unlikely that he would have undergone the same level of transformation that he did; the familiar racial dynamics might not have elicited such a strong epiphany in the first place. Of course, it would be preposterous to say that US racism toward the Chinese played a stronger role than racism toward black Americans in Clemens’s writing and his racial views; after all, his most famous work, Huckleberry Finn, and a number of his newspaper and magazine articles deal specifically with relations between blacks and whites in the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that the oppression of the Chinese in California prompted him to write satires that were, in effect, a rehearsal for his satires focused on racism toward African Americans lays before us a fruitful perspective from which to examine his intricate relationship with the ­Chinese.12 Furthermore, looking at the Chinese translations of Twain’s writings can give us insight into both the writings themselves and the social and cultural history of modern China. My work then fills this important gap in Twain scholarship, American literature, and transnational studies by pointing to the repercussions of the work of a most influential American author across a global theater. As early as 1913, H. L. Mencken hailed Twain as the “true father of our national heritage, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal.”13 In 1935, Ernest Hemingway famously concurred: “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”14 Two decades later, in 1955, William Faulkner ­revered Twain as “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.”15 Given the importance of Twain in America and American letters, as well as the continuous interest in this writer and his works around the world, a discussion of the relationship between Twain and China should inspire more engaging dialogues on Twain as a global figure. Over the past two decades, articles by Twain scholars such as Hsuan L. Hsu, Xilao Li, Hsin-yun Ou, Martin Zehr, and Darren Chiang-­Schultheiss have offered us insightful perspectives on Twain’s connection with the Chinese.16 Chinese-language scholarship, too, despite its much shorter

6  /  Introduction

discussions, has initiated some refreshing conversations on the topic. Scholars such as Li Xinchao, Zhang Lin, Chen Mei, Wang Xiaojie, and Shi Weiming have published articles that look at Twain’s representation of the Chinese and the Chinese translations of his works.17 These articles, understandably, tend to focus on specific works by Twain during a particular period or to present a chronological overview of the Chinese translations of Huckleberry Finn; they do not look at Twain’s connection with the Chinese during his lifetime. My work expands on these discussions by exploring the adventures of Clemens in Chinese communities in the United States, his response to events involving the Chinese in China, and China’s response to him as Mark Twain in his posthumous voyage across the Pacific. In 2010, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great ­Writers on His Life and Work insightfully examined Twain as a global figure by putting together essays on him by writers around the world. This collection opened important ways for future Twain scholars to take a transnational approach to this writer; indeed, this is where my work departs from existing discussions on Twain. Combining English-language and Chinese-language scholarship, I look at how Twain and his works are perceived in both the United States and China, and how readers’ different socio-political, historical, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds shape their understanding of Twain and his achievement. To understand Twain more fully, it is crucial to situate him not only in his own country, but also beyond national borders, and to look at scholarship not just in English, but also in the languages in which he is being studied and read around the world. It would be illuminating to ask, for instance, why “Running for Governor” is more often taught in high schools in China and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is more often taught in US schools, and why Huckleberry Finn is banned from American libraries from time to time, while China has had no problem with translating, publishing, and teaching it since its first translation. My book comprises five chapters: the first three chapters focus on Twain’s lifelong connection with China and his writings about the Chinese in America; the last two chapters explore the posthumous influence and popularity of Twain and his work in China. Chapter 1, “Sam Clemens the Missourian: Early Acquaintances with ‘Chinamen,’” begins with Clemens’s adventures in the American West in the 1860s. What Clemens witnessed in the frontier territory would contradict the founding ideals that he once learned as a child in Missouri. The everyday scenes of the oppression of the Chinese by the police and the Irish in the streets of San Francisco compelled him to reflect upon a country that was founded on democratic ideals but was

Introduction  /  7

also, ironically, plagued by racism. In 1870, the thirty-four-year-old Twain married and settled down with Olivia Langdon in New York. The Langdon family, especially the father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, with their abolitionist views, played an important role in influencing Twain’s attitude toward race and slavery. Around the same time, an important influence on Twain regarding the use of Chinese protagonists in his work was Bret Harte, and the two collaborated on the play Ah Sin (1877). After long neglect and a paucity of discussion of this work, there has been a recent revival of interest in it in both English and Chinese Twain scholarship, I devote the last section of this chapter to exploring this joint venture of two of America’s most influential writers of their time. I consider why it failed, and what significance it had in representing Chinese immigrants in America. Looking at both the American and the Chinese reception of the play, I argue that works of scholarship that denigrate the play as racist, and thus undermine the idea that Twain was taking the Chinese seriously, tend to be works that neglect Twain’s anti-imperialism. Chapter 2, “From the Mississippi to the Big Sea: Voyages Across the Pacific,” examines the impact of two Pacific voyages that Twain undertook on his attitude toward the racial other, particularly the Chinese. On his first voyage Twain was sent by a newspaper, the Sacramento Union, as a correspondent to the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Islands) in 1866, and at that time he viewed US annexation of the islands as necessary, and was convinced that the importation of Chinese “coolie” labor to the island plantations would lift American workers out of the “drudgery which all white men abhor and are glad to escape from.”18 It was on this trip that Twain became friends with Anson Burlingame, then US Minister to China (1861– 1867). Although Burlingame himself was a supporter of US annexation, he was also a strong advocate for the rights of Chinese immigrant workers. He certainly helped to deepen Twain’s understanding of and acquaintance with the Chinese. By the time Twain revisited the Sandwich Islands, thirty years later in 1895 as part of his lecture tour along the equator, he had become increasingly skeptical of first European and then American colonization by means of economic dominance and missionary involvement in foreign territories. The two trips he took across the Pacific underpin a significant transition that he experienced in his attitudes toward the Chinese. While some of Twain’s life events discussed in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 overlap one another in terms of chronology, the first chapter focuses on Twain’s relationship with the Chinese on the American mainland, whereas the second chapter delineates the cultural and ethnic diversity Twain encountered

8  /  Introduction

beyond the American shore that complicated the racial assumptions he grew up with in the slave-holding South. Chapter 3, “Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer: Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist,” discusses Twain’s anti-imperialist position and his involvement with the American Anti-Imperialist League at the time he returned from his longtime residence in Europe in 1900 (he was sixty-four). Twain was infuriated by what he realized was happening globally as imperial powers, including the United States, were taking land by force, not only from the Chinese, but also from Filipinos, Cubans, and other people of color through wars of aggression rather than liberation. This period would mark a major transformation in Twain’s racial views in ways that he probably never expected. Those he once perceived as “human vermin” turned out to be more noble than many of the so-called “civilized” people. Admitting to once being a “red-hot imperialist,” he returned home not only denouncing Anglo-Saxon imperialism, but also publicly lending his support to the Chinese. This chapter discusses a few important anti-­ imperialist pieces that he wrote, such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” “To My Missionary Critics,” and “The United States of Lyncherdom,” and examines the factors that led Clemens to take issue with the Reverend William Ament and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). It ends with an analysis of Twain’s rarely discussed piece “The Fable of the Yellow Terror” and some of the Chinese responses to Twain and his work. Chapter 4, “Lighting Out for the Pacific: Mark Twain’s Posthumous Journey Across China,” explores the Chinese socio-historical and political background into which Twain was first introduced, what his work meant to the Chinese when it first appeared, and why it appealed to them. Twain’s work came to China at a time when the nation was undergoing a series of westernization reforms due to its multiple defeats by foreign powers throughout the nineteenth century. Thus Twain and his works were introduced to the Chinese at a phenomenally critical moment, and his work indispensably contributed to the early process of bringing transnationalism into the Chinese literary community, across China, Japan, and the United States. Early Chinese translations of Twain were, in fact, based on Japanese versions instead of the original English versions. Notably, Liang Qichao, one of the Chinese reformers who introduced Twain to Chinese readers, did so when he was living in exile in Japan following his unsuccessful reform effort in late Qing China. This chapter looks at how Huckleberry Finn, in particular, was used to reform literature, language, and society in early

Introduction  /  9

twentieth-century China and as a political tool during the Cold War era. It also examines the travels of Huck Finn from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), suggesting that translating Twain’s work in these latter places functioned in part, for the translators involved, as a means of distancing themselves from communism and Chinese civilization as it was being constructed in Mainland China at the time. Chapter 5, “Translation, Appropriation, and Continuation: Huck Finn’s Chinese Adventures in the late Twentieth Century and Beyond,” continues the discussion in Chapter 4 by examining specific passages from Huck Finn and exploring how Chinese translators are approaching Twain’s work in the late twentieth century and beyond—how they convey appropriate contexts and elucidate elements that are unfamiliar to Chinese readers. Given the sheer quantity of Chinese translations of Huckleberry Finn, it is simply impossible to go through each and every one of them. Drawing on a few representative works from different periods, I explore some of the challenges that Chinese translators have been confronted with when it comes to translating the language of a fourteen-year-old boy, Pap Finn’s expressions of his racist attitude, and Jim’s black vernacular. I look at how Twain’s work was used to portray America in different spatial and historical ­moments. I focus mainly on Huck Finn because it is the novel by Twain that most interested Chinese scholars and readers. Most of all, it allows us to see how American race relations are being transposed into other cultural contexts, and whether the critiques of racism embodied in Twain’s work are being passed on to readers in China. In the final chapter of Huckleberry Finn, Huck concludes that he has “got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”19 On the surface, it may seem that Huck simply does not want to be confined by the rules and customs of the adult world, but perhaps there is more to what civilization means here. Huck’s refusal to be “­sivilized,” underlined by his inability to spell the word right, is suggestive of his—or rather, Twain’s own—skepticism about white Americans’ construction of the term. My epilogue will present a somewhat different picture of what “sivilization” means when Huck Finn is put into various Chinese contexts—Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and border states such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. It offers an overview of the history and nature of Chinese culture as it relates to views about minorities and about frontiers where different others may be particularly encountered,

10  /  Introduction

and examines how these views are similar to or different from those in the United States, and how they influence the understanding of Huck Finn in China. This analysis suggests that, however ironic, the brilliance and lasting popularity of Twain’s work lies in its being effectively used to suit different political implications, especially in regions whose political and national values conflict with those of the People’s Republic of China.

chapter 1

Sam Clemens the Missourian Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. G. K. Chesterton, “The Riddle of the Ivy,” in Tremendous Trifles

“I am a Boxer too,” Mark Twain remarked at a meeting of the Public Education Association at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York City on November 23, 1900, when he addressed the gathering on the foreign occupation in Manchuria.1 China was then witnessing an increasing number of overseas investments and foreign missionary activities. Many Chinese felt threatened by the intrusion of non-Chinese beliefs into a way of life otherwise deeply rooted in traditional Chinese values and culture. Churches were believed to disrupt feng shui and inflict bad luck, whereas mining and railroad construction were thought to be disturbances to dead ancestors buried underground. In 1898, a group of Chinese from the Shandong province calling themselves Boxers United in Righteousness (義和團 Yihe Tuan), a phrase also translated as Righteous Fists of Harmony or Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, emerged to declare war on foreign powers. Distressed and disgusted by the increasing overseas influences on their native land, Boxers attacked missionaries and other non-Chinese individuals and organizations by destroying their properties and railroad tracks and killing their converts. Under the slogan “Support the Qing, Destroy the Foreign!” (“扶清滅洋” “Fuqing Mieyang”), they called the non-Chinese “ghosts” (鬼子 guizi), and trapped 473 foreign civilians, 400 military personnel, and about 3,000 Chinese converts to Christianity in the Legation Quarter in Beijing on June 19, 1900.2

12  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

Twain was then sixty-four years old, and had already traveled and lived all over the United States and the world. Before returning home from his decade-long residence in Europe, he had traveled to the Eastern Hemisphere to deliver an international lecture series in 1895 and 1896, and he had witnessed European oppression of the native peoples there. Twain was most disillusioned when America obtained colonial control over Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines upon its victory in the SpanishAmerican War (1898), and when it participated in the Eight-Nation Alliance that sent international troops to China to suppress the Boxers. He declared himself an anti-imperialist immediately after he returned to the United States on October 16, 1900, shortly before pronouncing himself a Chinese Boxer at the Berkeley Lyceum.3 For someone growing up in a pre-Civil War, slave-holding town imbued with conservatism and white supremacist ideas, Twain had come a long way by the time he denounced American imperial missions abroad. Young Sam Clemens first left Hannibal at the age of seventeen to work as an itinerant printer and a journalist in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. He wrote in a letter from New York in 1853 to his mother, Jane Clemens, that he saw “[n]iggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street”; “to wade through this mass of human vermin,” he went on, “would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”4 Confronted by the diversity of the different human races, Clemens did not quite know how to place himself in a non-white community, which he apparently still viewed through the eyes of a white Southerner. As he started moving west, Clemens would come across a strong Chinese presence in San Francisco; seeing for the first time the oppression of the Chinese by the police and the Irish workers there compelled him to reflect upon a country that was founded on democratic ideals but was also, ironically, plagued by racism. The everyday episode of witnessing the stoning of a “Chinaman” in the streets of San Francisco sent shock waves through the young Clemens. It prompted him to reevaluate the nature and complexity of racism, which was now no longer confined to the simple context of black and white in Missouri but also affected other races in the United States, and eventually the world. In “Mark Twain’s Historical View at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin rightly argues that it was when Twain was away from home “that he gained the clearest understanding of his own country.” In another, more recent lecture, she

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  13

remarks that Twain’s “encounters with exploitative, abusive power abroad set off trains of recollections that take him home to the slave-holding society in which he had spent his youth.”5 Indeed, Twain’s overseas travels had opened his eyes to the large-scale imperial conquest going on in the Far East, and allowed him to reexamine the problems of hegemony and what it meant to be an American with a more critical and globally informed perspective.

Clemens’s Initial Encounters with the Chinese in the American West Twain’s initial, albeit still minimal, interest in the Chinese started as he was working as a journalist for Iowa’s Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. With this job, he had the opportunity to write about all kinds of things, including an “enchantingly beautiful” sunset scene in China displayed at an exhibition in Wyman’s Hall.6 However, it was not really until he headed west to work for his brother Orion in Nevada that he became aware of the strong Chinese presence in America. As he writes in Roughing It (1872), “Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia [Nevada]—it is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. . . . There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen on the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia.”7 Chinese immigrants first arrived on the West Coast during the gold rush in the late 1840s. Apart from mining, railroad construction was another reason for the influx of Chinese immigrants, who believed that they would receive higher wages and better employment opportunities in the United States than at home. In 1853 San Francisco, there were only fortytwo Chinese residents; that number skyrocketed to almost four thousand two years later and to about forty thousand in 1882.8 It is estimated that in the 1860s, 90 percent of the workforce building the Central Pacific Railroad was Chinese.9 According to Eric Foner in A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863–1877, thirty-five thousand miles of track were laid between 1865 and 1873, which “opened vast new areas to extend their [cities’] economic sway over agricultural hinterlands.” Creating opportunities for overnight millionaires, such as Collis P. Huntington, James J. Hill, and Jay Gould, the railroad “acted as a nationalizing force, sharply reducing transportation costs and establishing a vast national market that, within a quarter century, helped make the United States the world’s pre-eminent

14  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

industrial nation.”10 Behind the façade of a fast-growing industrial nation, nonetheless, lie numerous painful tales of the Chinese workers who had to endure harsh working conditions, often under an oppressive work environment. Their contribution to mining, railroad construction, and other industries in the United States was barely recognized.11 After Clemens moved to San Francisco and started writing for the Morning Call, he became increasingly aware of the conditions and sufferings of the Chinese, which were visible in the city streets in broad daylight. The topics about which he wrote range from opium smuggling, human trafficking, railroad construction, and white discrimination and brutality to violence within the Chinese community. Though Clemens was for the most part apprehensive about Chinese immigrants in America, he was also, to say the least, a keen observer of their way of life and culture. These observations were crucial because they planted the seeds for Clemens’s ongoing interest in and understanding of the Chinese and other oppressed people in the decades to come. His work on the Chinese community offered American readers a most valuable window onto a sector of America that was otherwise little cared about and, when it was noticed, often negatively portrayed. Clemens’s adventures in the West allowed him to take a step back and reacquaint himself with his country; what he witnessed on the frontier would contradict the founding ideals that he once learned growing up in the slave-holding South. In fact, his early writings about the Chinese already illustrated this awareness. A lot of these writings, if carefully read, come across as a commentary on America rather than the Chinese community. Perhaps no other remark than what he wrote at the end of “Chinese Slaves” (1864) better captures the overall message: in their smuggling of women as prostitutes, he said, “[o]ur Chinese fellow citizens seem to be acquiring a few good Christian instincts, at any rate.”12 This one-line attack on the American institutions of slavery and Christianity was deliberately subtle in a three-hundred-word passage that otherwise details the number of women smuggled, their physical features, and the conditions in which they lived. Clemens was then a young writer still, and was testing to see how far he could go without jeopardizing his readership. His attacks were subtle also because the full extent of the hypocrisy of his country was as yet unfamiliar to him; he was just beginning to negotiate his false expectations and disappointment. Just like most Americans at the time, Clemens seemed to view the Chinese as exotic, slant-eyed barbarians, skillful imitators incapable of deeper

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  15

intellectual thinking, smelly and unhygienic “heathens” clustering in the Chinese quarters, and so forth. But unlike most of his contemporaries, he also had an equally broad respect for the Chinese and acknowledged it. To cite an example, in “China at the Fair” (1864), he advised “the prudent Christian to treat the monster [a carved image of a Chinese lion] with respect, for it may, possibly, be a Pagan god in disguise.”13 Twain’s comment on the “Pagan god in disguise” would seem funny and therefore not to be taken seriously, but as readers laugh along with him, they are taking sides with him in accepting cultural differences and respecting a religion other than their own. Similarly, while visiting the Chinese Temple in San Francisco in 1864, he was impressed with an “urbane and intelligent interpreter” named Ah Wae, who “speaks good English, and is the outside business man of the tribe—that is, he transacts matters with us barbarians.”14 ­Notable is his reversal of who is “civilized” and who is “barbaric” to subtly place Chinese and Americans on more equal ground. While Twain often praises western civilization from his perspective as a white American, from the same perspective he lauds the superiority of the “barbaric” culture through the use of comedic elements. That Clemens is a humorist extraordinaire needs no further elaboration, but it remains little known that Chinese culture and conditions provided him a crucial site to experiment with writing about politically sensitive issues with not only humor but satire at the beginning of his writing career. In “Our Active Police” (1865), Clemens boldly attempted to describe how an unoffending Chinese rag-picker was almost stoned to death by a gang of boys: “If that unoffending man dies, and a murder has consequently been committed, it is doubtful whether his murderers will be recognized and punished, is it?” He went on sarcastically, “And yet if a Chinaman steals a chicken he is sure to be recognized and punished, through the efforts of one of our active police force.”15 Clemens touched on a similar subject a year later in “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” where he made use of satire as a weapon by inventing ignorant characters who see nothing wrong with police violence and bigotry. In the story, the narrator plays the role of the policeman’s loyal friend, who lauds the police department as “a kind, humane and generous institution,” and comments ignorantly on the police corruption and brutality toward the Chinese population.16 Twain’s satire is in effect an important moral guide that can help his audience to make a conscious decision, often between two extremes—in this case, the racist and brutal police or the innocent and unoffending Chinese. Without being too self-conscious, the readers would slowly see through the problematic

16  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

nature of racism based on the color of one’s skin in a place where all men are said to be created equal. Not surprisingly, Clemens’s outspoken attitude upset the members of the police department in San Francisco, who made the writer’s life difficult and comfortless. Clemens would eventually have to take a vacation by going pocket-mining. Although financially unsuccessful, mining did enrich his life experience, which in turn contributed to the rich backdrop of his work. Sam Clemens, of course, did not overcome his prejudice toward the racial other overnight. The year he wrote “China at the Fair” and just before “Our Active Police” was published, he admitted in a letter to his good friend Dan De Quille that he threw empty beer bottles out of a window at the tin roofs of the Chinese quarter just to test the Chinese reaction and for amusement.17 Although he attacked the abuse of the Chinese by the San Francisco police, he was more concerned about the moral values of the law keepers of his own country than the well-being of the racial other. Sam Clemens’s attitude toward the Chinese up until this point is complex; at best it is ambivalent and at times it is unwelcoming. As the next chapter will convey, while on his first trip across the Pacific as a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866, Twain supported American annexation of the Sandwich Islands and the importation of Chinese coolies as cheap labor for the island plantations to help secure US trade with the Far East. His new friendship with Anson Burlingame would certainly deepen his understanding and awareness of the conditions of Chinese immigrant workers, although it would be a few more decades before he was finally more able to recognize the Chinese—the Boxers in particular—as more than just a racial caricature.

A Western Perspective in the American East Twain attained his first major career and financial success from The Innocents Abroad (1869), and settled down with Olivia (Livy) Langdon in Buffalo, New York, a year later in 1870. The Langdon family had perhaps the most immediate influence on Clemens’s “reconstruction” from a racist white southerner to a socially conscious opponent of racism. Jervis ­Langdon, in particular, had become the kind of father that Clemens never had when he was a child: compassionate, generous, open-minded, and communicative. Most of all, where Clemens’s own father sent abolitionists to jail, Jervis Langdon worked closely with them and even provided sanctuary to runaway slaves. Both morally and materially, as Fishkin notes in Lighting Out for

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  17

the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, “Jervis Langdon was central to the process by which Sam Clemens remade himself into Mark Twain. The heritage of proud antislavery activism Langdon embodied helped goad Twain to raise the questions he had never asked as a child.”18 Aside from financial success, The Innocents Abroad was the first book that gained Twain nationwide and international popularity, and was a milestone for the young writer hoping to establish a place for himself in American letters. Although New England elites would consider his language brash and unrefined, he brought with him frontier experience and stories that aroused the curiosity of many. The American West to the rest of the United States was just as alluring as the Old World. For those who were not able to travel to either place, Twain’s travelogues not only served as excellent travel guides, but also offered humorous and insightful observations comparing the places he visited with the heartland of America. If his unique perspective in The Innocents Abroad came from his ability to differentiate the sham and grandiose from the reality of the Old World, the same is true for his observations of the American West in Roughing It (1872). In this second travelogue, Clemens recalls setting out for the West with the “miners’ dream” that he would see “buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.” However, the romantic picture that he envisioned soon evaporated when gold prospecting turned out not to be so remunerative after all. His “dissipated dreams,” although not specified other than mining, implied various other disappointments as well, most of which perhaps had to do with the racism and injustices that abounded in California. Clemens begins chapter fifty-four by remarking, Ours is the “land of the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won’t let other people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.

What was most disturbing to Twain was not the behavior of the offenders but that of the passersby, who just stood idly watching the show. It was appalling how the act was accepted both legally and morally, as the police did not do the slightest thing to prevent the tragedy; it was little wonder that violent racism started at an early age. For the Chinese, America was not the “land of the free” after all. It was perhaps at this point when ­Clemens became both fascinated and disgusted as well with the witnesses

18  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

to lynchings in the South, and this would form an important background to his most famous work, Huckleberry Finn, and later “The United States of Lyncherdom.” A less violent but also deeply harmful injustice that Twain noticed early on was that Chinese in the United States, along with African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans, were denied the right to vote; he had mentioned this prior to Roughing It in “The Treaty with China” (1868). In “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” Hsuan L. Hsu remarks, If the US West taught Twain an appreciation of vernacular narrative, brash humor, and the social and economic dynamics of boom towns, it also exposed him to volatile scenarios of comparative racialization wherein antiblack laws and customs were adapted to subordinate diverse groups including African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants.19

Twain would address this injustice again, with Bret Harte, in Ah Sin (1877) and subvert this reality in his fictional work. The censorship of his writing about oppression of the Chinese in San Francisco was an unpleasant experience that helped him understand silencing and racism. In his autobiography, Twain recalls submitting an article to the Call that was rejected. It described “some hoodlums chasing and stoning a Chinaman,” and pointed out that “a policeman was observing this performance with an amused interest—nothing more.” Twain remarked, “[u]sually I didn’t want to read in the morning what I had written the night before; it had come from a torpid heart. But this item had come from a live one. There was fire in it and I believed it was literature.”20 Ironically, writing had taught him about the dark side of human nature; he realized that his work had been rejected for publication even though it spoke the truth. The newspaper’s owner, George Barnes, who would later fire ­Clemens because of his outspoken attitude, had banned his article on the basis that the Call “gathered its livelihood from the poor and must respect their prejudices or perish. The Irish were the poor. They were the stay and support of the Morning Call without them the Morning Call could not survive a month—and they hated the Chinamen.”21 Clemens concluded his tirade by declaring, “there isn’t a single male human being in America who is honest.”22 Indeed, it was in the West where Clemens learned that writing with a “sound heart” was not always a recipe for getting into print: it could elicit both silencing and repression.23 Clemens’s messages against racism were often subtle, but one would be remiss not to realize the level of reconstruction that he had gone through at

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  19

this point. In fact, he concludes chapter fifty-four of Roughing It on a rather strong didactic note: No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.

The significance of Roughing It comes partly from its being a work that vividly captures the spirit of the American West but written when Twain had already moved to New York. It was in the East that Twain could more freely express issues that were too sensitive to cover in western media. Addressing an audience that was far removed from the racial scene of ­California, Twain deliberately brought racism to the forefront in the supposedly more “civilized” East. “The spin Twain gives class here,” as Gregg Camfield remarks in The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, is that true gentility is fundamentally humanitarian in spirit, setting up a paradox long an element in social activism in the United States—much reform to broaden access to the institutions of power and prestige in the United States has been instigated by the elites in the name of “improving” those below them.24

In 1870, Twain published three major pieces in The Galaxy, a New York– based magazine, concerning the tension between US citizens and Chinese immigrants: “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” (May), “John Chinaman in New York” (September), and “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” (starting in October). These satires, as Margaret Duckett remarks in Mark Twain & Bret Harte, “appeared at a crucial period in the national struggle against racial prejudice and discrimination.”25 Despite widespread prosperity in the United States during this period, as Foner observes, the unprecedented fortunes accumulated by the captains of commerce and industry helped produce unheard-of inequalities of income. The inexorable tendency toward the mechanization of industry and a large scale of production transformed skilled craftsmen into “tenders of machinery” and threatened to entrench within American life what The Nation called “the great curse of the Old World—the division of society into classes.”26

In 1873, the year after Roughing It was published, the United States experienced an abrupt economic downturn when Jay Cook and Company, a predominant US banking establishment, collapsed as a result of its inability to market millions of dollars’ worth of Northern Pacific Railroad bonds.27 Many mine and factory workers were laid off, while others resisted wage

20  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

cuts and staged violent strikes. The Panic of 1873, in Foner’s words, “had brought European-style class conflict to America.”28 Unlike the conflict in Europe, however, class conflict in America was closely intertwined with large-scale interracial conflicts, as the American workforce comprised a visible immigrant population whose presence was often viewed as threatening, especially when the job market was bleak. American industry, as Walter Licht posits in Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, “was immigrant industry, and the nation’s industrial workforce, which initially had been largely native-born, was re-formed through successive waves of immigration in the late nineteenth century. This had vast implications for American politics writ large and labor politics specifically.”29 As Camfield points out, the Irish were thought of as a distinct race, while “Americans of British extraction masked their class concerns behind race concerns, first displaying animosity against ‘Beer-guzzling’ Dutch (that is, German-speaking immigrants).” As industrialization encouraged immigration and thereby changed the needs of labor, Camfield notes, “quondam British and ‘Dutch’ alike railed against the Irish, later yet against Southern and Eastern Europeans, while virtually every group discriminated against blacks.”30 On the West Coast, labor shortages in railroad construction encouraged the importation of Chinese workers, who were nonetheless subject to prevalent discrimination, primarily by the Irish. The economic downturn in the United States increased hostility among working-class whites in general toward Chinese immigrant workers. When the demand for labor slackened, the Chinese became a cause of social anxiety and unrest because of their willingness to work longer hours for lower wages than their white colleagues. Blatant racism toward the Chinese was especially conspicuous among organized labor. In fact, a month after the appearance of “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” Harper’s Weekly editorially attacked an anti-Chinese labor bill put forward by the infamous New York state senator William “Boss” Tweed, and published a full-page Thomas Nast cartoon captioned, “Hands off, Gentlemen! America means fair play for all.”31 Likewise, Denis Kearney, the Irish founder of the Workingmen’s Party, raised campaigns in California to denounce capitalists and the Chinese as enemies of the workingman.32 In Chicago in 1882, the same year that the federal Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the Trades and Labor Assembly supported strikes in a labor dispute and railed against Chinese laundries and their patrons. Their platform included a Chinese plank with this provision: That “Scabs” shall be treated as traitors and enemies to those who raise and maintain the standard of life so as to afford the greatest good to the greatest

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  21 number; those that exercise in their capacity as “Scabs” and aliens must not settle among people which tend to an industrial self-government. We detest all men who patronize Chinese laundries, and hope the Chinese nuisance will soon be abated.33

Meanwhile, politicians and presidential candidates alike in the 1870s and 1880s often used the troubling presence of Chinese cheap labor in California as a political mantra to secure popularity and votes of the American public. A great number of literary journals and magazines across the country promoted anti-Chinese sentiment. Scribner’s, Century, and even journals that prided themselves on their honest reportage, such as Outlook, Independent, and Arena, all presented negative portrayals of the Chinese. The same was true for professional magazines such as Engineering Magazine, American Architect, and Political Science Quarterly, which all supported the exclusion of the Chinese. Similar attitudes were expressed in books, religious publications, popular weeklies, and monthly reviews such as the ­Review of Reviews and Forum. The Times, too, expressed its indebtedness to Arthur Smith, who in Chinese Characteristics (1890) described the Chinese person as “never moved by the suffering of others” because “he is callous, cowardly, treacherous, a puzzle to the western mind.” In other words, the anti-Chinese sentiment that was commonly shared among writers across America had at that point become “essentially a national attitude.”34 It was such socio-political circumstances that prompted Twain to write “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” “John Chinaman in New York,” “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” and later Ah Sin. The satires that Twain wrote for The Galaxy allowed him to experiment with speaking to his audience through various inventive perspectives: a highly cynical narrator who decried the unjust persecution of a boy whose offense was simply stoning some Chinese, a naïve American passerby who was fooled by an Irishman in the guise of a Chinese tea merchant, and an oppressed Chinese whose American dream was shattered en route to the “land of the free.” In “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” Twain wrote about a “well-dressed boy” who, on his way to Sunday school, was arrested for stoning “Chinamen.” The “Sunday-school scholar” imitated behaviors that were frequently reported in the daily papers, and was taught by his religion that “God will not love me if I do not stone him [a Chinaman].” He grew up learning that the police actually enjoyed looking at unoffending Chinese being attacked by dogs set on them by some butchers.35 Writing on the topic enables Twain to realize that the deprivation of the basic human rights of the Chinese is not the fault of the Chinese themselves but is the result of the selfish

22  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

political agenda of his own people. What is even more disgraceful than the persecution itself is that the offense is considered by many as natural and legitimate, owing to a morally deformed social environment. Within a few months after “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” Twain published “John Chinaman in New York,” which was among his most playful, outstanding, and yet much misinterpreted pieces on the Chinese at that time. Clemens’s narrator stumbles upon a “Chinaman” sitting before a New York tea store, “acting in the capacity of a sign,” a sight that immediately seizes his sympathy: “Is it not a shame that we who prate so much about civilization and humanity are content to degrade a fellow-being to such an office as this?” He pities “the friendless Mongol” and wonders “what was passing behind his sad face, and what distant scene his vacant eye was dreaming of.” As he starts to console the person, who he thinks has had a hard life making ends meet, he realizes that the “Mongol” is actually an Irishman in disguise, who remarks how “aisy” life is for him in this job, “barrin’ the bloody furrin clothes that’s so expinsive.”36 What is disturbing turns out not to be a Chinaman in New York but an Irish person exploiting the Chinese image for an easy daily wage. The double irony here is the Irish person in disguise complaining about the expensive foreign clothes that he has to provide for his job; whereas in reality very few Chinese could ever afford such “expinsive” clothes as a “quaint Chinese hat” and “silken blouse,” given their much lower wages compared to Irish workers. The Irishman’s “outlandish attire” further speaks of the absurdity of his representation of the Chinese in general. The sight of Chinese was much rarer in New York than in California at that time, as suggested by the title “John Chinaman in New York.” Because of their rare and to New Yorkers peculiar presence, Chinese individuals were often reduced to a spectacle for public viewing. In 1834, a “Chinese Lady” named Afong Moy was put on display at the American Museum in New York City. Her “simple foreignness,” as James Moy concurs, was “deemed sufficient novelty to warrant her display.” Other exotic “performances” from Asia, the “Siamese twins Chang and Eng” among the most famous, followed throughout the nineteenth century. 37 In Twain’s story, the peculiarity of a “Chinaman” in New York is rendered immediately in the first paragraph: “everybody that passed by gave him a steady stare as long as their heads would twist over their shoulders without dislocating their necks,” because of the exotic features that the person ­displayed. The narrator goes on to satirize the so-called “superior race,” who “cracked some unseemly joke about [the Chinaman’s] outlandish

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  23

attire or his melancholy face, and passed on.” Darren Chiang-Schultheiss argues that Twain in this exposé “made no attempt to familiarize himself with John Chinaman,” and that “the article risks reinforcing existing stereo­types of Chinese simply because Twain’s essay does not correct prevailing notions that already existed among his contemporary readers.”38 It is certainly not hard to understand Chiang-Schultheiss’s standpoint because of the ambiguity that Twain deliberately articulated at the beginning just to establish rapport with his audience, who viewed the Chinese as nothing more than an exotic other. Nevertheless, a closer look at the narrative warrants a different set of interpretations. In fact, the brilliance of the story lies precisely in the setting up of a most perfectly stereotypical image of a “Chinaman,” and then destroying it in no time as the Irishman comes into play. Hsin-yun Ou, in “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” offers an insightful commentary on Twain’s sketch, and remarks that having been “deceived by superficial ethnic identifiers,” the narrator “is embarrassed by his own misconceptions of ethnic identity and cultural stereotypes.”39 However, there is more to Twain’s work: by looking at the “Chinaman” through the eyes of someone who stands among the crowd, Twain is identifying the traumatic sense of betrayal that the American bystanders, or readers for that matter, ought to feel upon discovering the deliberate exploitation of a false image of the exotic other. In other words, rather than reinforcing existing Chinese stereotypes, Twain was educating his audience, however subtly, on the fallacy of these images. Obviously, the criticism was not directed only to the Irish, but also to American politicians, police, media, and so forth that had actively been doing what the Irishman did for political and monetary purposes for a few decades. Whereas “John Chinaman in New York” plays into the role of a naïve American seeing only the superficiality of what he believes to be a ­Chinese character, “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” borrows the perspective of an innocent Chinese who narrates his disillusionment upon seeing through the hypocrisy of America. Twain’s story was inspired by Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1760–1762), which mocks social foibles in England. Goldsmith’s narrator, Lien Chi, is a cultivated Chinese philosopher and traveler who comments, often ironically, on what he sees in England in a series of letters to a Chinese friend. Taking on a similar idea, Twain created Ah Song Hi, an oppressed Chinese immigrant to America, who, in a series of seven letters, recounts his experiences to his friend Ching-Foo in China. Twain’s note at the beginning

24  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

warns his readers of the seriousness of what he is trying to communicate: “No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a Chinaman’s sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.”40 Ah Song Hi begins by describing his newfound excitement at leaving his “oppressed and overburdened native land” across the sea for the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” where everybody is treated equally without being asked about his nationality, color, or creed. The letters then follow Ah Song Hi’s journey in America, how he first has all his money taken away by the immigration officials upon landing, then is violently kicked and harassed by the police, and barely just a month after ends up in prison for “making a disturbance” in the street.41 “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” depicts a version of America very different from the one Ah Song Hi envisions, where people not of Anglo-Saxon descent are powerless and brutalized, their dreams thwarted and delayed.

Ah Sin—“A Most Abject & Incurable Failure!” Among Twain’s many forgotten works, Ah Sin (1877) is the one that has baffled Twain scholars for the longest time, partly because it was not published until more than eight decades after it was performed on stage, and partly because of the Chinese stereotypes that the play contentiously embodies. A collaboration between Twain and another icon of the American West, Bret Harte, Ah Sin not only turned out to be unsuccessful, but also brought an end to the two men’s friendship. The play was performed once at the National Theatre in Washington, on May 7, 1877, before it officially opened two months later on July 31 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. Playing to diminishing audiences, Ah Sin closed in late September. A letter from Twain to William Dean Howells dated October 15 of that year described the work as “a most abject & incurable failure!”42 The play was thereafter forgotten, never published and rarely mentioned, until it was rediscovered and published in 1961 by the Book Club of California. After yet another blanket of silence, this dramatic work that the New York Sun once considered “­beneath criticism” has begun to gather attention over the past two decades.43 This newly aroused interest in Ah Sin from Chinese and Chinese American scholars such as Hsuan L. Hsu, Shi Weiming, Mao Jian, ­Hsin-yun Ou, Zhang Longhai, Qin Liyan, Darren Chiang-Schultheiss, Chen Mei, and Wang Xiaojie underlines the urgency of examining the significance of the work in the context of Twain’s relationship with the Chinese.

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  25

Twain and Harte first met in 1864, in San Francisco, when Twain was a reporter for the Morning Call and Harte was a secretary to the superintendent of the United States Mint. Harte was also the editor of the Californian, to which Clemens was a contributor. While Harte remarked in the Springfield Republican in 1866 that he “saw a new star [Twain] rising in this western horizon,” Twain spoke of Harte admiringly as someone who “trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor.”44 Twain’s interest in writing about the Chinese was shared by Harte, who as an editor of the San Francisco literary magazine Overland Monthly included fifteen substantial articles on the lives of Chinese immigrants in America in the first twenty-four issues of the magazine, published between 1868 and 1870. The work that persuaded Twain to undertake a collaboration with Harte was a poem that the latter wrote in 1870, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (which became better known as “The Heathen Chinee”). As Twain would recall much later in his life, Harte’s work “created an explosion of delight whose reverberations reached the last confines of Christendom and Harte’s name, from being obscure to invisibility in the one week, was as notorious and as visible in the next as if it had been painted on the sky in letters of astronomical magnitude.”45 Within days of its first appearance in Overland, Harte’s poem was being printed in magazines and journals nationwide, ranging from the New York Evening Post, New York Tribune, Boston Transcript, Providence Journal, and Hartford Courant to the Saturday Evening Post.46 The poem begins with “truthful James” speaking: WHICH I wish to remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.

This persona goes on to present the readers with Ah Sin’s “pensive and childlike” smile, and his innocence that will provide a perfect opportunity for both James and his friend Nye to cheat Ah Sin of all that he has in a game of Euchre. Much to their surprise, not only does Ah Sin do the same to them by hiding twenty-four jacks behind his long sleeves, he beats James and Nye in a game that he pretended he “did not understand.” In a state of shock, Nye rises with a sigh, “Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor.”

26  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

Given the concurrent public excitement over the “Chinese question,” the open-endedness and ambiguity of Harte’s poem made his work liable to much misreading and misinterpretation. Contrary to Bret Harte’s initial intention of writing a work “with a satirical political purpose” to mock the anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California, it was mistaken by many as promoting it.47 Politicians used the poem to advance their political agendas when addressing the concern of a potential Chinese takeover of the American labor market. California senator Eugene Casserly, for instance, thanked Harte for supporting his cause by writing such a timely poem that opposed admission of Chinese labor. Similarly, Allen Thurman, a Democratic candidate for vice president in 1888, cited Harte’s work during his campaign to strengthen his stance in opposing Chinese immigration.48 Harte considered this work that brought him fame and fortune “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.”49 After “The Heathen Chinee,” Harte wrote stories featuring Chinese characters to repudiate the stereotypes that the poem was taken to encourage, including Wan Lee, the Pagan (1874), The Latest Chinese Outrage (1878), The Queen of Pirate Isle (1886), See Yup (1898), and Three Vagabonds of Trinidad (1900). None of these stories, however, was as popular as “The Heathen Chinee.” Nor did the righteous Chinese characters in these pieces come close to the popularity enjoyed by Charles T. Parsloe as a stereotypical Chinese laundryman who spoke only eight times in pidgin Chinese English in the four-hour play Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876). As Margaret ­Duckett observes in her meticulous study of the two writers, although Harte defended people of color and denounced racism in America, it was “the fluke of ‘The Heathen Chinee’ that catapulted his fame.”50 Twain was undoubtedly fascinated by the overwhelming attention that “The Heathen Chinee” brought to Harte despite the false interpretations that the poem generated. When Harte asked Twain to write a play with him that would take advantage of both the popularity of the character Ah Sin and the existing appeal of Parsloe, who would play the role of Ah Sin, Twain jumped at the opportunity. Reviews of the initial performance in Washington were quite positive. Denver’s Daily Rocky Mountain News thought Parsloe’s performance of the Chinaman “faultless.”51 San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin found the image of Ah Sin refreshing and demanded more of him: Ah Sin is “a new type of man in the American fabric, political and social—a creature at once shy and sly, reticent and talkative, cunning and amiable, weak, yet powerful, subtle as air, acute as quicksilver—a servant, a pariah, a thief, yet

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  27

child of the oldest civilization on our earth.”52 Reviews in August after the performances in New York began were not as encouraging. The New York Herald, for instance, asserted that Ah Sin was “a popular success,” but “the materials are all old, the character of the Heathen Chinee being excepted.”53 Similarly, the New York Sun considered the play “commonplace,” the incidents “tangled and unsequential,” the language “never witty or epigrammatic,” and the characters “mere sketches.”54 Evidently, it is hard to judge the effectiveness of the play and Parsloe’s performance as a Chinaman without seeing the original version. As Albert Bigelow Paine rightly remarks, “Just why ‘Ah Sin’ did not prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. Poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery.”55 In the preface to the 1961 Book Club of California edition, Frederick Anderson posits that although Ah Sin was not far from the poorest work by either writer, it assumes importance when “one realizes that it was written just after the apex of Harte’s literary career and just before the peak of Mark Twain’s.”56 The additional significance of the collaboration does not lie in how commercially successful it was at that time, but in the unprecedented efforts of the writers to challenge Chinese stereotypes at the apex of anti-Chinese sentiment. As Ah Sin was playing in New York, on August 13, 1877, a California State Senate committee proposed a “solution” to the Chinese problem in An Address to the People of the United States Upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration. Calling the Chinese “morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth,” whose “touch is pollution,” the authors insisted that “justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil.”57 An American correspondent for the London Times reporting on this address commented that the “Judges of the San Francisco Criminal Courts described the Chinese as great liars and useless as witnesses. The ethnological testimony taken indicated that the Chinese have not sufficient brain ­capacity to furnish motive power for self-government.” 58 During this period, popular representations of Asians and Asianness in the mainstream theater often reflected or elicited anti-Asian sentiments. Chinese were portrayed either as people who are incompetent, high on opium, speakers of pidgin English, and corruptors of innocent white women and children, or as intelligent and fluent speakers of English who are no less evil as they would soon take over California and ruin the lives of white Americans. Henry Grimm’s The Chinese Must Go (1879), for instance, embodies both character types and illustrates the threatening presence of the Chinese.59

28  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

Given the strong hostility, Ah Sin as a character was quite phenomenal as he existed to prove all of the above descriptions wrong. Twain and Harte challenged the status quo by instilling a Chinese character with the power to move the plot, provide evidence in court, and subvert deep-seated stereo­types. Set in a mining camp on the Stanislaus River in Calaveras County, Ah Sin was played by thirteen people. As the audience might expect from the comic elements in “The Heathen Chinee” and Two Men of Sandy Bar, the character of Ah Sin possesses a similar set of stereotypical qualities: he steals, cheats, and lies his way through the mining camp. Yet different from the Ah Sin in “The Heathen Chinee,” Ah Sin here takes everyone by surprise toward the end with a strong moral revelation. In the play a murder occurs, and rather than blindly taking money from the murderer (Broderick) to reproduce a bloody jacket to frame another person (York) for the murder, Ah Sin on the surface plays along with Broderick until he can produce Broderick’s own bloodstained jacket in court as a vital piece of evidence against the white man, and return justice to the innocent. He wins a heroic “HURRAH” by the end of the play, smacking down the stereotypes declared provocatively by Broderick at the beginning: “slant eyed son of the yellow jaunders,” “moral cancer,” and “unsolvable political problem.”60 As Jacqueline Romeo remarks in “Irony Lost: Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee and the Popularization of the Comic Coolie as Trickster in Frontier Melodrama,” Ah Sin appeared not only for comic relief, but also to “reveal the truth. The character was the immigrants’ trickster, because their survival depended on it. He taught them how to negotiate the hostile and confusing world they now found themselves in.”61 In a curtain speech made at the New York premiere of Ah Sin, Twain explained that the play is “didactic”: the whole purpose “is to afford an opportunity for the illustration of this character [Ah Sin]. The Chinaman is going to become a frequent spectacle all over America by and by, and a difficult political problem, too. Therefore, it seems well enough to let the public study him a little on the stage beforehand.”62 Although Twain’s seemingly condescending speech could easily seem to suggest that the play offers mockery of the Chinese, it actually mocks the American anxiety over the presence of this cultural other. As Twain’s readers should know by now, and as is evident in his other works such as “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” and “John Chinaman in New York,” Twain often appears to side with his readers at the beginning just to make an effective moral point subsequently. In the case of Ah Sin, as the audience is absorbed in laughing at the clumsiness of the Chinese character or at Broderick’s racist remarks directed

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  29

toward Ah Sin, numerous subtle attacks are being made to counter Chinese stereotypes. The most obvious of these is that it is Broderick who is the ultimate “moral cancer” and “difficult political problem.” While another character, Mrs. Tempest, speaks of Ah Sin as a “poor dumb animal” who has “the monkey faculty of imitating,” it is really Ah Sin who saves the life of her daughter’s love—how would that have been possible if Ah Sin had nothing in him but imitation? Another subtle attack is Ah Sin’s calling every Caucasian, both men and women, “John.” The terms “John” and “John Chinaman,” as Robert McClellan tells us in The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890–1905, were commonly used by white people then to address the Chinese to indicate their “inferiority, foreign origin, and a kind of subservient anonymity,” conveying “impressions of animal-like inferiority and viciousness.”63 As Ah Sin greets Mrs. Plunkett with, “Good day, John,” the audience would laugh at Ah Sin’s ostensible ignorance, but they would essentially be laughing at themselves because they were the most ignorant ones in calling every Chinese person “John” in the first place. According to Duckett, Twain made a lot of revisions of which Harte disapproved, but the nature of most of these revisions has not been determined because no manuscripts other than the one published in 1961 are known to have survived.64 One passage that Twain may have changed comes in Act 2 when Ah Sin thinks that Mrs. Tempest and Miss Tempest are Plunkett’s wives. The Daily Evening Bulletin review on May 21, 1877, recounted the scene this way: “‘Ah Sin,’ over his ironing-table, murmurs: ‘Two ‘Missee Plunketts.’ Ah, ah! Amelican man two wifee—nice Amelican man!’” However, the version published in 1961 has Ah Sin remark: “­Plunkee got 2 wifee—Mellican man no likee Chinaman hab 2 wifee—Chinaman no likee wifee sell wifee—poor wifee got no home—Mellican man no likee wifee, lun away, let poor wifee starve—Mellican man too muchee—­clivilized. More Mellican lady comee—me watchee.”65 Although there is no solid proof that Twain was the editor of the above passage, it is likely the case, as Harte did not desire to change anything once the two had completed the script for the first performance. In this highly probable scenario then, Twain would rather lend Ah Sin the opportunity to question the idea of American civilization by having him exclaim that American men are “too muchee clivilized” than have him say, “nice Amelican man!” Much as Twain has the fourteen-year-old Huck misspell the word “­civilize” as “sivilize” in his later work, Huckleberry Finn, he has Ah Sin mispronounce the word as “clivilized” to contradict the idea of white civilization. Tellingly, given

30  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

Ah Sin’s minimal English capacity (his lines consist mostly of words like “washee,” “likee,” comee,” and “allee same”); “clivilized,” even when mispronounced, ought to be an extremely difficult word for him. As it would be rather unrealistic for Ah Sin to know what that word actually meant, it seems quite obviously a statement coming directly from Twain himself. It was unfortunate that Ah Sin would be the first and the last work on which Twain and Harte collaborated, as the tension that developed during their collaboration also brought an end to their friendship. Their conflict initially came from a critical remark that Harte made about Livy; their friendship was further dampened when Harte failed to repay money that Clemens had loaned to him. Harte was likewise upset about Twain making changes in the manuscript continually, especially in the portrayal of the “Chinaman.” In an angry letter dated March 1, 1877, to Twain, Harte wrote: If there is any one thing that we are sure about, regarding our play—anything that we do know, by actual experience, by general report, by universal criticism, by the consent and acknowledgement of the public—it is that Parsloe is a perfect Chinaman! Now to spend five or six hundred dollars to send him to San Francisco to study Chinese character is simply preposterous—so preposterous, that even the honest fellow himself saw it.66

In retrospect, it was perhaps not so preposterous of Twain to have had this consideration; after all, how could one claim to be a “perfect Chinaman” if one did not have even the slightest knowledge of the characteristics of the Chinese people? In all fairness, Twain had limitations in speaking for the Chinese as a white American who had never set foot in Mainland China or had any close Chinese friends who might have helped him with offering an otherwise more objective portrayal of the Chinese people. Not surprisingly, his representation of the Chinese has aroused skepticism among various Chinese and Chinese American scholars, whose criticisms resonate with those of the New York Sun back in 1877: Ah Sin is “still a caricature” and “entirely devoid of any of the mental and moral peculiarities which mark his race.”67 Critics such as Darren Chiang-Schultheiss, Shi Weiming, Chen Mei, and Wang Xiaojie all regard Twain’s portrayal of the Chinese as problematic. In “Representations of the Chinese Other in Mark Twain’s World,” ChiangSchultheiss remarks that Twain’s Chinese characters “are never roundly developed,” resulting in “stock images that his readers could readily recognize as types.”68 In Chinese scholarship, Shi, in “中华传播的误读与贴 近一论马克吐温作品中的华人形象意义” “Zhonghua Chuanbo De Wudu Yu Tiejin: Lun Ma-ke Tuwen Zuopin Zhong De Huaren Xingxiang Yiyi”

Early Acquaintances with “Chinamen”  /  31

(The  mis-interpretation and proximity of the dissemination of Chinese culture: a discussion of the portrayal of the Chinese image in the work of Mark Twain), asserts that Twain’s “imagination” of the Chinese came merely from second-hand experience as he had never been to China.69 Likewise, in “追梦人, 镜子和替罪羊—马克吐温中华人形象” “Zhui Meng Ren, Jingzi he Tizuiyang—Qianxi Ma-ke Tuwen Zhonghua Ren ­Xing­xiang” (The dream-seeker, the mirror and the scapegoat—on the Chinese image in Mark Twain’s works), Chen and Wang argue that even though Twain spoke up for the Chinese, his understanding of them is “limited by the time and cultural environment that he was brought up in.”70 These criticisms are all reasonable. Indeed, should Twain and Harte have given Parsloe’s role more complexity, it is quite likely that the play would have been better received. Nevertheless, the positive responses from a majority of the recent discussions of Ah Sin, be they from Chinese or Chinese American scholars, suggest that there is perhaps more to what the play appears to offer. Instead of judging Twain’s portrayal of the Chinese by the play alone, as did the previously discussed reviews, they often look at Twain’s other writings on the Chinese and are aware of his anti-imperialism. In a paper delivered at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in 2011, Hsuan L. Hsu posits that Twain’s and Harte’s work represents “historically informed responses to debates precipitated by People v. Hall,” explicitly dramatizing “the dynamics of witnessing, testimony, and evidence.”71 Ah Sin’s legal disability “does not endanger other Chinese characters” but “honest and sympathetic white characters like Plunkett, York, and Miss Tempest.” Hsu concludes with the refreshing observation that the play’s “oblique depiction of kindness and intimacy between its Chinese character and Plunkett indicates both the possibility of interracial working-class solidarity and the difficulty of perceiving or representing it under existing political conditions.”72 Across the Pacific, Qin Liyan, in “儿童乌托邦: 布莱特·哈特的华人 分析和探讨” “Ertong Wutuobang: Bula-te Ha-te De Huaren Fenxi He ­Tantao” (The utopia of the children: Bret Harte’s writings on the Chinese), enthuses, “if there was no Ah Sin, there would have been no justice, and truth would never have been revealed. He sees and controls everything, and could even be said to be omnipotent.”73 Tellingly, in commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Twain’s death in 2010, the National Taiwan Normal University put on a performance of the play. This choice speaks volumes; those making this selection clearly viewed Ah Sin as an indispensable work of Twain’s for understanding his relationship with the Chinese.

32  /  Sam Clemens the Missourian

In the same year, Zhang Longhai writes that although Ah Sin appears to occupy just a minor role, the fact that “the two most influential American writers at that time named the play after a Chinese tells of the effort they put into introducing Chinese and Chinese culture to the audience.”74 ­Similarly, Hsin-yun Ou argues that Twain “endeavored to write outside the Orientalist discourses of his age.” Although not always free from contemporary racial stereotypes, his depictions of the Chinese were “more complex and sympathetic than what was typically portrayed in the contemporary popular media.”75 Last but not least, Mao Jian in “美国乡土作 家哈特眼中的中国人形象” “Meiguo Xiangtu Zuojia Ha-te Yanzhong De Zhongguoren Xingxiang” (The Chinese image in the eyes of the American writer Bret Harte), asserts that given the strong anti-Chinese sentiment in America, depicting Ah Sin as “a cultural other who is both intellectually and morally superior to white people was a phenomenal gesture.” Mao also believes that Twain’s “denunciation of American imperialism over the Far East and the oppression of the people later in his life is unsurpassable among his contemporary writers.”76 As early as 1933, William Purviance Fenn, then head of the Department of Foreign Languages in Peking University, had commented on western writers who spoke up for the Chinese. “Mark Twain had perhaps least to say,” he remarks, and the Chinese were only “a passing interest” to him. 77 Duckett held the same opinion that Twain “never completely outgrew some of these racial prejudices which Bret Harte regularly attacked.”78 ­Similarly, Robert McClellan has asserted that neither Harte nor Twain took the Chinese very seriously as they have not written much about them.79 Fenn, Duckett, and McClellan were perhaps unaware of Twain’s earlier writings on the Chinese, and his scathing attack on the unfair American political and economic dominance over China in “The Treaty with China” (1868). Nor were they likely informed of Twain’s anti-imperialism and his role as a vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League when he returned from Europe in 1901. As the next two chapters will convey, not only did Twain not put aside the Chinese question after he finished Ah Sin, but he also did much more than what was generally known to the public in the previous century. The last few decades of his life constitute an important period that until fairly recently had long been neglected by Twain scholars, a period that essentially marked another major transition in Twain’s relationship with the Chinese.

chapter 2

From the Mississippi to the Big Sea Voyages Across the Pacific

Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I am still pulling. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Sam Clemens famously remarks in his first travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869), which described his trip to Europe and the Holy Land, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”1 Indeed, if Clemens had stayed in Hannibal all his life, he would not have made such an insightful remark about the value of travel for recognizing one’s ingrained assumptions. In truth, he had his own prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness when he first left American soil in 1866 as a correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union to report on the Sandwich Islands. As mentioned in Chapter 1, not only was Twain then admittedly supportive of US annexation of the islands, but he was also convinced that the importation of Chinese coolie labor there would help the newly acquired state of California to prosper, invigorate American businesses, and lift American workers out of the “drudgery which all white men abhor and are glad to escape from.”2 By the time he revisited the Sandwich Islands thirty years later, in 1895, while delivering a lecture series along the equator, Twain was openly skeptical about the motives and utility of both European and American colonization achieved through economic dominance and missionary activity

34  /  From the Mississippi to the Big Sea

in foreign territories. His travels to the Sandwich Islands, and to Fiji, Austral­asia, Ceylon, India, and South Africa, coincided with the continuing British colonization of the West Indies, India, and the Antipodes, as well as French, Belgian, German, and Dutch colonialism in Africa and the Far East. These tours allowed Twain the necessary space in different sociopolitical contexts to reflect upon global racism vis-à-vis the legacy of slavery and inequality at home. His two voyages across the Pacific provided many experiences that helped him to make a significant transition in his attitudes toward the Chinese. Although Twain did not reach China on either tour, the cultural and ethnic diversity that he encountered beyond the American mainland further challenged the racial assumptions he grew up with, and complicated his view of existing global hegemony in the political and economic arenas. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has remarked: [I]f Huckleberry Finn is the practice, what he wrote between 1897–1907 was the theory. It was during this decade that Twain articulated how the barbarous world embodied in that novel managed to survive and prosper—and how the world he lived in some generations later masked similar barbarism in much the same ways.3

The line that Twain once drew between barbarism and civilization would gradually blur and become subverted as he constantly moved between river and shore. Just as Huck and Jim flow deeper into slavery while en route south on the Mississippi, Twain witnessed the global engine of slavery and indentured servitude beyond the US territories as he ventured out to the Southern Hemisphere. He recognized the universal nature of racial prejudice and that it was not confined to his home country, and that the concept of race is not natural but conditioned—a theme that runs through his darkest novel, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), published shortly before his equatorial travels. Global travels allowed Twain to obtain a more detached view of his home country, which was vital for his understanding of and sympathy for the conditions of the racial other and, in his later years, the position of the Chinese Boxers.

Sam Clemens’s First Excursion Abroad—the Sandwich Islands In 1857, four years before the commencement of the Civil War in 1861, Sam Clemens began serving as a cub pilot on a steamboat as an apprentice of pilot Horace Bixby, receiving his own pilot’s license in early 1859. Since boyhood, he had thought that piloting would be his lifelong career:

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  35

“I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.” 4 ­Following the disruption of his piloting days on the Mississippi, he enlisted in the Missouri State Guard (a militia sympathetic to the Confederacy) for two weeks, before moving west to eventually pursue his writing and lecturing career. He first headed to Nevada with his brother Orion, a supporter of Lincoln, who took a position as secretary to the governor of Nevada.5 Clemens’s piloting endeavor, in effect, did not come to an end in 1861; as a writer he constantly navigates life directions for himself and for the American people. As he says of his experience on the Mississippi River in Life on the Mississippi (1883): Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost that which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.6

While Clemens had not yet mastered “every trifling feature” of the Pacific waters on his first trip to the Sandwich Islands, his equatorial excursion in 1895 would reinforce his disillusionment in the same way as expressed in the above lines; the multitudinous disturbing episodes that he encountered along the equator would eventually tear asunder all the grace, the beauty, and the poetry of the Pacific Ocean. Having made a name with his humorous sketch “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which appeared in New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, Twain before long gained a national reputation as a voice of the American West. His experience working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise as well as the San Francisco Morning Call also earned him a reputation for making striking observations about the people and events around him. He was later sent by the Sacramento Daily Union in the spring of 1866 as a correspondent to the Sandwich Islands to report on life and the political situation there, as well as potential US involvement in the islands. Clemens set sail on the steamer Ajax to Honolulu on March 7, eventually publishing twenty-five letters from the islands in the Daily Union between April 16 and November 16. In his early letters, Twain promoted the establishment of a steamer line between San Francisco and Hawaii, the largest of the islands; he was convinced that the best way to strengthen the American empire was through

36  /  From the Mississippi to the Big Sea

business and colonization by first “fill[ing] these islands full of Americans.” He believed that not only would it help with the annual state revenue of California, but it would also drive potential French and English aggression away from the islands: “the main argument in favor of a line of fast steamers is this: They would soon populate these islands with Americans, and loosen that French and English grip which is gradually closing around them.”7 To Twain, interestingly, the threat that America might lose the islands did not come from Hawaiian resistance, but from British and French aggression there; little did he realize that America then was pursuing a similarly aggressive policy. He also suggested having a China mail steamer that would sail directly from East Asia to San Francisco and would sublet its contract to the Ajax “to get the benefit of ‘the trades’ ” with the Sandwich Islands.8 Indeed, Twain was not alone in his supposition that this would be a good idea; the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, with the aid of congressional subsidies, would eventually launch its transpacific service between Hong Kong and San Francisco in 1867.9 Prior to Twain’s landing in the Sandwich Islands, an established and lucrative trade taking place between the islands and China was the importation of Chinese “cheap labor” to work on the island plantations. The first 195 Chinese (from Amoy, Fukien) arrived as coolies in Hawaii, on the ­Thetis under Captain John Cass, on January 3, 1852, and the coolie trade was growing fast by the time Twain visited.10 Not only was transporting coolie labor to developing colonial sites such as Hawaii, Ceylon, Malaya, and the Caribbean an extremely profitable (indeed profiteering) business, it was also a response to the potential shortage of labor as worldwide calls for the abolition of slavery proliferated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Chinese coolies were widely shipped to Cuban plantations in the mid-­ nineteenth century, and before long to California, where they would then be transported to Hawaii and Louisiana for plantation work. Moon-Ho Jung, in Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of ­Emancipation, observes that by the summer of 1869, “China and California surpassed Cuba as potential sources of coolie labor for the South.”11 Attuned to the era’s conventional stereotype that the Kanaka race (native Hawaiians) was doomed to pass away, Twain concurs with the idea that the transportation of Chinese “cheap labor” to Hawaiian plantations would be an effective way to keep the economy going: Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government sends to China for Coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month each for five years. . . . Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics,

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  37 some afflicted with incurable diseases and nearly all were intractable, full of fight and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. . . . They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched. If the Hawaiian agent had been possessed of a reasonable amount of business tact he could have got experienced rice and sugar cultivators—peaceable, obedient men and women—for the same salaries that must be paid to these villains, and done them a real service by giving them good homes and kind treatment in place of the wretchedness and brutality they experience in their native land.12

Twain’s description of the Chinese laborers is, in fact, not a far cry from the description of coolies in the British West Indies found in New England periodicals in the 1840s, who were “in a state of nudity and hardly any of them decently clothed,” in addition to “suffering from severe sickness.” The plight of the coolies in the early days was so miserable that “their belief is, that they are slaves” and “the negroes appear sincerely to pity them.” 13 What Twain witnessed was certainly not a pleasant sight; what he wrote conveys a certain level of sympathy toward the hardship that the Chinese faced in China at the time. However, while genuinely believing that coolie labor was a better alternative for the people, Twain at this time was more concerned about coolie trade being beneficial to American business and the extension of America’s empire across the Pacific. In “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai‘i,” Rob Wilson rightly asserts that “Twain enlists the region not as a site of cultural interest or Edenic fantasy, as he so often does with tourist charm elsewhere, but to link with little ideal­ization the Far East of China and the eastern coast of America in the flow of global capital and national profit.”14 Twain’s practical attitude toward the coolie business is expressed through his frequent use of economic figures to justify adopting coolie trade in California: You will not always go on paying $80 and $100 a month for labor which you can hire for $5. The sooner California adopts Coolie labor the better it will be for her. It cheapens no labor of men’s hands save the hardest and most exhausting drudgery—drudgery which neither intelligence nor education are required to fit a man for—drudgery which all white men abhor and are glad to escape from.15

The term “drudgery” evidently underestimates the level of inhumanity that the coolies had to endure. Although the status of the Chinese coolies might appear more respectable than that of African slaves because they were given a work contract, these contracts were often offered based on false promises, deception, and kidnapping. Add to this the fact that the Chinese did

38  /  From the Mississippi to the Big Sea

not hold any rights to testify against white men in US courts at the time,16 and it is clear that the contracts they signed did not fully protect their rights against violation by any white agents. While the contacts usually lasted from five to eight years, many of the coolie workers either died during their terms due to extremely harsh working conditions or involuntarily remained in servitude much longer than they had been promised. It would be hard to find a more accurate description of the nature of work that was involved than the literal meaning of the Chinese term from which the English “coolie” comes: 苦力 kuli means “bitterly hard use of strength.” As Jung explains, “[t]he insatiable global demand for coolies manifested locally in the early 1850s in an upsurge of kidnappings and fraudulent schemes, coercive tactics that drove Chinese residents to equate the trade to ‘pig-dealing.’”17 Similar to conditions in the transatlantic slave trade, the mortality rate of coolies during their voyages to the plantations was high; many of them did not make it to the destination owing to the unsanitary conditions and starvation they endured on board. While en route to take up his new position as US Commissioner to China, Peter Parker had written publicly in January 1856 that the coolie trade was “­replete with illegalities, immoralities, and revolting and inhuman atrocities, strongly resembling those of the African slave trade in former years, some of them exceeding the horrors of the ‘middle passage,’ . . . and the foreign name has been rendered odious by this traffic, hundreds and thousands of lives having been inhumanly sacrificed.” He later remarked after visiting a coolie barracoon in Macao, “No felon in a European prison is more securely incarcerated than these Chinese.”18 The voices opposing the coolie trade persisted throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s, and eventually prompted the US Congress to pass An Act to Prohibit the “Coolie Trade” by American Citizens in American Vessels, which President Lincoln signed on Feb 19, 1862. Was Twain aware that such were the conditions of Chinese labor? Did coolies receive “kind treatment in place of the wretchedness and brutality they experience in their native land”? Wilson argues that “Twain’s orientalist fantasy obscures the fact that in 1866, just after one form of American slavery of blacks had been abolished by the Civil War, he is urging the adoption of a new Asian Pacific form of slavery through the exploitation of contract labor.”19 While encouraging America to push its frontier into the Pacific, Twain did not thoroughly grasp the fact that US colonialism would eventually involve subjugating the people there to American political,

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  39

economic, and ideological control. As Amy Kaplan concurs in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, Chinese laborers allowed Twain to imagine restoring the role of plantation overseer, lost with the abolition of slavery. . . . Twain ends this letter on sugar in Hawaii with a paean to the rise of an American empire in the Pacific, an empire that relies not only on the extension of American enterprise and power abroad, but also on the importation of foreign labor at home to whiten the American working class.20

At this point, Twain was not able to equate the conditions of the coolie laborers with the situation of Chinese immigrant workers in San Francisco that he once sympathetically described in “Our Active Police” and “What Have the Police Been Doing?” The Chinese in Hawaii at this time, in ­Wilson’s words, “remained outside Twain’s nativist dream of territorial unity and capitalist integration.”21 An important event that helped Clemens better understand the position of the Chinese before he left Hawaii for New York was his new friendship with Anson Burlingame, then US Minister to China (1861–1870), who was a strong advocate of Chinese rights in America. The two met during Twain’s visit to the Sandwich Islands, when Burlingame offered Twain the opportunity to write about the clipper ship Hornet disaster, which came to form the foundation for Twain’s debut article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. This New York–based magazine was one of the first publications through which Clemens began to establish an East Coast audience; writing about the shipwreck helped Clemens in ways that would turn him into, in his own words, a “literary person.”22 Twain had had great admiration for Burlingame since the day that they met. He was flattered by Burlingame’s hospitability as a person, “especially from such a man,” as he wrote his mother and his sister in June 1866. ­Burlingame, Twain continues, “is acknowledged to have no superior in the diplomatic circles of the world, & obtained from China concessions in favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce & the ­Envoys of France & Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself.” 23 ­Although Twain’s friendship with Burlingame ended with the latter’s death in 1870, Burlingame’s correspondence, associations, and strong relations with China had in many ways “magnified Twain’s observation-based interests in the Chinese,” as Martin Zehr notes.24 In 1868, Burlingame was head of the Chinese mission to the United States advocating the passage of the Burlingame Treaty, which he had collaborated on with Secretary of State William H. Seward. It was viewed as

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a response to the Tianjin Treaty signed in June 1858, which he and Seward believed did not adequately protect the rights of the Chinese in America. In a speech addressed to a crowd in New York on June 23, 1868, Burlingame urged mutual understanding and respect between China and the United States by asking for the preservation of Chinese autonomy. The critical point of the speech was the moment when he spoke against viewing Chinese as barbaric: There are men of that tyrannical school who say that China is not fit to sit at the council-board for the nations, who call them barbarians. . . . These things I utterly deny. I say, on the contrary, that that is a great and noble people. It has all the elements of a splendid nationality.25

Within days after returning from San Francisco to New York, on July 29, 1868 with Burlingame’s encouragement, Twain wrote “The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained,” in response to Burlingame’s address. Published in the New York Tribune on August 28, 1868, the article goes over each of the eight items of the Burlingame Treaty, and defends the Chinese rights to vote, hold offices, receive education, own land, and testify in court, as well as to acquire citizenship in the United States. Twain remarks, “I am not fond of Chinamen, but I am still less fond of seeing them wronged and abused.” Instead of taking Twain’s remark of disliking the Chinese at face value, one should recognize his strategy of ironically siding with the average Americans who were mostly “not fond of Chinamen,” to eventually work to make them see what was fundamentally wrong about abusing another human being because of his or her different racial background. Continuing this approach, the writer exclaims: [T]he idea of making negroes citizens of the United States was startling and disagreeable to me, but I have become reconciled to it. . . . The idea of seeing a Chinaman a citizen of the United States would have been almost appalling to me a few years ago, but I suppose I can live through it now.26

Twelve years before the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the US Congress denied Chinese immigrants the right to be naturalized. News­papers such as the San Francisco Argonaut “fulminated against incorporating into the United States a multitude of ‘Chinese, Japanese, Kanakas, and halfbreed Portuguese’ to whom ‘we should be loath to grant the franchise,’” as Thomas J. Osborne tells us in Empire Can Wait: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898.27 Likewise, the Memphis Daily Appeal, Jung explains, “purportedly welcoming Chinese ‘immigrants’ as equals, also gleefully pointed out that Chinese could not become US citizens or

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  41

voters, since they were not ‘free white persons’ as required by the Naturalization Law of 1790.”28 Defining the statuses of Chinese immigrant workers and coolies, in Jung’s words, “became an endless and indispensable exercise that resolved and reproduced the contradictory aims—racial exclusion and legal inclusion, enslavement and emancipation, parochial nationalism and unbridled imperialism—of a nation deeply rooted in race, slavery, and empire.”29 Given the socio-political circumstances and the heated anti-Chinese sentiment, Twain’s remark about granting citizenship to the Chinese is indeed quite telling. While the Burlingame Treaty did not confer the right of naturalization on the Chinese, it did extend to them “the same privileges, immunities and exemptions” as US citizens have. Twain pushes this statement further, into potentially including immigrant Chinese as citizens of the United States, defying mainstream antagonism toward the idea. “The Treaty with China” departs significantly from Twain’s other journalism because there was very little humor in it. He makes it clear that the Burlingame Treaty holds “grave importance” because it “will affect our relations with China.” Between the time two years earlier when he advocated the use of Chinese coolies as a way to emancipate white labor and the time he met Burlin­game, Twain seemed to have become more convinced that Chinese workers should have rights and respect at least equal to that of their fellow white workers in the United States. This does not mean that he had in any way changed his perception of the Chinese largely as cheap labor and a valuable asset to the US economy. Nevertheless, because “Twain viewed both Chinese immigrant labor and transpacific trade as key elements of the US’s future affluence,” posits Hsuan L. Hsu, in “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” “he consistently opposed laws discriminating against Chinese immigrants and arguments for excluding them altogether.”30 Twain’s encounter with Burlingame was certainly an important factor enabling him to pay more attention to the conditions that Chinese workers had to endure under their contract terms. In fact, when Burlingame resigned his position to become envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary and head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European nations, Senator John Conness of California offered to make Twain Burlingame’s successor in China. Twain declined the position, however tempting, because he wanted to settle down with his then future wife, Olivia (Livy) Langdon, and he would hate to put his

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writing endeavor aside for a diplomatic career. As he wrote to his mother, Jane Clemens, and his sister Pamela Moffett in February of 1868, “It was a great temptation, but it would render it impossible to fill my book contract. . . . God knows I am mean enough & lazy enough, now, without being a foreign consul.” Writing to Livy in January of the following year, he recalled the decision that he had made in more purposeful terms: “Why, a year ago, in Washington, when Mr. Conness, one of our Senators, counseled me to take the post of United States Minister to China, when Mr. Burlingame resigned (the place was chiefly in Mr C.’s gift,) I said that even if I could feel thoroughly fitted for the place, I had at least become able to make a living at home & wished to settle down.”31 Although Twain did not succeed Burlingame as minister to China, in the process of writing “The Treaty with China” Twain was given the opportunity to reflect on the issue of universal human rights and look at the presence of the Chinese in his own country from a humanitarian perspective. When Burlingame passed away, Twain wrote a eulogy that was published in the Buffalo Express. Burlingame, he remarks, had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state, and become a citizen of the world; his charity was large enough and his great heart warm enough to feel for its races and to labor for them. He was a true man, a brave man, an earnest man, a liberal man, a just man, a generous man, in all his ways and by all his instincts a noble man.32

In the same year, Twain published “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” “John Chinaman in New York,” and “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” all of which express a sympathetic inclination toward understanding the conditions for the Chinese in America. While anti-Chinese sentiment would proliferate in the years leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Twain along with Bret Harte reacted with Ah Sin (1877) as a way to criticize and lampoon the anti-Chinese prejudices, and figuratively restore the Chinese rights to testify in court against white men. After Ah Sin, Twain continued to fight for the rights of the Chinese in ways that went beyond literary publication, most evidently in his support for Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Commission. During the period from 1872 to 1881, Yung Wing—the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale College)—had successfully brought 120 Chinese students to the United States for education under the ­Chinese Educational Mission. Twain came to know Yung through the Reverend Joseph Twichell, who was a close friend of both Yung and Twain. Twichell, as Gregg Camfield remarks in The Oxford Companion to Mark

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  43

Twain, “took on the plight of the Chinese in America as one of his ministerial causes, helping to found and preserve Hartford’s Chinese Educational Mission.”33 While Twichell and Twain “shared their abhorrence of anti-Chinese racism,” Camfield continues, “Twichell saw his humanitarianism as part of an evangelical purpose; Clemens disparaged the idea of spreading Christianity to the Chinese, as can be seen in ‘The United States of Lyncherdom.’”34 However, Twain’s and Twichell’s different positions on the matter became irrelevant for practical purposes because the Chinese Educational Mission did not last. The Chinese Empress Cixi and conservatives in the Chinese court eventually banned the program for fear of the increasing influence of western thinking and culture on the students. When Twain realized that Yung’s program was going downhill due to pressure from the Chinese government, acting under Twichell’s influence he immediately contacted General Ulysses S. Grant, who wrote to a leading statesman of late Qing China, Li Hung Zhang, to try to dissuade China from terminating the program, although to no avail. Despite the outcome, Twain’s support for Yung Wing’s program speaks of his sustained pro-Chinese attitudes; the effort he put into the Chinese Educational Mission symbolically furthered the wish of his deceased friend Burlingame to ensure the right of the Chinese to receive education, among other rights, in the United States.35 Although it would be three more decades before Twain would publicly reject US imperialism, the sentiment captured in the various works that he wrote at the time prefigures his anti-imperialist stance. A private letter that Twain wrote his good friend Whitelaw Reid in 1873 already conveys his changing attitude toward the question of annexation of the Sandwich Islands: To speak truly, I would rather those islands remained under a native king, if I were there, but you can easily see that that won’t suit those planters. Mr. Burlingame told me privately that if he were minister there he would have the American flag flying on the roof of the king’s palace in less than two weeks. And he was in earnest, too. He hungered for those rich islands.36

As implied in these lines, Burlingame still had an influence on Twain after his death, but Twain no longer shared Burlingame’s imperialistic viewpoint. It was at this point that Twain started to develop anti-imperialist arguments “based on the nature of US civilization that he would repeat thirty years later to oppose annexation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War,” writes Jim Zwick in Confronting Imperialism:

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­ ssays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League.37 As the next chapter E will convey, Twain would develop a dramatically different attitude toward the idea of both US civilization and citizenship by the turn of the century.

Revisiting the Pacific—Following the Equator (1897) Sam Clemens revisited the Sandwich Islands in 1895 as part of an international lecture tour that he undertook in 1895 and 1896, which he recorded in Following the Equator (1897). While the United States was just a year away from annexing the islands, thereby extending its territory into the ­Pacific, imperial powers in Europe continued to “liberate” and “civilize” racial others from their traditional beliefs and local authoritarianism, under what the imperialists efficiently promoted as the will of Providence. As Twain was traveling along the equator, he became increasingly disillusioned with European colonialism in the East. What disturbed him the most was his realization that instead of extending democracy, his countrymen were following, as Fishkin remarks, “the European model in foreign affairs, seeking to dominate another culture out of greed, selfishness and arrogant pride masquerading as benevolence and altruism.”38 While Twain was visiting places that seemed to be away from western civilization, he realized, as he says sarcastically in Following the Equator, that “[o]ne escapes from one breed of an ill only to encounter another breed of it” (8).39 Although it might seem that Twain did not continue to address the “Chinese question” between Ah Sin in 1877 and his journey home from his sojourn abroad in 1900, he did not ever put aside the question of racism during his absence from home. Through his encounters with diverse cultures and ethnicities around the world, Twain obtained a decentered perspective on the United States and a more balanced view of the world. As described in Chapter 1, when young Sam Clemens first left Missouri to work in New York in 1853, he wrote home remarking on how the many “[n]iggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street; and to wade through this mass of human vermin, would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”40 By the time he undertook the equatorial travel more than four decades later, rather than “niggers,” “mulattoes,” “quadroons,” and the Chinese, it was now the Anglo-Saxon crowd that he came to denigrate as the real “human vermin” for their claims to moral superiority.

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In his introduction to Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays in the Oxford Mark Twain series, Gore Vidal remarks: [Mark Twain] was always, literally, a journalist, constantly describing daily things while recollecting old things. In the process, he made, from time to time, essential literature, including the darkest of American novels, Pudd’nhead Wilson. . . . All this, then, is what is going on in Mark Twain’s mind as he gets ready for a second luxury tour, this time around the world.41

Twain’s around-the-world tour opened his eyes in crucial ways that prompted him to relate global racism to the problem of race at home. The American author playfully connects regional racism to international affairs by using David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson’s new calendar (an extension of the calendar in Pudd’nhead Wilson) for the epigraphs for the chapters in his travelogue. Through projecting David Wilson’s observations from a slaveholding southern town along the Mississippi river onto global landscapes, Twain effectively communicates the pressing damage and inhumanity that racism has brought about on the local and global levels. The epigraph for chapter fifteen of Following the Equator, for instance, is “Truth is stranger than fiction—to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it” (90). While what happens in Pudd’nhead Wilson might appear fictional, the blatant racism depicted in Twain’s work realistically reflects the dynamics and history of racism in the American South where the novel is set. Analogously, the real-life observations of global racism that Twain communicates through the epigraphs from a fictional character in Following the Equator essentially demystify any fictional elements into painful episodes of reality. Moving beyond the slave-holding town of Clemens’s youth, unfortunately, seems only to reaffirm that the lies and hypocrisy of the people that Clemens encountered at home are also present just about everywhere he goes. Approaching Honolulu for the second time thirty years after his last visit, Twain exclaims, “many memories of my former visit to the islands came up in my mind while we lay at anchor in front of Honolulu that night. And pictures—pictures—pictures—an enchanting procession of them!” (22). Although Twain did not actually get on shore, due to a cholera outbreak on the island, the various events that he describes carry weight as they illustrate his changing attitudes toward ethnic conflicts and land conquests among neighboring communities. He marvels at the success of King Kamehameha in conquering the Sandwich Islands just to indirectly attack the white men’s practice of “enlarging [their] sphere of influence” and “robbing [their] neighbor.” He considers the King a “remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a savage,” and concludes,

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“Savages are eager to learn from the white man any new way to kill each other” (18). Twain insightfully inverts the dichotomy of the “civilized” and the “savage” by positioning the history of the white men’s colonization as a bad model for the natives. Fishkin observes that Twain’s strategy for breaking down this spurious binary of “savage” and “civilized” is two-pronged. One involves paying special attention to instances of intelligence, skill, courage, and creativity on the part of the so-called “savages”— qualities customarily associated with “civilized” human beings. The other involves calling attention to instances of so-called “civilized” people acting in shockingly depraved—or “savage”—ways.42

The inverted savage-civilized binary captured by Fishkin would set the tone for the rest of Twain’s travelogue, as well as his later anti-imperialist writings such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), “To My Missionary ­Critics” (1901), “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), and “The Fable of the Yellow Terror” (1904–1905). Next in Following the Equator, Twain describes his adventures in Australasia—a majority of which focus tellingly on the historical conflicts between native Australians and white settlers, as well as the later extermination of the former over the centuries. The author wastes no time before getting down to an elaborate picture of the “recruits,” the cheap Kanaka labor, on a sugar plantation in Queensland: The death-rate among the new men has reached as high as 180 in the 1,000. In the Kanaka’s native home his death-rate is 12 in time of peace, and 15 in time of war. Thus exile to Queensland—with the opportunity to acquire civilization, an umbrella, and a pretty poor quality of profanity—is twelve times as deadly for him as war. Common Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require, not only that these people be returned to their homes, but that war, pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their preservation. (44)

While Twain does not directly link his observations of plantation labor in Queensland to slavery in the American South or coolie labor in the Sandwich Islands, what he witnesses in Australia evidently reminds him of similar racial experiences back home. In Bendigo, Australia, he recalls seeing during a visit to a hospital a “convalescent Chinaman who had been attacked at midnight in his lonely hut eight weeks before by robbers, and stabbed forty-six times and scalped” (145). Although Twain does not elaborate on his observations, what he writes presents scenarios strikingly similar to those he depicted in “Our Active Police” (1865) and “What Have the ­Police Been Doing?” (1866), where the stoning of a Chinese person in broad daylight was an everyday event in the streets of San Francisco.

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  47

Earlier in Following the Equator, Twain had drawn comparisons between the Australians and the people back home: “The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance” (71). Furthermore, his visits to museums in Australia, where he sees “no Aboriginals—no ‘black fellows,’” enable him to look back at museums in the United States and realize the meager value and existence that the “aboriginals” have in both countries: “We have at home an abundance of museums, and not an American Indian in them. It is clearly an absurdity, but it never struck me before” (89). In response, Twain exclaims later in chapter twenty-two, “Why, a literature might be made out of the aboriginal all by himself, his character and ways are so freckled with varieties—varieties not staled by familiarity, but new to us” (127). Twain here effectively links the relative silence of the so-called “aboriginals” to the use of systematic violence by colonists in setting up a national system, and calls readers’ attention to the urgency of hearing and restoring the voices of the oppressed in the face of realizing the deep criminality and inhumanity behind such silence. Compared to his practice in his earlier travelogues, The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, in Following the Equator Twain writes much more extensively about racial dynamics abroad and displays strong awareness of and sympathy for the oppressed against the powers that be. He is enthusiastic when he sees Australian miners speaking up against the imposition of high taxes, and calls the government’s unpleasant method of collecting taxes “very galling to free people.” He regards the Ballarat miners’ protest as “the finest thing in Australian history. It was a revolution—small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a principle, a stand against injustice and oppression” (141). Similarly, in South Africa, he is surrounded by news about the Uitlanders’ protest in Johannesburg against paying heavy taxes without voting rights and representation—about which Twain remarks, “My sympathies were soon with the Reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and with their cause. . . . What the Uitlanders wanted was reform— under the existing Republic” (410). Soon enough, Twain’s sympathetic attitude toward the Uitlanders and the Ballarat miners as they rebelled against those in power would extend to the Chinese Boxers struggling against European, American, and Japanese imperialists as he returned home in 1900: “It is all China now and my sympathies are with the Chinese.”43 Publicly lending his support to those who were striving for freedom, Twain had undergone a dramatic shift in his attitudes toward the racial other from thirty years earlier when he supported US annexation of the Sandwich

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Islands. During his first visit to Honolulu on the Ajax, Twain was well aware of the Hawaiian protest against the increasing American presence on the islands. The Hawaiian monarchy was then seeking religious and political alliances with the British to avoid American missionary control and potential annexation.44 Twain did not address this in his letters back then to the Daily Union, and instead encouraged the American imperial mission across the Pacific, where he believed American civilization would exert a positive influence on the inhabitants. Of course, one can always argue that as a journalist for the California press, Clemens was obliged to promote Sino-US trade and American annexation of the Sandwich ­Islands.45 ­Having gotten himself into trouble with the San Francisco Police Department and the editor of the Morning Call by ridiculing those who oppressed the Chinese, including the police and Irish workers, as discussed in Chapter 1, it was not in Clemens’s best interests to risk losing his job again. However, the Sandwich Islands lecture that Twain gave in St. Louis after he returned home from his first Pacific tour in March 1867 shows that he was already aware of the detrimental impact of western civilization on the Kanakas: “The white men came, brought civilization and several other diseases, and now the race is fast dying out, and will be extinct in about fifty years hence.”46 In a letter to the New York Tribune published in January of the same year, Twain pushes the argument further by mocking the rhetoric of annexation: “We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. . . . [W]e can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable.”47 Twain’s remarks, as Zwick notes, “undercut the ‘civilizing mission’ view of annexation by highlighting what he was beginning to see as the base nature of civilization at home.”48 Throughout Following the Equator, Twain compares racism abroad to the conditions at home, and judges that America is not any more morally at fault than Europe. As he comments on how Cecil Rhodes’s administration in southern Africa was “chartered to rob and slay” lawfully, but “not in a compassionate and Christian spirit,” he concludes that “[t]his is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery” (428). Soon after his trip, however, as America was getting involved in the Philippine-American War and the Boxer uprising, Twain would stop making comparisons. To him, what America did and what Europe did were no different from each other; as he would remark sarcastically, “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages” (126).

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Before reaching South Africa as his final stop, Twain visited Ceylon and India. These were the two places that fascinated Twain the most, because their ethnic features and customs were so drastically different from those at home. Ceylon was a “radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint” (213). Yet before long, he was stunned and also highly disappointed to see European and missionary influences in the otherwise untouched “dream of fairyland and paradise”: Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed—dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an English or American village. Those clothes—oh, they were unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud. I looked at my womenfolk’s clothes—just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures—and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them. Then I looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself. . . . Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been nothing short of that these hundred years. They are insincere, they are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral decay. (213)

Twain here once again questions the model of Christian charity that imposes its beliefs and ways of life onto another culture as a form of political, economic, and ideological control. Using costumes as a metaphor, Twain expresses disgust toward missionary work as a veneer over “an inward sham and a moral decay” (214)—a remark that contradicts his praises thirty years earlier for the civilizing work of the missionaries in the Sandwich ­Islands.49 Through global travels, Twain came to see the irony of enslaving a people that ought to be free. At first glance, readers might be disturbed by Twain’s referring to the young women in Ceylon as “black girls,” but they should not take his ostensible generalization at face value. To enable his readers at home to understand racial dynamics abroad and to in turn reflect upon the problem of racism in the United States, Twain skillfully employs familiar racial terms to amplify his readers’ understanding of race in different global racial contexts. Rather than simplifying the matter of race, Twain in effect complicates “blackness” and “whiteness” by bringing foreign racial elements into a discussion directed largely to an American audience. He does the same in Pudd’nhead Wilson by introducing a peculiar pair of Italian Siamese twins (interestingly inspired by the real Chinese Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng) into a most conservative, slave-holding Dawson’s

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Landing in the American South to not only disturb but denaturalize the black-white racial norms. Like Ceylon, India struck Twain as bewitching, bewildering, and enchanting: This is indeed India! It is the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations. (216–217)

Twain observes that in India there was but “a slight sprinkling of white people—not enough to have the slightest modifying effect upon the massed dark complexion of the public” (215). In the midst of this exotic locale, far away from the familiar context at home, Twain once again comes upon a scene that takes him all the way back to his southern boyhood. As Twain goes up to his residence in Bombay, a “burly German” comes along with seventeen “natives” to help settle his possessions. When a native gets down on his knees to work on one of the doors, without understanding what is wrong with it, his German master, who understands the problem but does not explain it, hits him on his jaw. The native does not show any resentment and takes the blow “with meekness.” This incident immediately elicits flashbacks to Twain’s childhood in Hannibal: I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood. . . . My father was a refined and kindly gentleman. . . . He punished me . . . two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly—as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. (217–218)

Projecting this boyhood episode in his southern home onto colonial sites along the equator, Twain convincingly conveys similar European treatments of the racial other. He begins to question the education he once received in the South when he was a child: It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side

Voyages Across the Pacific   /  51 of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe—all in two seconds by the watch! (218)

The awkward connections that he was able to make between Hannibal and the world, in Fishkin’s words, “involved coming to terms with what Twain as an adult came to view as a shocking and embarrassing chapter of history—his country’s history and his own personal history.”50 What Twain witnessed in the present prompted him to revisit his childhood and reflect on how the present dynamic of race in the United States and elsewhere was shaped by the kind of racial environment in which he grew up. The past and the present, Fishkin continues, “converged for Twain at the turn of the last century, reinforcing a cynical, anti-Romantic, realist rejection of the idealized rationales that allowed western nations to mask the real motives that guided their actions vis-à-vis both the less developed world and also minorities within their own borders.”51 By the time Twain reached South Africa, he had seen many corners of the world and a vast array of skin colors: Port Louis, “a little town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we have encountered yet. French, English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans with wool, blacks with straight hair, East Indians, half-whites, quadroons—and great varieties in costumes and colors.” Mauritius, where the majority population is East Indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of the slaves of the French times); then French; then English. There was an American, but he is dead or mislaid. . . . [T]here is every shade of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel, molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white, new-ivory white, fish-belly white. . . . They think that Russia and Germany are in England, and that England does not amount to much.

And Natal, where “there are ten blacks to one white” (390). To say that Twain is a quintessential American writer is to truly undervalue his reputation and influence beyond the American shore; for he is more a quintessential global writer, traveler, observer, and profound messenger, who communicates valuable and valid comparative observations of social ills and human prejudices in America and the world. Traveling brings back memories of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction, and raises questions about empires and oppression. His second visit to Hawaii differs significantly from the first; instead of promoting annexation of the Sandwich Islands and the use of cheap Chinese coolie labor there as a way to

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enhance US economic growth, he now sees through the hypocrisy of colonization and Christendom, and recognizes that the resort to utilizing cheap labor is just another form of slavery, of which he has come to strongly disapprove. He is also increasingly disillusioned to see the imminent formation of a global racial hierarchy as a result of Euro-American economic and political dominance. Near the end of his trip, Twain displays strong skepticism of Cecil Rhodes’s administration in Cape Town. Although fascinated by the man’s power and influence, Twain is equally disgusted by his unmonitored aggression in South Africa. Following the Equator was published in 1897; in just a few more years Twain would return home from his decade-long residence in Europe and declare himself to be an anti-imperialist and a Chinese Boxer.

chapter 3

Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. Edward W. Said, “Blind Imperial Arrogance,” Los Angeles Times

After residing for almost a decade in Europe, Mark Twain sailed home in October 1900. He had not only combated financial losses from his untimely investment in the Paige typesetter, but he had also made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. The sixty-four-year-old writer had become a national hero and a celebrity figure, one whose homecoming was a muchanticipated event across the country. Newspapers lauded his success in overcoming bankruptcy and achieving fame and popularity in Europe, hailing him as “the bravest author in literature.” Harper’s Weekly heralded him as the “the most advertised man in the world.”1 While writers and reporters were expecting the humorist to delight the American audience with funny stories or the wonders of his travels, he took them by surprise almost immediately after he landed by declaring himself to be an anti-imperialist. He remarked to a New York Herald reporter on October 16: “I am an anti-imperialist, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”2 Before his equatorial travels, Twain had been in favor of imperialism not because he supported American oppression of people of color but rather because he had been mistaken about what the term imperialism actually implied. As he told the New York Herald reporter: I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame of it to

54  /  Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? . . . But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.3

Like other anti-imperialists, Twain approved and was proud of the founding ideals of America. These ideals of democracy enabled the nation to carry out its important mission to protect the weak and liberate them from oppressive regimes at home. He was under the notion that, unlike European colonization, America’s ventures into Cuba and the Philippines were genuinely intended to fight for those peoples’ independence from Spanish tyranny. However, his close friend and literary executor, ­William Dean Howells, a zealous anti-imperialist himself, had filled Twain in with a clearer picture of the American role in the Spanish-American and ­Philippine-American Wars (the latter running from 1899 to 1902). As his comments to the New York Herald quoted above reveal, the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1898), which put Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines under US control, had also helped to convince Twain that American wars for liberation had become wars of conquest. A letter to his good friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell early in 1900 clearly illustrates Clemens’s conviction: “Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free and give their islands to them; and apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests and confiscate their property. If these things are so, the war out there has no interest for me.”4 A month after his arrival in the United States, on November 23, Twain announced his support for the Chinese Boxers at a meeting of the Public Education Association held in the Berkeley Lyceum in New York: Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home, what a pleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allow Chinamen to come here, and I say in all seriousness that it would be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there. China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. The Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success. The Boxer believes in driving us out of his country. I am a Boxer too, for I believe in driving him out of our country.5

Twain’s remarks convey a few important messages; the rhetorical question he raises, “Why should not China be free from the foreigners” (emphasis added), immediately brings home the idea of foreign occupation

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in China being an act of enslavement rather than liberation. As Americans “do not allow Chinamen to come here”—as was evident from the Chinese Exclusion Act, which would continue to bar Chinese immigration for another four decades until 1943—Twain thought it only fair that foreigners be barred from entering Chinese territories. Among all of Twain’s commentaries and portrayals of the Chinese, his Boxer speech perhaps shows the most respect for the people from across the Pacific. While his previous work, such as “­Chinese Slaves,” “What Have the Police Been Doing,” “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” and Ah Sin, unavoidably identify the Chinese with superficial and exotic racial stereotypes, Twain here places the Chinese spine to spine with the Americans by calling the Boxer a “­patriot” whose love for his own country is a quality shared by the people of every other nation. Instead of Orientalist and exploitative, the image Twain portrays of the Chinese Boxer is one that is heroic and admirable. With this speech, Twain has for the first time publicly, at least, fully recognized China as a nation with its own sovereignty. The remark, “The Boxer believes in driving us out of his country. I am a Boxer too, for I believe in driving him out of our country,” albeit absurd on a literal level, essentially reinforces this idea. Although it might seem that Twain was advocating Chinese exclusion, he was once again simply—and indeed cleverly—establishing a divide between the Americans and the Chinese and inverting the two just so his audience could step into the shoes of the racial other and understand their conditions more thoroughly. In fact, as can be seen in “The Treaty with China,” written twenty-two years prior, Twain had already accepted the idea of including the Chinese as citizens of the United States: “The idea of seeing a Chinaman a citizen of the United States would have been almost appalling to me a few years ago, but I suppose I can live through it now.”6 While Twain had continued since then to speak up on behalf of the Chinese only when he was arguing against American oppression, there was no evidence that he wanted to marginalize the Chinese people, much less exclude them altogether. It was only because Twain could no longer tolerate the continued and worldwide oppression of the Chinese, nor the increasing aggression and violence among nations on the global stage, that he resorted to saying he would much rather see mutual exclusion of Chinese and Americans from each other’s countries than other actions that would inevitably lead to tragic ends. ­Instead of exclusion, Twain was in effect urging mutual understanding. Up to this point, Twain was not necessarily “fond of Chinamen,” yet he stood on the

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side of the Chinese from a humanitarian standpoint against the barbaric behavior of his own country abroad. Actively denouncing American and global imperialism, Twain helped to found the American Anti-Imperialist League, where he held the office of vice president from 1901 until the end of his life.

The Boxer Uprising (1899–1901)—a Background The uprising of the Boxers (義和團 Yihe Tuan) was an indigenous movement among peasants and laborers as a result of their growing dissatisfaction with the weak, late Qing China and its inability to deal with foreign invasions. China’s multiple defeats in its wars with foreign powers—first by Britain in the Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), then by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895)—had brought the country into a state of poverty as a result of the series of unequal and financially punitive treaties it was forced to sign. In addition to Britain and Japan, Russia, France, Spain, Germany, and America all also took an interest in China and were literally dividing it up, bringing areas of China into their own spheres of influence by grabbing provinces and ports for trading and constructing railroads and also missionary schools and churches. All these activities posed a calamitous influence on Chinese ways of life and beliefs that had been deeply rooted for thousands of years.7 In addition to these external threats and the internal vulnerability of the government, a serious drought and multiple floods in Shandong province from 1897 to 1898 swept away many farmers’ crops and lifelong endeavors almost overnight. It was under such tumultuous circumstances that the Boxer uprising emerged in Shandong. Mostly young and poor, Boxers wore red and yellow headbands and armbands, and wide sashes around their waists. Whirling and twirling swords, Boxers chanted to Taoist and Buddhist saints as part of their rituals to call for the power of the god. When the correct incantation was chanted, the god was believed to descend and possess the chanter’s body, and instill him with superhuman skills that made him immune to attacks with cannons, rifles, and knives. ­Practicing monk-like austerity, Boxers were not allowed meat or tea, but only wheat cakes and water in their diet. They were also strictly prohibited from having sexual contact with women, whom they considered unclean and therefore destructive to their spells and trances. Nevertheless, women Boxers had their own auxiliary, which was known as the Red Lanterns

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(紅燈照 Hong Deng Zhao). Both anti-Qing and anti-Christian, ­Boxers were “ephemeral, their organization rudimentary, their leadership shadowy, their growth spontaneous, and their beliefs expressed in lurid posters and shouted slogans.”8 Despite their loose organization and leadership, the Boxers appealed to a great number of people because they had “formed a shadowy counter­part to authoritarian rule for hundreds of years.” They were the secret voices of an otherwise hopeless people who were subjugated to an absolutist monarchy. Secret societies became widespread in late nineteenth-century northern China as it was plagued by foreign threats, natural disasters, and widespread poverty and famine. Paul Cohen calls this phenomenon death ­anxiety: “[the Boxers’] religious and magical practices had as a paramount goal the affording of protection and emotional security in the face of a future that was indeterminate and fraught with danger and risk.”9 In the spring of 1900, the uprising spread rapidly from Shandong into the country­side near Beijing. Boxers burned churches, destroyed railroad tracks, killed Chinese Christians, and intimidated anyone who stood in their way.10 In June, they threatened foreigners who sought refuge in the Legation Quarter in ­Beijing. The siege lasted for fifty-five days. The Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后) hesitantly sided with the Boxers, as they were obviously more popular than the Christian converts among the Chinese people, thereby declaring war on the foreign powers present in China.11 Up until 1899, the United States had been reluctant to assume the role of a colonizer, and its role in China in the nineteenth century had mainly to do with commerce and trade. Its sphere of interest was Manchuria, which conflicted with the similar interests of Russia and Japan. Having invested in the Manchurian market for over half a century, Standard Oil and the American Sugar Refining Company were the leading participants in the American China Development Company, which entered bids for the construction of the central part of the Peking-Hankow-Canton railroad. Where Belgium had gotten the right to build the northern section, the American China Development Company won the bid for the southern section. The Rockefellers also had a huge influence with their Baptist missions and vigorous promotion of the sale of Standard Oil kerosene in the country.12 The US commercial interest in China was analogous to its interest in the Philippines; gaining control of Manila, which had served as a crossroads for Spanish-Chinese trade for three centuries, meant gaining important access to trade with China.13

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Even though the United States did not have a colonial history in Asia, nor was it as aggressive as other European colonial powers there, it began to take on a role similar to its involvement in the Spanish-American War. John Hay, then US secretary of state, having negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1898, then announced the Open Door Policy in 1899, which demanded that parts of China be opened to the United States as they had been to other European powers. US participation in what came to be known as the Eight-Nation Alliance (with Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Japan) further defined the US stance as imperialist on the international stage. The alliance was formed to deal with the Boxer uprising, and the United States contributed 1700 American soldiers who had just fought in the Philippine-American War, resulting in an international force of 20,000 soldiers. The alliance reached Beijing on August 14, 1900, and lifted the siege. Then, instead of progressing to a peaceful negotiation that could have prevented further damage and loss of human lives, both alliance soldiers and missionaries began to exact revenge by looting villages, killing as many Boxers as they could, and raping Chinese women, as well as murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese people. James Ricalton, an American photographer who followed the allied force and captured events with his camera as they happened, described the “great city” of Tientsin, after the allies’ departure, as “sacked, looted, and in ashes, by Christian armies,” and transformed into “a holocaust of human life.” He remarked that the “Boxer Uprising was stupid and barbarous,” but the “retaliation by the so-called Christian armies was often characterized by rape, plunder, cruelty, and enormous indemnities dictated by allied might.”14 Twain was aware of the US involvement in these brutal episodes in China and was strongly against it. On August 13, 1900, the day before the Eight-Nation Alliance sent its armed troops to relieve the legations in Beijing, while still overseas Twain wrote to Twichell expressing his sympathy for the Chinese: “They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good.”15 On October 6, immediately before leaving England, Twain remarked to a reporter from the New York World on his growing distrust of the American intervention in China and the Philippines: You ask me about what is called imperialism. Well, I have formed views about that question. I am at the disadvantage of not knowing whether our people are for or against spreading themselves over the face of the globe. I should be sorry

Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist   /  59 if they are, for I don’t think that it is wise or a necessary development. As to China, I quite approve of our Government’s action in getting free of that complication. . . . There is the case of the Philippines. . . . I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States.16

For Twain and other anti-imperialists, as Susan K. Harris notes in God’s ­Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1901, “the US narrative about its own special mission is not inherently false; rather, it has been used falsely, betraying the people who trust its promises.”17 Initially, the American Anti-­ Imperialist League was founded to oppose the American annexation of Hawaii and potentially Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines during the ­Spanish-American War. Members of the Anti-Imperialist League believed that instead of restoring freedom and order according to the ways of these former Spanish colonies, the United States was violating its founding ideals of democracy by taking democracy away from them.18 Where the Philippines would become the league’s primary concern, Twain put an equal emphasis on the American suppression of the Chinese Boxers. A month after declaring himself a Boxer, Twain was invited to preside at an event at the Waldorf Astoria in New York celebrating the twenty-six-year-old Winston S. Churchill’s heroic escape after he had been captured by the Boers in South Africa. In his introduction, Twain did not hesitate to make use of the occasion to launch a tirade about European and American imperialism, and to satirize US and British policy in China. He remarked that America, “the refuge of the homeless, the hunted, the oppressed,” had shut her door to the Chinese, and “England, mother of human liberty,” had assisted the United States to “force China to admit the foreigner when she didn’t want them, and to let him in free when she wanted to charge him $50 if he was a harmless Christian or kill him if he was a missionary.” Upon presenting Churchill, what he said should have once again taken the audience by surprise: Mr. Churchill will tell you about the war in South Africa, and he is competent. . . . By his father he is English, by his mother he is American—to my mind the blend which makes the perfect man. . . . We have always been kin: kin in blood, kin in religion, kin in representative government, kin in ­ideals, kin in just and lofty purposes; and now we are kin in sin, the harmony is complete, the blend is perfect, like Mr. Churchill himself. I have the honor to present him to you.19

60  /  Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) Although Twain’s position as vice president of the league was not as administrative as that title suggests, his role there was nevertheless indispensable. As the country’s leading anti-imperialist newspaper, the Springfield Republican, remarked, “Mark Twain has suddenly become the most influential anti-imperialist and the most dreaded critic of the sacrosanct person in the White House that the country contains.”20 With a reputation easily second only to the President of the United States, through writing against American imperialism he contributed a most important voice that helped to mobilize public opinion and that educated people on what they needed to know beyond the equivocal US slogans about civilization and liberation. His article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) was the league’s most popular and influential publication; its New York, New England, and ­Chicago offices all requested permission to reprint it.21 Appearing in the North American Review, this political piece attacked the hypocrisy of Christian aggression and colonial exploitation of the weak in China, the Philippines, and South Africa. The primary trigger for “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” had been the New York Sun’s Christmas Eve reportage on the Boxer rebellion. Twain’s response to that report is shown in the following excerpt from “To the ­Person Sitting in Darkness” (the emphasis is Twain’s): The Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions, has returned from a trip which he made for the purpose of collecting indemnities for damages done by Boxers. . . . He also assessed fines amounting to THIRTEEN TIMES the amount of the indemnity. This money will be used for the propagation of the Gospel. Mr. Ament declares that the compensation he has collected is moderate, when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who demand, in addition to money, head for head. They collect 500 taels for each murder of a Catholic. In the Wenchiu country, 680 Catholics were killed, and for this the European Catholics here demand 750,000 strings of cash and 680 heads. In the course of a conversation, Mr. Ament referred to the attitude of the missionaries toward the Chinese. He said: “I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive. . . . The soft hand of the Americans is not as good as the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand they will take advantage of it.”22 (162)

Twain was infuriated by Ament’s behavior in China as it was a violation not only of the founding ideals of America, but also the principles and compassion that Christianity proclaims to embrace. Moreover, Ament was clearly not the only missionary who collected indemnity from the Chinese

Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist   /  61

to make up for the losses of Christian lives and the Catholics had even gone much further by demanding “head for head.” All this made it clear to Twain that Christian aggression in the Far East had become just as blatant as, and also part of, the white imperial mission at large. As Harris observes, “[t]he debates, conducted in congressional chambers, in editorials and letters to the editor, in sermons, and in cartoons, show how intensely American conversations about national identity had become fixated on religion and race by the close of the nineteenth century.”23 Where the spreading of the Gospel was an important agenda for US foreign policy in both the Philippines and China, in the former country Christianity was already widely accepted as a result of the longtime Spanish influence there; the Boxer revolt, however, was primarily anti-Christian. Despite that, interestingly, discussions of the rebellion then and now tend to neglect the missionaries, focusing instead on diplomats and soldiers.24 “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” then, is an excellent source for filling that lacuna as Twain targeted his attacks in that piece mainly toward missionary work abroad and especially Ament’s work in China. The writer began by warning his readers that the purpose of this article “is not to describe the terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of Politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts. They could not be described, even verbally” (161). Knowing that the general public was ill informed about imperialism and the business-oriented nature of Christendom, Twain set out to speak to the Americans “sitting in darkness.” While lending support to US deployment abroad, most Americans could not even properly locate China and the Philippines on the world map. Twain was keenly aware of that, and asked his audience to imagine the brutal scenes in China actually taking place at home. Knowing that everybody must be familiar with the infamies and corrupt politics of Tammany Hall in New York, Twain made reference to the notoriety of the “East Side districts” and pointed out that rather than being local, the offenses he was addressing were committed globally, and rather than being “in the name of Politics” alone, they were also done in the name of religion. George Lynch, a journalist for the British Daily Express, had written of the threat of heavy media and political censorship he encountered that prevented him from giving a fair report of the Boxer uprising: “There are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery.”25 Rather than refraining from writing about the things that Lynch conjectured would be subject to hostile responses, Twain

62  /  Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer

exposed them by taking away the veneer of western civilization. To remind his readers what Christianity means, he listed a number of qualities, centered in the middle of the page, that perhaps not only a Christian, but also any decent human being ought to encompass: Love, Justice, Gentleness, Christianity, Protection to the Weak, Temperance, —and so on. (165)

Law and Order, Liberty, Equality, Honorable Dealing, Mercy, Education,

In Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920, Peter Schmidt posits that in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” “Twain’s target was the language of liberation used to support US colonialism,” and that he “used the art of parody and ­collage to show its workings.”26 The technique that Twain used to present the Christian qualities is especially effective. He said sarcastically that none of these qualities seemed to fill the bill when applied abroad, and he also playfully capitalized various other terms throughout the passage, such as “Progress and Civilization,” “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust,” “Business Master,” “Christendom,” “Great Family of Nations,” and “Master of the Game.” By giving these otherwise ordinary terms a name, he was mimicking what Christendom did only to satirize them—branding deceptive ideals and selling them to the world. In contrast to these beautiful slogans, Twain wrote, was “The Actual Thing” that “the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty” (166). There are obviously two kinds of civilization, Twain remarks, “one for home consumption and one for the heathen market” (167). Similarly, there are two contrasting faces of America, “one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on, then kills him to get his land” (170). He asked rhetorically if Germany would do the same to America, ­England, France, and Russia, “[o]r only to China the helpless—imitating the elephant’s assault upon the field-mice?” (168). What is illuminating and truly groundbreaking about the article is Twain’s transnational vision, as he was calling for humanity, regardless of nationality, color, or creed, to investigate what was happening globally and to recognize it as fundamentally wrong. While most members of the AntiImperialist League focused on the debate over the Philippine-American

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War, Twain offered a unique voice that not only brought readers’ attention to the situation in China, but also established a global context for the understanding of race through linking American imperialism to concurrent imperial histories of Europe in Africa and the Far East. The “person” addressed in the article’s title did not assume a national identity. Readers could be Americans who had little idea of what was at stake nationally or the Chinese and the Filipinos who had been brutalized and silenced. They could even be the colonizers themselves, who in the name of civilization justified their brutal and aggressive behaviors because they believed, in Schmidt’s words, that their “motives are ‘enlightened,’” although, ironically, they were the ones who “remain[ed] in the shadows and [spoke] only hypothetically.”27 Twain’s article therefore attempted to gather a global community of people against the powers that be who had abused their authority under cover of the darkness created by the ignorance of their own countrymen as well as people of color. Twain also ridiculed British Cabinet Minister Joseph Chamberlain’s aggression in South Africa, whose “game” was adopted by the United States in Cuba and the Philippines, as well as by Russia, France, and Germany in the Pacific. Can we afford civilization?, the author asked. Perhaps not, when “we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world” (174). He went so far as to propose a new flag for the Philippines: “we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones” (176). Not surprisingly, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which many would consider anti-American even today, did not go unattacked. Twain shared with Joseph Twichell his painful dilemma that Livy would not allow him to publish it “because it would destroy me [Twain].” Compelled to expose the injustices that he saw and yet pressured by society to silence himself, Twain exclaimed to Twichell: I can’t understand it! You are a public guide and teacher, Joe, and are under a heavy responsibility to men, young and old; if you teach your people—as you teach me—to hide their opinions when they believe the flag is being abused and dishonored, lest the utterance do them and a publisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience?28

Twain would eventually obtain approvals from both Livy and Twichell, although conviction alone would have prompted him to publish a piece that was to receive as much reverence as it did condemnation. John Kendrick Bangs, editor for the humor section of Harper’s Magazine, questioned Twain’s Americanness and patriotism. He and Twain debated the

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question “Is the Philippine Policy of the administration just?” in the pages of Harper’s Weekly in 1901. Twain argued “No,” and Bangs ­argued “Yes.” ­Asserting that Twain was “somewhat astray in his ­Americanism,” Bangs went so far as to mention Twain and treason and the term Copperhead (commonly used in the Civil War years to describe people who rebelled against the government in Washington) in the same breath: I should not, for one instant, think of calling Mr. Clemens either a traitor or a Copperhead, for he is neither, but I do think that upon his return last autumn after a prolonged absence from his native land, during which time he may reasonably have been expected to get out of touch with things American, he should have been inoculated against what I might call the contagion of the ­Atkinsonian bacillus, lately discovered in Boston, the effects of which are to promote irresponsible speech, to impair the political vision, and to stunt one’s patriotic development.”29

However subtly, Bangs was reminding readers of Twain’s southern identity, and the fact that Twain had actually once served in Missouri’s confederate militia during the Civil War, even if for only two weeks. In all that Bangs claimed, most of which was unsubstantiated, there was one crucial point: that Twain’s absence from America had given him a different set of judgments. While his changed ideas might have seemed treacherous to some, Twain’s experience abroad had in fact developed in him an invaluable capacity to proffer a critical perspective on imperialism; his vision and voice were sorely needed amid the tumultuous times facing many global communities.

“To My Missionary Critics” (1901) Twain’s strongest critics were, not unexpectedly, to be found on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He received letters from a few clergymen and a note from the Reverend Dr. Judson Smith, corresponding secretary of the board, headed “An Apology Due from Mr. Clemens.” Twain responded with “To My Missionary Critics” shortly after. Instead of offering an apology, Twain used this article to further explore the motive behind missionary work in China and explain his position even more clearly. In the article, he quoted a sample passage from one of the critics: The evidence of the past day or two should induce Mark Twain to make for the amen corner and formulate a prompt apology for his scathing attack on the Rev. Dr. Ament, the veteran Chinese missionary. The assault was based on a Pekin dispatch to the New York Sun, which said that Dr. Ament had collected from

Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist   /  65 the Chinese in various places damages thirteen times in excess of actual losses. So Mark Twain charged Mr. Ament with bullyragging, extortion and things. A Pekin dispatch to the Sun yesterday, however, explains that the amount collected was not thirteen times the damage sustained, but one-third in excess of the indemnities, and that the blunder was due to a cable error in transmission. The 1-3d got converted into 13. Yesterday the Rev. Judson Smith, Secretary of the American Board, received a dispatch from Dr. Ament, calling attention to the cable blunder, and declaring that all the collections which he made were approved by the Chinese officials. The fractional amount that was collected in excess of actual losses, he explains, is being used for the support of widows and orphans.30

Twain followed this by saying that he had “no prejudice against apologies” and that he never withheld one or ever had a disposition to do so. Before proceeding to make his case, he presented what he called “exhibits,” materials that he had received that had eventually eliminated the “small chance” of an apology from him. Among these exhibits were testimonies from George Lynch and Sir Robert Harte, a British consular official in China, on what they saw in China. Lynch’s observations had appeared in the New York Herald on February 18, 1901 (the emphasis is Twain’s): When the soldiers were prohibited from looting, no such prohibitions seemed to operate with the missionaries. . . . A day or two after the relief, when looking for a place to sleep in, I met the Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions. He told me he was going to take possession of the house of a wealthy Chinaman who was an old enemy of his, as he had interfered much in the past with his missionary labors in Pekin. A couple of days afterward he did so, and held a great sale of his enemy’s effects. . . . As the stock became depleted it was replenished by the efforts of his converts, who were ransacking the houses in the neighborhood.31

Likewise, in the January 1901 issue of the Fortnightly Review, Harte wrote about a similar situation he had observed of missionaries stealing properties from Chinese homes: “And even some missionaries took such a leading part in ‘spoiling the Egyptians’ for the greater glory of God that a bystander was heard to say: ‘For a century to come Chinese converts will consider looting and vengeance Christian virtues!’” (Twain’s emphasis).32 A majority of American citizens believed that US participation in the Eight-Nation Alliance against the Boxers was a just call and an honorable battle between their much-esteemed civilization and Far East savagery. To the Chinese, however, the line between “civilized” and “savage” was never blurrier than in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising. The events leading up to the uprising and after were one of the darkest pages of Chinese history since its earliest encounters with white foreigners. Since Lynch and Harte

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could bear witness to what actually happened in China, their testimonies were crucial if Twain was to launch a convincing attack on Ament and missionaries alike. Where “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” addresses global imperialism and violence in the Eastern Hemisphere, “To My Missionary Critics” focuses solely on the Boxer rebellion in China, delving more deeply into issues otherwise little known to the general public. Twain continued to do a groundbreaking job in showcasing to the person sitting in darkness what was fundamentally troubling about the Christian dissociation of “just and fair Christian and civilized methods” from the “heathen market.” The “cable blunder” that Ament identified was thought by the missionaries opposing Twain to be a powerful piece of evidence to ruin Twain’s accusations and thereby prove that the actions of Ament and other missionaries in collecting indemnities from the Chinese were not crimes. But the outcome was quite the opposite. Given Ament’s assertion that an indemnity of merely one-third in excess, instead of thirteen times the losses of Christian properties, had been collected, Twain went straight to questioning the motive of collecting anything at all in the first place: What was the “one-third” extra? Money due? No. Was it a theft, then? Putting aside the ‘“one-third extra,” what was the remainder of the exacted indemnity, if collected from persons not known to owe it, and without Christian and civilized forms of procedures? Was it theft, was it robbery? In America it would be that; in Christian Europe it would be that.33

Just as in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain here effectively inverted the situation in China into a context that was instantly familiar to the American audience—America and “Christian Europe.” He asserted that what missionaries did in China would undoubtedly be considered “theft” in biblical terms. “Morally,” he continued, “there are no degrees in stealing. The Commandment merely says, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and stops there.”34 What was worse was not that they collected the third extra but that they collected indemnities from the innocent instead of the guilty. This is not to mention their demand of “head for head,” which was an act of vengeance and not an instance of the Christian virtue of love and forgiveness. The point Twain makes in this piece should remind one of another essay of his, “The Stupendous Procession,” which was published at a time between “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics.” In this essay “CHRISTENDOM” appears as “a majestic matron, in flowing robes drenched with blood. On her head a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines, the bleeding heads of patriots who died for their countries—Boers, Boxers, Filipinos.”35

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Further down the page, Twain wrote: “ALL WHITE MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL.” Declaration of Independence “ALL WHITE MEN ARE AND OF RIGHT OUGHT TO BE FREE AND INDEPENDENT.” Ibid. 14th amendment: “WHITE SLAVERY SHALL NO LONGER EXIST WHERE THE AMERICAN FLAG FLOATS.”36

In her article “Mark Twain and the Jews,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin asserts that “The Stupendous Procession” presents a montage of global racism and white exploitation of the weak that “appears to be almost cinematic.” Twain’s “supremely visual experiment here”—written right after the birth of the American motion picture industry, which would soon capture US wars overseas on the popular screen—“may have been taking a tentative step toward entering the cultural conversation surrounding this medium by infusing it with a different earlier visual tradition.”37 In fact, Twain used the same technique in “To My Missionary Critics” by juxtaposing different “exhibits” for his readers. The visual presentation he experimented with here was an effective way to communicate to the people of his country the American foreign policy that would eventually come to characterize the entire twentieth century. Both “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics” delivered devastating blows to Ament and his reputation in the United States. In a strained letter to his wife in January 1901, Ament writes, “I am doing what I do not recall that I ever did before, remaining at home deliberately and missing all the services. I need the rest and felt that it was imperative. You see there is no let up for me. It is a constant strain from morning till night.”38 Nellie Naomi Russell, a missionary colleague, notes that when Ament was weary in body and mind, there came like a thunderbolt the article by Mark Twain in the North American Review . . . A brave, masterful man he was, ever ready to relieve, not to add to the sum of human suffering, and while in some things he may have been unwise, his mistakes, whatever they may have been, were of the head and not the heart.39

Ament headed back to the United States on April 25, 1901, to clear his name. He admitted some of the events: [T]he American and English missionaries looted the premises of Prince Yu and other Chinese magnates and sold the plunder for the benefit of the missions, the sale lasting two weeks. After disposing of all the loot, and finding that the

68  /  Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer demand for sables and other valuable things was undiminished, they purchased other plundered articles from the Russian and East Indian soldiers and sold these at a profit.40

Nevertheless, in response to the criticisms of Twain and others, Ament denied forcing the Chinese to accept Christianity, and said that “[w]e treat their beliefs kindly, try to extract the good, and never interfere with their customs, except where they interfere with Christianity.”41 Ament anyhow managed to rebuild his name and popularity in the United States. Soon he was on the podiums of America’s most influential organizations. He was a guest at a banquet at New York’s Delmonico’s, where four hundred bankers and business leaders gave him a standing ­ovation.42 Despite that, Judson Smith, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and church leaders in the United States were convinced that his actions in China following the siege of the legations had been an embarrassment. In fact, Smith demanded that the money Ament collected in China be returned after the formal indemnity China would pay under a peace treaty was received. Larry Clinton Thompson, in ­William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris and the “Ideal Missionary,” observes that [i]n the official histories of missionary enterprise he would recede to obscurity rather than occupy the place of honor he otherwise would have merited. The missionaries had won the battle with Mark Twain, but the humorist, armed with a poisonous pen and lasting fame, won the war. Twain’s essays are often reprinted and read—but Ament’s defense and the defense of him by others is buried in musty archives.43

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics” laid before the readers the void between the American mission to civilize, modernize, and Christianize the racial other and America’s vindictive behaviors abroad. Twain’s work, Susan K. Harris writes, “did not seek to destroy Americans’ belief in their country’s special mission. Rather, it sought to bring readers’ consciousness to the need to restore national faith” by the turn of the century.44 Unfortunately, news and media portrayals often simplified complicated and catastrophic socio-historical events, especially those in foreign lands. In the United States, the Boxer uprising was often considered an epitome of the kind of barbaric display that ought to be put down by means of military force. The New York Sun, for instance, described the siege of the Peking legations as “the most exciting episode ever known to civilization.”45 Even William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West traveling show reinforced the American triumph in

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preaching progress and civilization to the barbaric land, perhaps more so than any other medium. Seeing that the Boxer uprising was a center of debate in national news and magazines, Cody decided to reenact the American victory in China, making “Rescue at Pekin” the finale of his traveling program. Opening in Pittsburgh on April 2, 1901, the very month when “To My Missionary Critics” was published, the finale created a storm in the audience; they “stomped their feet, shouted at the top of their lungs, shook their fists in the air and wailed empathetically for fallen American soldiers.”46 By the end of the 1901 season, the show had traveled through the mid-Atlantic region, upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, the upper South, and the eastern parts of the Midwest. As John R. Haddad, in “The Wild West Turns East: ­Audience, Ritual, and Regeneration in Buffalo Bill’s Boxer Uprising,” explains, the popularity of the show was due to the fact that it was framed by both Wild West promoters and the press as a combat between “civilization” and “savagery.” “Rescue at Pekin” dismissed the rebellion as “simply a savage, unreasoning and uncompromising hostility to foreigners,” without ever showing the foreigners’ brutality therein. Such a simplistic dichotomy easily appealed to a large American audience, who “proudly embraced their own civilization and welcomed opportunities to cheer exuberantly for it.”47 As the show capitalized on America’s nostalgia for a bygone era, ­Haddad notes, it also supplied an answer to the unsettling question, “where can men find a suitable proving ground now that the frontier has vanished?” That answer is, by continuing west across the Pacific. [While] the conventional acts in the Wild West represented Cody’s attempt to superimpose a romantic mythology over the past, “The Rescue at Pekin” offered a future with an aggressive vision: the civilizing mission which had begun in the West could be extended to the Far East, and Chinese Boxers could serve as “new” Indians.

Literally and ironically indeed, due to the impracticality of importing real Chinese Boxers from China to act in the show, Cody decided to use Sioux Indians as a substitute for the Boxers. A New York Sun reporter was convinced that the Indians were naturals for the role as they were “used to dying” in the show.48 Reviews of Cody’s show were mostly enthusiastic. While the New York Journal reported the huge roar of approval from the audience, who “rose in delight” when “the Americans scaled the wall ahead of the allies,” a reporter in Baltimore recalled that “the allied forces of Christendom were shown as dealing a staggering blow to the Boxer demon of the Orient.” A personal

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friend of Cody’s, Twain was in the audience and even received a personal wave from Cody from the stage at the start of the show. Offering modest applause, Twain excused himself just before the Boxers finale. “When the battle of Tien Tsin began,” reported the New York World, Twain “expressed his disapproval of our foreign policy by abruptly leaving the Garden” with a face “as sour as a German pickle.” The Evening Sun corroborated this account, saying, “This was the part that Mark Twain did not see,” and that “[t]he famous convert to anti-imperialism departed before the number was called and left the people sitting in the darkness.”49

“The Fable of the Yellow Terror” (1904–1905) In the little known and rarely discussed short story “The Fable of the Yellow Terror” (written ca. 1904–1905), Twain sarcastically warns America and Europe against overcivilizing Asia.50 He draws an analogy between the western powers and a nation of Butterflies who were “insufferably proud” of their “elegant civilization” and “always anxious to spread it around the planet and cram it down other people’s throats and improve them.” They start sending “missionaries to all the pagan insects to teach them how to be tranquil and unafraid on a deathbed” and to “charge for the funeral.”51 ­Having covered all the ground with their “profitable art” of making honey and killing by using their sting “scientifically and devastatingly,” the Butterflies eventually arrive at “the vast empire of the Bees.” Despite the Bees’ initial resistance, the Butterflies eventually succeed in coercing them into liking the idea of making honey and accepting civilization.52 Indeed, the outcome of this struggle appears to be a landslide victory for the Butterflies: So each of the different tribes of Butterflies sent in a two-hundred-dollar missionary with the private purpose of getting him massacred and collecting a million dollars cash damages on him, along with a couple of provinces and such other things as might be lying around; and when the Bees resisted, civilization had its chance! When it got through, there wasn’t a Bee that wasn’t bruised and battered and sore, and most humble and apologetic and submissive.53

Twain concludes the story anticlimactically, however, by introducing a new species, “a grave gray Grasshopper,” who gives “a prominent Butterfly” a most convincing lecture on the danger of civilizing the Bees further: You have taught one tribe of Bees how to use its sting, it will teach its brothertribe. The two together will be able to banish all the Butterflies some day, and keep them out; for they are uncountable in numbers and will be unconquerable when educated. Also, you have given the Bees the honey-appetite—forced it

Reflections and Reformation of a Red-Hot Anti-Imperialist   /  71 upon them—and now the frenzy of it will never leave them. . . . Whether Bee or Butterfly win, it is all the same, the Butterfly will have lost the market. . . . Maybe you ought to have let the Yellow Peril alone, as long as there wasn’t any. Yet you ought to be proud, for in creating a something out of a nothing, you have done what was never done before, save by the Creator of all things.54

Written around 1904 or 1905, Twain’s story coincided with the RussoJapanese War (February 8, 1904, to September 5, 1905). The Japanese victory shocked the western powers, who had hitherto viewed their military capability as far more sophisticated than that of their Asian counterparts, resulting in a reassessment of Japan and the balance of power in East Asia relative to the global stage. If we put Twain’s work into the context of the war, then the Bees would be the Japanese, who were learning, mainly with the aid of German experts, how to use their “sting” devastatingly: that is, to progress from westernizing their military and participating in westernstyle colonial exploits to winning the war with Russia.55 The Grasshopper would then be China, which was often viewed as a potential ally of Japan against threats from the western world, although Japan was no less aggressive than ­Europe and America as an imperial power toward China, as was most evident in its participation in the Eight-Nation Alliance.56 Having seen how the Butterflies dealt with the Bees, the Grasshopper displays skills in negotiating and bargaining with the Butterflies by asking “for his passport” as he finishes his speech.57 The Butterflies would very likely give the Grasshopper his passport, lest his prophecy came true and the Butterflies find themselves taken over by a joint force of the two “pagan” empires. While Twain’s fable asked Europeans and Americans not to underestimate the racial other, its stronger message was that they should stop their imperial mission or face grave consequences. Rather than fearing the potential takeover of the “Yellow” empire someday—which was still extremely farsighted of Twain in retrospect, given the rapid economic growth of Japan in the 1980s, followed by that of China in the last two decades—the last thing that he wanted to see was the total moral collapse of his own people and, eventually, of the human race. Twain here once again uses the technique of inversion, which here reverses the dominant and the subservient, thereby allowing the readers to stand in the shoes of the racial other and reexamine the situation in real life under a new light. In depicting the Butterflies using their weapons stealthily, Twain shows respect for the Bees as they possess a visible weapon but never use it unless provoked. The Bees are far more noble and magnanimous than the Butterflies, who set out to deceive their enemies by the beautiful and colorful veneer of their deadly schemes.

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A similar sentiment is depicted in Twain’s highly provocative essay titled “The United States of Lyncherdom” (written in 1901 and first published, posthumously, by Albert Bigelow Paine in a collection of Twain’s writings called Europe and Elsewhere in 1923), in which Twain expressed his frustration that all Missourians were presented in the news as lynchers. Rather than point a finger at the half a million innocent citizens of Missouri, the author implies that imperialists are the real lynchers. Initially planning to write a book on the lynching history of America, he says elsewhere, he eventually refrained from doing so for fear that he “shouldn’t have even half a friend left down there [in the South].”58 By the time Twain wrote this piece, his perspective on Missouri in relation to America at large had taken a dramatic shift—most notably in terms of his likening of local racism to global oppression of people of color. Perhaps the most appalling gesture made by Twain in this work is not merely raising the subject of lynching but going so far as to invite China to witness the lynching activities in his southern hometown. In pleading for the United States to leave China alone, the writer remarks ironically: “We ought to be careful. We ought to think twice before we encourage a risk like that; for, once civilized, China can never be uncivilized again.” The deeper meaning of Twain’s words and his notion of “civilization” lies in what follows, as he depicts a scene with a “negro” being swung in the air before he is slowly burned to death, and then suggests that China should see what civilization really means.59 Asserting, “our country is worse off than China,” the writer concludes, “O kind missionary, O compassionate missionary, leave China! Come home and convert these Christians!”60 In November 1907, just a few years before Twain would pass away, he remarked on the absurdity of knee-jerk patriotism in a piece called “True Patriotism at the Children’s Theater.” Twain writes: “Citizenship? We have none!. . . . I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, ‘My country, right or wrong, my country!’ How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.”61 In remarks made at a banquet of the American Society in London on July 4, 1907, Twain again traced the founding of America to its English ancestry: “Really we destroy more property on every Fourth-of-July night than the whole of the United States was worth one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning, our day of sorrow.”62 Much as Twain had respect for England and a desire to “bring about the union of America and the mother land,” now they were “kin in sin,” and “thieves, highwaymen, pirates, and we are proud to be the combination.”63

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Twain cared tremendously about his reputation and popularity in the public eye, and his scathing attacks on slavery and imperialism reflect the fact that he cared just as much about his country and humanity. As Abel Startsev lucidly puts, “one has to love one’s motherland infinitely, and also suffer similarly, without end, for the shame which is brought forth by the fundamentalists and racists and lynchers, to love it so much to call it the United States of Lyncherdom for all the world to see.”64

Twain the Humorist or the Anti-Imperialist? After Twain’s death, his anti-imperialism was soon forgotten in the United States and the writer was largely labeled a great humorist. For more than half a century, virtually no scholarship mentioned his involvement with the Anti-Imperialist League or alignment with the Chinese Boxers. Finally in 1972, Frederick Anderson published a collection of Twain’s anti-imperialist writings in A Pen Warmed Up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest. Since then, Twain and his anti-imperialist position have begun to gain some attention in America. Hal Holbrook, for instance, sometimes included portions of “The United States of Lyncherdom” in his performances of Mark Twain’s Tonight. Nevertheless, it was not until 1992, when Jim Zwick collected a series of Twain’s anti-imperialist writings in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, that more work on the subject appeared, and Twain the anti-imperialist is still not a salient image in the American mind. As Zwick explains in Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League, “Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist writings are relatively unknown today because of the nation’s inability to deal with that part of its past.”65 Tellingly, Twain’s anti-imperialism was not emphasized at all in Ken Burns’s 2001 documentary film on the great writer. Chinese scholarship, on the contrary, displayed an early awareness of Twain’s anti-imperialism. His work on Chinese immigrants and support for the Chinese Boxers was an important area of study in Chinese scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. Lao She (老舍) began his speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Twain’s death with these words: “Mark Twain, an outstanding writer of critical realism in the United States as well as an exposer of imperialist aggression and the hypocritical civilization of US capitalism, passed away fifty years ago.” He continued, Mark Twain’s works “are powerful weapons for progressive human beings in opposing aggressive wars, imperialism, colonialism, and in safeguarding world peace.”66 Where Twain was mostly remembered for The Adventures

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of Tom Sawyer (1876), its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and other humorous sketches and travelogues, Lao directed the audience’s attention to the more serious and yet little known Twain. Similarly, Twain scholar Zhou Jueliang (周珏良) has highlighted Twain’s three “anti” positions—anti-feudalism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism—citing such works as The Prince and the Pauper, “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, and “The United States of Lyncherdom.”67 As Twain later explained his position on the Chinese Boxers, “when I publicly attacked the American missionaries in China and some other iniquitous persons and causes, I did not do it for any reason but just the one: that the inclination to do it was stronger than my diplomatic instincts, and I had to obey and take the consequences.”68 By saying he was a Boxer, Twain did not mean that he literally partook in the Boxer rebellion, nor that he was a pugilist. In fact, he did not know more about the Boxers than what was reported in the papers outside China: that is, the deep contradictions embedded in the antagonism between the Boxers and the Qing court, and the Empress Cixi’s reluctant siding with the Boxers only due to the imminent invasion by the Eight-Nation Alliance. Nevertheless, what was admirable about Twain was that he was simply doing what Huck Finn does when he follows his “sound heart” rather than a “deformed conscience” and helps the runaway black slave, Jim, attain his freedom.69 It was Twain’s “sound heart” that won deep respect from scholars and readers all over China. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became one of China’s most translated works. While the first translators looked at Huck Finn as nothing more than children’s literature, the second translator, Zhang Wanli (张万里), in 1954, already demonstrated knowledge of Twain’s anti-imperialism. Translators that followed often spoke about Twain’s relationship with China and his support for the Chinese in the prefaces to their works. Despite the Chinese stereotypes that Twain’s early work, such as Ah Sin, embodies, Chinese critics credit Twain for his bravery in speaking up for the Chinese people in his later years. Twain has been widely regarded as the American writer, and a dear friend of the Chinese people. He is often passionately spoken about in China. As Twain scholar Li Tianqiao (李天桥) enthused in 1988, “Mark Twain went through the trials and triumphs of China; he is our honored friend. He will forever be living in the heart and soul of the Chinese people.”70

chapter 4

Lighting Out for the Pacific Mark Twain’s Posthumous Journey Across China

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises,” of rupture. Eugène Ionesco, “Reply to an Inquiry,” L’Express

Throughout his writing career, Mark Twain was deeply fascinated by translations and foreign languages. He included Chinese characters in chapter fifty-four of Roughing It (1872), bemoaned the difficulties of German in “The Awful German Language” (1880), and spoke with pride about learning Italian without the assistance of a teacher in “Italian Without a ­Master” (1904). While he was living in Vienna, he translated a few German plays (they were never produced) and even wrote one by himself, Meisterschaft (Virtuosity) (1898). He playfully had Huck speak “Polly-voo-franzy” in Huck Finn and debate with Jim in chapter fourteen whether a Frenchman is a man even though he speaks differently. Likewise, realizing that the French translation of his much acclaimed “Jumping Frog” story had done him an injustice by evading much of his humor, he took the trouble of retranslating the French version back into English just to poke fun at French grammar. He titled it “The ‘Jumping Frog.’ In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back Into A Civilized Language Once More By Patient, Unremunerated Toil” (1903). If Twain were still alive, he would certainly be intrigued by how frequently his works have been translated the world over. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has been translated into fifty-nine languages

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and dialects, from Hindi, Kirghiz, Marathi, Portuguese, Telugu, Afrikaans, Korean, Chuvash, Turkish, French, and Hungarian to Uzbeck.1 In China, Twain is more frequently translated than any other American writer. ­Between 1949 and 1979, his works sold more than half a million copies.2 Twain is commonly regarded as not only the American writer and humorist, but also as a friend and ally of the Chinese people. The first American works translated into Chinese were not Twain’s, but Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Henry Wadsworth Long­ fellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (1838), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). All of these works depict scenes of American life not previously familiar to the Chinese people. Stowe’s work, in particular, stirred nationwide attention and offered Chinese readers a clearer picture of what American slavery was like in pre-Civil War America. Published by the Commercial Press, Stowe’s work was translated into Chinese in 1901, almost half a century after its initial publication. Founded in 1897 in Shanghai, the Commercial Press is the oldest publishing house in China and is still in operation today. It has played a significant role in disseminating western literatures during various westernization movements in China, as will be discussed shortly.3 In 1911, the Commercial Press was promoting a range of English-Chinese dictionaries: for example, the Commercial Press English and English-Chinese Dictionary. Dictionaries played a key role in helping translators and readers understand a language that was still rather alien to the population. Although they could not solve all translation problems, their existence “must have contributed to the general improvement in standards evident in the 1910s.”4 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first translated by Lin Shu (or Lin Qin-nan) (林纾 or 林琴南) and Wei Yi (魏易) under the title《黑奴吁天录》 Hei-nu Xu-tian Lu (A memoir of the sorrowful cry of a black slave) in 1901. Lin was an experienced translator of western literature and over his lifetime translated 180 novels. In the preface to his translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lin remarks: As I learned about the American suppression of black people in the novel, I could not help but feel melancholy for my fellow countrymen who also experienced blatant racism working in the US. They are treated even worse than black slaves because they were barred from entering the US workforce upon the nation’s exclusion of the Chinese.5

In the afterword, Lin expressed his worry that China’s weakness would eventually result in the demise of the country, a thought that was also shared by Wei. As discussed in the previous chapter, China at that time had experienced multiple defeats in the Opium Wars, First Sino-Japanese

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War, and the Boxer rebellion. The numerous unequal treaties that China was forced to sign as a result of these losses had dampened not only the country’s financial state but also the soul of its citizens. To help their country avoid being further victimized by foreign powers, both Lin and Wei used the novel as a tool to deliver social messages to the Chinese audience, who they hoped would come to learn about the American oppression of the Chinese in America and the imminent threat of foreign invasion in China, instead of being deceived by the so-called American dream. They urged that China strengthen herself so as to avoid further damage done by foreign powers. While Irving’s and Longfellow’s works taught readers in China about the American Revolutionary War and gave them views of America that they had never seen before, Stowe’s novel had offered them a glimpse of American slavery prior to the introduction of Huckleberry Finn to China in 1942.6 Twain’s work, once introduced, became an even more popular piece of translation in China. Cheng Shi (成时), a dedicated translator of Huckleberry Finn, remarks in the preface to his translation: The history of America is short, so is its literature. There are not many writers whose names still stand after two centuries, fewer yet whose works are taught at universities today and are at the same time popular among the general reading public. Mark Twain is one such American literary master, and his book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one such work.7

Indeed, despite Stowe’s and Twain’s shared focus on race and slavery, the impact of Huckleberry Finn has not only outweighed but has also outlasted that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for several good reasons. First of all, the introduction of Twain’s work into China coincided with various important events leading up to the New Culture Movement (from mid-1910 into the 1920s) that encouraged the importation of a tremendous amount of western literature—especially novels—into China. From 1902 to 1907 alone, the number of translated works of literature surpassed the number of items of local creative literature, amounting to no less than four thousand pieces.8 This is indeed a significant cultural phenomenon. It was also a time when the Chinese literary community advocated the use of every­day language. Twain’s work offered Chinese writers a refreshing perspective on language, validating the variety of regional languages spoken on an everyday basis by regular people and making accessibility of language a priority. Most of all, often written in the form of humor, Twain’s work touches on many other facets of American life that attract the attention of Chinese readers. Twain’s interest in the Chinese and his speaking up for the

source: Xin Xiao Shuo, Vol. 22, 1905.

f i g u r e 4 . 1 . Mark Twain’s first appearance in China, 1905.

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Boxers against white imperialism, too, has undoubtedly gained him much attention and affection from Chinese scholars and the reading public. This once again testifies to Twain’s global vision as writer. As Cheng Shi puts it, Twain “is also a literary master of the world, whose unique writing style and content has won popularity the world over, and has made tremendous contribution to world literature.”9

Mark Twain’s Early Adventures in China In “The Adventures of Mark Twain in China: Translation and Appreciation of More Than a Century,” Xilao Li discusses the various major translations of Twain’s work in China. He points out that “the process of modernizing Chinese literature began with the translation of foreign literature.”10 Twain was introduced in China at a time when the country was undergoing a series of reforms, and his body of work has played a significant role in modernizing Chinese literature. One of Twain’s earliest appearances in China took the form of his photograph, which was placed next to a photo of Rudyard Kipling under the title “Two British and American Novelists” in the journal《新小说》 Xin Xiao Shuo (New fiction), in 1905 (issue 22). Twain’s name was transliterated as Mai Ti-an (麥提安). This name did not have any specific meanings; it simply approximated how “Mark Twain” sounds in Chinese (this is also the case with other variations of his name in Chinese).11 The journal Xin Xiao Shuo was founded by Liang Qichao (梁启超) in 1902 when he was living in exile in Yokohama, Japan, as a result of his unsuccessful attempt to bring about reforms in late Qing China during the “Hundred-Day Reforms” in 1898 (June 11 to September 21). His teacher, Kang Youwei (康有為), had convinced Emperor Guangxu (光緒) of the need to renew China culturally, politically, and educationally to brace the country for potential foreign invasions. The reform was triggered by ­China’s recent multiple defeats, in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) as well as the First (1839–1842) and Second (1856–1860) Opium Wars. ­Before these wars, the tradition of the long-established imperial court positioned the Chinese people to look up to their kings, and to consider their imperial court the apex of world civilization; anywhere outside the mainland territory was considered “barbaric.” Europeans and Americans (whose languages, clothing, rituals, and culinary cultures were almost totally different from those of the Chinese) were considered just as inferior as the Mongolians, Tibetans, and Xinjiang Chinese.12

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The Chinese people were completely taken aback by their nation’s defeat in the Opium Wars, and this had prompted them to consider adopting the western way of learning. Even though “westernizing” China was the main goal, Chinese learning was placed as the “core” (foundation) and western learning as the “periphery” (supplemental). Guangxu, with the help of Kang, Liang, and other reformers, introduced a series of social and institutional reforms. Liang believed that western literature and culture would exert a positive influence on China. He remarked: [W]hether we want to change or not, the changes will come. If we initiate them the changes will be made according to our own design and will work to preserve our nationhood, our race and our culture; if the changes are imposed on us they will serve to bind and subjugate us. Alas, it will be a disaster I dare not dwell on.13

By establishing Xin Xiao Shuo, Liang was hoping to arbitrate a “revolution” in three domains of literature: 詩界革命 shejie geming (revolution in poetry), 文界革命 wenjie geming (revolution in prose), and 小说界革命 xiaoshuojie geming (revolution in novels).14 In China, novels and plays had long been regarded as vulgar literature, and the line was strictly drawn between these types of low literature and the highbrow works, such as poetry, written in classical Chinese and within the elite circle.15 Liang was convinced that fiction in particular was the “soul” of the people, and thought that political fiction should have the most impact on society amid the social progress and political change that China was experiencing. He translated a Japanese work of political fiction,《佳人奇遇》Jiaren Qiyu (The adventure of a beauty), written by Tokai Sansi, into Chinese, and in the preface he remarked that “the political progress that America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Japan made owes much to the power of political fiction.”16 While Kang, Liang, and other reformers were still fighting their way to achieve Chinese modernity, the Empress Dowager and other conservatives in the imperial court banned the movement altogether for fear of losing their power to these revolutionists. Kang and Liang fled to Japan, where they continued with reform activities. Although this reform movement was not successful, it was a stepping-stone for other major events that supported similar causes to happen in the twentieth century. One important avenue to change that the pre-twentieth-century westernization movement opened up was the culture of journals and periodicals. From 1865 to 1895, there were approximately 86 journals started in major cities such as Shanghai, Macao, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Amoy, Ningbo, Hankow, Tianjin, and Hong Kong. From 1896 to 1911, the number had risen to no fewer

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than 1600 and they could be found in most parts of China.17 The Britishowned《信報》Shen Pao (Trust news) was the first Chinese literary magazine to appear in China. Launched in 1872 in Shanghai, it published poetry, prose, and ­fiction.18 The most influential of all was perhaps the missionaryrun《萬國公報》­Wanguo Gongbao (also known as Review of the Times and the Globe Magazine). Running weekly from 1874 to 1907, it disseminated western “geography, history, civilization, politics, religion, science, art, industry, and general progress.” Its circulation increased from 1000 in 1889 to 38,400 in 1898, and 54,000 in 1903.19 The explosion of periodicals and journals in China would soon coincide with a staggering number of translations of foreign literature that began to appear by the turn of the century. China was then home to a handful of young translators who had undergone the “modern school” system in China. Students returning from the United States and Europe, who had learned to write critical reviews of literature, had also helped to nurture a reading culture that was otherwise invisible before the twentieth century. More commentary essays and independent articles were being published that offered critical views and explanatory footnotes on western literature. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the understanding of Western literature had gathered a critical mass that enabled another influential western­ization movement to be launched, the May Fourth Movement. On May 4, 1919, a group of Chinese students mounted a protest because they were angered by the Chinese government’s incompetent response to both the Eight-Nation Alliance that fought against the Chinese Boxers in 1900 and the western allies’ decision to favor Japan over China in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919.20 The protest eventually escalated to the national level and engendered another phase of modernization in China through adopting western learning materials and literatures.21 Different from the reformers who were active during the Hundred-Day Reforms in 1898, protestors in the May Fourth Movement were aware that without support from the imperial court, the mission now was to win over the citizenry. And the only way to achieve this was to reach out to the public through literature written in a language that could communicate to the mass audience. Instead of the classical language, 文言文 wenyanwen, which was understandable only by the elites, the vernacular language, 白话 baihua, would slowly take over and dominate the Chinese literary community. As Liu Haiming tells us in his MA thesis, “Mark Twain in China: A Survey & an Annotated Bibliography,” Hu Shi (胡适) was “the first person to advocate the replacement of classical Chinese with the vernacular in literature.” Hu had declared, “Under

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no circumstance is it possible to create a valuable living literature by means of the dead wenyan (the classical language).”22 Chen Duxiu (陈独秀), widely regarded as the father of the movement, writes in《文学革命论》Wenxue Geming Lun (The manifesto of literature revolution) that there are three elements to do away with in new literatures: (1) difficult highbrow language, (2) classical work, and (3) literature about nature. Instead, he emphasized creating a national literature that is accessible to all classes of people, as well as one that is realistic and related to the society. Literature under the influence of this movement, in other words, is antifeudal in its thinking, modern in its use of language, and flexible in its structure. In 1915, Chen launched a new journal— 《青年雜誌》Qingnian Zazhi (Youth, or La jeunesse), renamed a year later as《新青年》Xin ­Qingnian (New youth)—in Shanghai that published all its articles in vernacular Chinese instead of traditional Chinese language.23 A representative piece came from Hu Shi (胡适) in 1917: “文学改良刍议” “Wenxue Gailiang Dangyi” (On the improvement of literature) calls for a revolution in language by explaining the importance of using a language in literature that is communicable to people from all walks of life. Liang was not in China at that time, but his role in Japan was indispensable in bringing together the revolutionary spirits of Chinese in both countries, as well as introducing western literatures to the Chinese audience through Japan. Tellingly, the publishing of Chinese periodicals in late Qing to the early Republic period was not confined to China but was also occurring in Japan, America, Singapore, and France. Shanghai, Japan, and Beijing were the main centers, contributing about 66 percent of the output of the whole publishing industry. Liang’s journals《清議報》Qingyi Bao (Dissenting news),《新民叢報》Xinmin Congbao (The new citizen), and Xin Xiao Shuo were all published in Japan.24 Evidently, in this early period the phenomenon of the Chinese diaspora among intellectuals was already in play. Liang certainly deserved credit as the first reformer to introduce Twain to China. Even though the introduction was just a picture with a simple caption, Liang had paved the way for Twain to soon occupy an important place in the canon of foreign literature in China, as well as an important role in China’s transnationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Chinese translations of western work saw a strong influence from Japan because most of them were based on Japanese versions translated from the English by such prominent Japanese translators as Hara Hōitsuan and Yamagata Iso’o.25 The predominant presence of American literature in Japan had its roots in the rich American-Japanese cultural and economic

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exchange during the Meiji era (1868–1912). In the 1930s, China witnessed an increasing number of students studying overseas in Europe, America, and Japan. Because Japan already had a fairly established canon of western literature, many Chinese scholars first encountered foreign literature in Japan during their studies there. Japanese has a phonetic system close to that of Chinese and there is a high incidence of Chinese characters in the Japanese vocabulary, which encouraged Chinese translators to translate a great deal of western literature based on Japanese editions. Twain became known to China through very much the same channel.26 The first translation of Twain’s work into Chinese was based on the Japanese translation of “Cannibalism in the Cars.” Translated into Chinese in 1904 by Chen Jinghan (陈景韩), under the pen name Leng Xue (冷血 Cold Blood), the short story appeared in the first issue of《新新小说》Xin Xin Xiao Shuo (New new fiction). Similarly, Wu Tao (吴檮) translated the

f i g u r e 4 . 2 . Cover of Xin Xin Xiao Shuo, 1904. source: Xin Xin Xiao Shuo, Issue 3, Vol. 9, 1904.

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Japanese version of “The Californian’s Tale” and published it in《綉像小 說》 Xiu Xiang Xiao Shuo (Illustrated fiction) in 1906 (issue 70). Twain appeared under the Chinese name 马克多槐音 Ma-ke Duo Kuaiyin. Instead of being introduced as a humorist, Twain initially came across as quite a serious writer. Wen Shan and Tu Guoyuan observed that even though there is humor in “The Californian’s Tale,” much of the American humor was lost in the process of translation because it was untranslatable in the context of the Chinese language. When this short story was republished in 1917 by Zhonghua Shuju (China Publishing House), in《歐美名家短篇小說》Oumei Mingjia ­Duanpian Xiao Shuo (Short stories by famous European and American writers), Twain’s name finally appeared in the form adopted as his official Chinese name: 马克吐温 Ma-ke Tuwen.27 Lu Xun (鲁迅)—the pen name for Zhou Shuren (周树人)—was perhaps solely responsible for first bringing Twain’s humor to China by having

f i g u r e 4 . 3 . Cover of Xiu Xiang Xiao Shuo, 1906. source: Xiu Xiang Xiao Shuo, Issue 15, Vol. 70, 1906.

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Eve’s Diary translated in 1931. If Twain is the grandfather of modern American literature, as Faulkner famously averred, then Lu is the grandfather of modern Chinese literature. A humorist like Twain, Lu’s work makes people laugh, but behind the laughter there are often profound social criticisms. Deeply convinced of the need to reform China, Lu helped to materialize what the May Fourth Movement advocated by prolifically writing literature that breaks away from traditions and past formulas, contributing to a new canon of Chinese literature in the twentieth century. He believed that literature should be in the service of the people, and what he said about writing certainly strikes a chord with Twain’s idea of writing literature in the language of the people: “I believe that the first thing that a writer should do is abandon the use of flowery prose and write with words from the heart. They should adopt vocabulary that is alive, just as how children use only words that they know.”28 This is precisely what Huck Finn embodies as a work narrated by a fourteen-year-old boy and written with several regional dialects. Lu was highly acclaimed by the Communist regime after 1949 and remained Mao Zedong’s favorite writer. In the article “China’s Orwell,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom comments on Lu Xun’s towering accomplishment, seeing him as a writer who should be read not only locally but globally. He believes that Lu’s works “provide the clues an outsider needs to unlock the cultural code of a nation,” and that Lu is the kind of writer “whose work becomes embedded in a nation’s DNA.” He remarks that, similarly, Twain is an essential writer of America, and that foreigners “striving to understand the American psyche . . . must know about Huck Finn and the mystique of the Mississippi River.”29 Wasserstrom’s insightful comments highlight an important aspect of Lu and Twain, that they are essential not only to their own countries, but also to the world when a deeper cross-cultural understanding is involved. Although Twain came from an earlier generation than Lu, his work and thoughts have had an important influence in China and in Lu’s writing career, when the nation was still in the critical process of locating its national identity. Twain’s ambivalence and anger toward America was similar to what Lu strongly felt toward his own country. Lu viewed feudalism and religious superstition as barricades that prevented his countrymen from progressing forward. His belief was shared by Twain, whose disdain for monarchy and the Catholic Church is articulated in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Transported back in time to sixth-century England and King Arthur’s court, Twain’s protagonist, Hank Morgan

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from nineteenth-century Connecticut, is stunned to see pervasive social and political ills in the medieval society, and attempts—albeit to no avail— to remove English feudalism and replace it with a democracy. Like Twain, who criticized labor exploitation by the robber barons of industry and the tradition of hierarchy inherited from Europe, Lu recognized that a society that is based on the class system could victimize people such as farmers, women, and children who already had very few choices in their lives. Lu expresses his concern on these issues in his 1918 work《狂人日记》Kuangren Riji (A madman’s diary), which criticizes the traditional system and values of feudalism, and in《呐喊》Nahan (Outcry), published in 1923, which depicts contradictory issues in society in a deeply unsettling and confusing time.30 Unlike many of his contemporary reformists, Lu was aware of the danger of China’s falling into yet another manifestation of western imperialism by blindly importing western culture such as clothing, cuisine, and other rituals, a fact that explains why he understands Twain’s anti-imperialist stance as well as he does. It does not in the least suggest that he despises foreign literatures; on the contrary, he encourages bringing in new literary elements that are crucial to giving Chinese literature a new perspective. Long an admirer of Twain’s work, Lu had first discovered Twain in 1931, when his son and his maid brought home an English book they had found in a western neighbor’s trash pile and that the maid intended to use for origami—the 1906 illustrated edition of Eve’s Diary. Caught by Lester Ralph’s illustrations, Lu decided to edit the manuscript and had Li Lan (李兰) translate Twain’s work for Hufeng Publishing (胡风书局) in Shanghai.31 In his preface to this translation, Lu remarked that Twain made a difference as an American writer because he survived the changes that had occurred in America by the turn of the century, something that Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman could not do. Lu went on: Twain became a humorist in order to live, but he imbued humor with bitterness and sarcasm in order to show that he was not satisfied with that kind of life. This little bit of revolt, however, is enough to make the children of New Land [The Soviet Union] laugh and claim: Mark Twain is ours.32

For him to say “Mark Twain is ours” is not to claim ownership of Twain for the Soviet Union, or for China for that matter, but rather to express comradeship with a figure who embraces values that are intrinsic to what the Chinese people were experiencing at that time.

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Early Chinese Translations of Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first brought to the attention of the Chinese in《美国文学ABC》Meiguo Wenxue ABC (American literature ABC). Edited by Ceng Xubai (曾虚白) and published by 社界书局 ­Shejie Shuju (The World Press) in 1929, this book aimed at opening a fertile ground for the understanding of American literature among Chinese readers. Ceng remarks that “all of Twain’s works carry a double ­meaning. He says one thing but means something else that is much more profound. He wears the costume of a clown but underneath it is a humanist and a philosopher.”33 Ceng further observes that although Twain has numerous admirers, most of them do not know who he really is, or what makes the greatness of this writer. He then uses Huck Finn as an example: “those who read this novel as a piece of children’s literature are missing out on the entire point of the book; through his [Huck’s] innocent eye one sees the depiction of real life.”34 Huck Finn was first translated into Chinese by Zhang Duosheng (章鐸聲) and Guozhen (國振). Published by Guangming Shuju (光明书局) in Shanghai in 1942, it came with a preface by Chen Bochui (陈伯吹), a famous writer of children’s literature and a translator of Tom Sawyer. Chen expresses his particular fondness for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn because “like Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, I have the heart of a boy no matter how old I am.”35 Before Huck Finn was translated by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen, Chen had thought of translating it himself because he considered it a huge loss for China not to have a Chinese version of the work. Zhang and Guozhen translated all forty-three chapters, everything except for the “Notice” and “Explanatory” pages with which Twain prefaced the story. It is unfortunate that multiple translation errors appear in their text and that the rigid language interferes with its readability. ­Despite that, their work laid an important foundation for more translations to come in the decades that followed. Interestingly, the Chinese title《顽童流浪記》Wantong Liulang Ji, which translates as “a rough kid’s adventures,” became an official title, not in China but in Hong Kong and Taiwan. ­Instead of going with a different title each time a work is translated, as many translations in China do, adopting the first title that comes out has the advantage of standardization, thereby minimizing confusion among readers. Nevertheless, Zhang and Guozhen’s title does not mention Huckleberry Finn’s name and suggests that Twain’s work is only for children. Translators in China that followed would come up with titles that are closer to Adventures of Huckleberry

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Finn. In fact, Twain scholars in China have rarely mentioned Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen’s work. They have placed their focus mostly on the second and third translations, by Zhang Wanli (张万里) (1954) and Zhang Yousong (张友松) and Zhang Zhenxian (张振先) (1955). This has mainly to do with how well the work has been translated, the degree of the translators’ fame, and the publishers’ reputations. Unlike Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen, who presented Huck Finn as children’s literature, these later translators were well aware of the novel as a critique of American racism and slavery, and also aware of Twain’s anti-imperialism, as will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. Twain’s increasing popularity in China happened at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to dominate the world with their opposing ideologies of capitalism and socialism. The tension between the two powers extended to other Pacific regions in outbreaks that began as civil wars in Korea (1950–1953) and Vietnam (1959–1975). The increasing American presence politically and militarily in both South Korea and South Vietnam during the respective wars had aroused much antagonism among the communist allies that sided with North Korea and North Vietnam, as well as in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The huge loss of human lives in Vietnam that accompanied the American military intervention, in particular, stirred condemnation in many corners of the world.36 Many English-language materials were prohibited from coming into China out of fear that they would extend the bad influence of capitalism. Realism was an important concept, and the Chinese literary circle paid particular attention to scholars’ and writers’ political attitudes in their works. Twain fitted into the category perfectly and was often referred to as the “American realist writer,” whose socio-political commentaries, just as in the May Fourth Movement, were embraced by Chinese writers and readers at this later time. The novel The Gilded Age (1873), for instance, spoke to a lot of Chinese because it reflects human greed and the evils of capitalism; the same was true for Twain’s short stories and articles that ridiculed western traditions and hierarchy. Instead of the “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” so widely read in US schools, “Running for Governor” was, and continues to be, a particularly popular piece in school curricula in China and in discussions among Chinese scholars. Published in The Galaxy and the Buffalo Express in 1870, “Running for Governor” attacks the corrupt 1870 New York gubernatorial election, where the Democratic incumbent, John T. Hoffman, won the election as a result of his close connection with William “Boss” Tweed, who had

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extensive control over patronage in New York City and other forms of political corruption. In his fictional account, Twain enters a race for New York governor against Stewart L. Woodford and John T. Hoffman on an independent ticket and remarks optimistically, “I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was—good ­character.”37 Soon after, however, candidate Twain finds himself falsely attacked by unnamed accusers and labelled by the press as an Infamous Perjurer, Montana Thief, Body Snatcher, Delirium Tremens, Filthy Corruptionist, and Loathsome Embracer. At the end, sending in his withdrawal from the candidacy, he signs it: Truly yours, Once a decent man, but now MARK TWAIN, I.P., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E.

Rarely taught in the United States, “Running for Governor” satirizes the embarrassing corrupt political community in the United States that Twain saw at the time, and the hypocrisy of a capitalist country that shouts false slogans of democracy. Not surprisingly, it is an extremely popular work to teach in Chinese classrooms and is much better known than the “Jumping Frog” in China. As Su Wenjing remarks, “Just about anyone who has had a middle-school education in China knows Mark Twain and ‘Running for Governor’” and “remembers the specific cultural moment and social critique represented in the story.”38 Amy Qin, in her article “The Curious, and Continuing, Appeal of Mark Twain in China,” concurs: “That ‘Running for Governor’ was a critique of the United States written by an American as highly esteemed as Twain was precisely what made it so appealing to the Chinese.”39 Before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which brought a great number of translations to a halt, there were approximately seven editions and reprints of Huckleberry Finn. Temporally, Huck Finn had survived China’s socio-political turmoil over the course of a few decades— the eight-year battle against Japanese invasion (1937–1945), the Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists (1945–1949), and the establishment of the socialist Republic government in 1949. Although the eightyear-long Japanese invasion of China slowed down the translation business and partially wasted what had been established, translation activities did not entirely cease. Translators and scholars such as Lin Yutang (林语堂), Zhu Shenghao (朱生豪), and Ai Siqi (艾思奇) continued to dedicate time and effort to translation work and developing its theories and methods.

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Yudi (俞荻), a famous translator and a student of Lu Xun’s, recalls in “我 与文学翻译” “Wo Yu Wenxue Fanyi” (Literature translation and I), published in 1989, that the kind of literature he chose to translate was mostly “progressive” and “revolutionary.” He wrote that “while China was on the verge of collapse, I translated the struggles and experience, as well as the progressive literary theories of the world’s pioneer socialist country [the Soviet Union]. This was a calling for our people not to give in to the Japanese invasion, as well as to inspire our youth to create in the literary community.”40 After the invasion, he remained a dedicated translator of foreign literature, including Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. The year 1955 alone witnessed eight more new translations of Twain’s works, including Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer Abroad, The Innocents Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, and some short stories.41 By 1966, most of Twain’s most famous works had been translated into Chinese.42 Except during the ten-year Cultural Revolution, translations of Twain’s works and studies about them in China have not ceased. Two peaks in Twain scholarship in China occurred from 1950 to 1960 and 1980 to 1990; during these two periods over one hundred articles were written on the author.43 Jiang Xiaoli (蔣曉麗), in《中国近代大众传媒与文学》 Zhongguo Jindai Dazhong Chuanmei Yu Wenxue (Contemporary Chinese mass media and literature), published in 2005, comments that the trend of introducing literature from outside of China “has not only created an impact on Chinese political thinking and education, but also opened up an alluring ‘new land’ for Chinese writers to break away from the constraints of tradition and feudalism, as well as old writing styles.”44 At the same time, publishing became a big business and writing and translating a lucrative source of income for the many unemployed or underemployed intellectuals. The period following the modernization of China in the early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of translated works coming from the country’s most famous literary reformers, philosophers, scholars, and politicians. Under the leadership of these individuals, the industry of translation began to flourish and would become an important site of education and learning later in the century. Apart from a culture of journals, periodicals, translations, and publishing, this period also saw an increasing number of translation departments as well as foreign literature departments being created in universities across China. As early as 1926, Tsinghua University founded a program that came to be known as the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. In 1929, it founded a research center that drew in even more scholars who specialized in western literatures and learning materials. Similarly, the Beijing

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Foreign Studies University (BFSU) originally grew out of Yan’an Foreign Languages School, which itself had emerged from the Russian Language Section of the Third Branch of the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese Military and Political College. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Yan’an Foreign Languages School had merged with the School of Foreign Affairs to become the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. In 1959, the Beijing Russian Institute was assimilated into the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. Then, in 1994, with the approval of the then State Education Commission, the institute changed its name to Beijing Foreign Studies University.45

En Route to Taiwan and Hong Kong From 1966 to 1976, the time of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were generally deprived of books, and there was little foreign influence in the country. However, this did not stop Twain’s works from traveling to Taiwan and Hong Kong. In terms of social systems, economic strength, and legal frameworks, these two places have a lot more in common with each other than they do with Mainland China. Their publishing industries are marketoriented and owned by private companies instead of the government (government ownership is still the case in China nowadays), allowing for high volumes of publication imports and exports. Regarding output, Taiwan and Hong Kong come second and third among Chinese publishing bases but are the most developed regions in their competitive capacity.46 The publishing industries there have thus had more potential for the flow of information and knowledge, especially at times when China was closing her doors to foreign infiltration. In Taiwan, Zhang and Guozhen’s translation of Huckleberry Finn made its first appearance in 1957, through Da Zhongguo (Big China) Publishing. In 1967, a translation by Hong Qingquan (洪淸泉) was published by Weiwen Bookstore, and a translation by Chen Shuangdiao (陳雙 鈞) was brought out by Zhengwen Publishing in 1974. This was followed by a translation by Huang Wenfan (黃文範), published by Beiyi Publishing in 1975. During the same period in Hong Kong, Zhang Yousong’s and Zhang Zhenxian’s translation made its way through Chung Lew Publishing in 1958, and Li Yuhan’s translation appeared from World Today Press in 1963. The growing American presence in Taiwan, which manifested itself militarily, economically, culturally, began with the outbreak of the Cold War in the late 1940s. The American government’s interest in Taiwan primarily came out of its containment policy intended to safeguard the United States

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against communist powers. However, the United States also realized that of equal importance was the use of what Joseph Nye was to later call “soft power” politics: that is, domination through cultural and ideological influence. One major channel for achieving this in Asia was education. During the early years of the Cold War period, a lot of transnational academic collaborations were initiated. The Harvard-Yenching Foundation, for instance, created the China Council for East Asian Studies in 1957, which supported scholarly activities annually to the amount of $30,000. The Ford Foundation also gave substantial financial support to the study of Sino-American, Sino-Russian, and Sino-Japanese relations starting in the early 1960s. Both the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment contributed significantly to influential interuniversity programs for language study based at National Taiwan University. In the following three decades, close to eight hundred Americans acquired Chinese language skills, and that profoundly shaped American teaching and research about China and Chinese studies in the United States.47 Largely dependent on US assistance to avoid coming under the control of China, Taiwan had its own dilemma in the face of the washing away of Confucianism by western science and values. At the early stage of US-Taiwan relations, many Taiwanese who attended American universities decided not to return home, where they would be received with much hostility. Indeed, “[i]ntellectuals in Taiwan were generally demoralized in the decade of the 1950s, their resources meager, standards low, politics circumscribed, and scholarship isolated from developments elsewhere in the world.” While more Taiwanese students returned to their home country in the 1960s, those who stayed behind had assumed the role of portraying to the American public what China should mean, with Taiwan being the “real” and “democratic” China.48 Likewise, American studies had become a popular discipline of study in Taiwan, hence the popularity of the Fulbright program there. The Fulbright awards did much toward disseminating American ideals, through funding scholarships and teacher exchanges abroad. A yet more political agenda led to the establishment of the Asia Foundation in 1956, which received secret funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. On the surface, it carried out scholarship exchange programs and instructional programs in science, sociology, and agriculture. On a deeper level, the foundation assisted the Taiwanese government in tax reform between 1956 and 1973; there were also covert activities in recruiting agents to engage in undercover operations and disseminate anticommunist propaganda.49

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To push the American cultural diplomacy further, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was founded in 1953 to promote US foreign policy and national interests abroad through international educational exchanges and broadcasting and information programs.50 One significant cultural influence that the USIA brought to noncommunist regions was American literature, which was accomplished by setting up the World Today Press (今日世界 Jinri Shije) in Hong Kong. Shan Te-shing (單德興), in Fanyi Yu Mailuo (Translations and contexts), observes that for a period of time, Taiwan intellectuals were more interested in American literature and comparative literature than in the more established British literature.51 This had a lot to do with the founding of the World Today Press in Hong Kong that circulated American literature and materials to Taiwan and other East Asian countries. Shan observes that during the Cold War period, the World Today Press brought new knowledge and ideas to a noncommunist China that was still going through an early stage in knowledge exchange and contact with non-Asian cultures. The USIA set up the World Today Press in Hong Kong and not anywhere else for various reasons. Geographically, Hong Kong is in a perfect location, as it is right by the southeastern tip of the Chinese territory and it could easily serve as a bridge between China and the West and between the West and southeastern lands in the Pacific. Politically, unlike Taiwan, Hong Kong, as a British colony, was not carrying any “American ally” label. Its more neutral position made it a more convenient base for the United States to carry out its cultural diplomacy. In addition, Hong Kong’s relatively liberal political environment had attracted a lot of intellectuals, writers, translators, and so on from other parts of Asia. The dissemination of knowledge and opinions was also much easier in a place where freedom of speech was encouraged. Last but not least, Hong Kong already had a handful of Chinese printers producing good quality work, and their attractive book covers and bindings naturally drew a higher number of readers.52 The translation activities carried out by the World Today Press allowed its readers to not only understand but accept American culture and values through an appreciation for American literature. This is essentially “the kind of cultural diplomacy played by the USIA as it invested money and resource in translating American literature into Chinese, thereby making it familiar to the Chinese people,” observes Shan. World Today Press was originally named America Today (今日美國 Jinri Meiguo), and the change of name highlighted the global perspective that the press set out to embody. The World Today Press was a well-developed enterprise because it

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was adequately funded and had an impressive team of highly qualified writers, translators, and editors who were experienced in translating American literature and introducing it to readers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia.53 In 1963, the World Today Press published a translation of Huckleberry Finn by Li Yuhan (黎裕漢), followed by reprints in 1965 and 1975. In 1964, a year after it first published Li Yuhan’s Huck Finn, the press published a translation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Cai Luosheng (蔡洛生). Li Yuhan is actually a pen name made up from the surnames of three translators—Li Rutong (李如桐), Yu Yelu (余也鲁), and Han Dihou (韓 迪厚)—all of whom had at some point worked for the USIA. Li graduated from Peking University in the mid-1930s before undertaking studies in journalism at the University of Missouri and Columbia University, where he was awarded a master’s degree. He then worked with the USIA as the chief editor for the World Today Press. After retiring from his job in 1977, he did editing work with Singtao Publishing. Yu was an editor for the World Today Press in the 1950s, and a decade later obtained a degree in journalism from Stanford University. Upon returning to Hong Kong in the 1970s, he helped found the Department of Journalism at Baptist University, and later became head of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Han worked with the USIA in Kunming, after she graduated from ­Yanching University in the 1940s. She then moved to Hong Kong, where she obtained a master’s degree from the University of Hong Kong and took up a position as an editor for the World Today Press. In the 1960s, she studied in the University of Detroit Mercy, and a decade later became a lecturer in languages at Oakland University.54 Of all the translations of Huck Finn published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Li Yuhan’s translation is the most prominent because of the efforts made in the work by the three translators, who were experienced in editing and translation. Before looking in greater depth at how the language is handled in selected translations, or how Huck, Jim, and Pap (whom I consider the most important characters in the novel and whose language styles are the most distinct) are portrayed, it is necessary to discuss the types of language used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. People in these two regions speak two different Chinese languages—Mandarin in Taiwan, a language spoken by people in China as well, and Cantonese in Hong Kong, which for the reason discussed below is now mostly considered a dialect. However, both these languages in these regions are written with traditional Chinese characters (繁體中文 fanti zhongwen), whereas on the Chinese Mainland

f i g u r e 4 . 4 . Cover of the first translation in Hong Kong of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1963.

f i g u r e 4 . 5 . Back cover of the first translation in Hong Kong of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1963.

source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Li Yu Han, World Today Press, 1963.

source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Li Yu Han, World Today Press, 1963.

f i g u r e 4 . 6 . The first page of the first translation in Hong Kong of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1963. source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Li Yu Han, World Today Press, 1963.

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simplified Chinese characters (简体中文 jianti zhongwen) are used. Evidently, Hong Kong and Taiwan retained the use of traditional Chinese largely for political reasons; neither region officially belonged to China then, and each had every reason to keep its own language and identity independent of the Communist Party. Putting aside the continuing controversy of the question of Taiwan’s independence, there has been much debate as to whether Cantonese is just a dialect vis-à-vis the official language of the Mainland since sovereignty over Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997. China’s decision to adopt simplified characters, made at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was largely based on practical reasons, one of which was the overwhelming number of regional languages (close to 250) spoken across the country, each one often unintelligible to speakers of the other languages. Unlike the situation in the United States where speakers of African American Vernacular English and standard English are not incomprehensible to one another, in China, speakers of Jinan (used in Shandong province), for instance, are not able to communicate with speakers of Shanghainese, unless they choose to speak in official Mandarin. Although etymologically Jinan and Shanghainese are both Chinese languages, they are in practice different languages. Furthermore, many people were illiterate then, and simplified characters were obviously going to be a lot easier for these people to learn because they require many fewer strokes. Adopting simplified characters also dramatically reduced the cost of printing. Understandably then, the dialects in Huckleberry Finn cannot be translated with regional languages, lest they become understandable only among readers of specific regions. The choice of language that Chinese translators struggle with when translating foreign works written in dialects continues to be a challenge today. In the preface to the most recent Chinese translation of Huck Finn in Taiwan (2012), Wang An-chi (王安琪) expresses the dilemma in using regional languages: “I have considered translating Twain’s work with Taiwanese Hokkien, but this would only limit the reach of my own work and leave out the broader audience in the Chinese mainland.”55 The most effective way to highlight the differences between the kinds of language and dialects that Huck, Jim, and Pap speak, then, is by using speech styles and vocabulary choices that differentiate one person’s level of education and literacy from another’s. In the case of the Li Yuhan translation, despite the translators’ effort to give Huck a lively diction, Huck’s language is still rather polished for a child with minimal education. The narration does smack of a fourteen-year-old, but one who is learned and clearly able to tell

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his story in written language, rather than the spoken language that Twain has Huck speaking in the English original. Huck in this translation is more like a schoolboy writing his journal in a casual and lively way than like someone who is capturing his adventures verbally and in a uniquely unpolished language that reflects his low educational level and social standing. Compared to the version by Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian, and the later translations by Cheng Shi (1989) and Xu Ruzhi (1995) in China, which I will discuss in the next chapter, Huck’s several moral struggles have also not been captured as vividly as in the original, and Pap is more polite in his enraged diatribe against the “govment” and the black professor from Ohio than Twain depicted him. The easy way he speaks suggests that he too has received some kind of education. For instance, his words “before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—” are turned into “才能去抓一個鬼鬼崇崇, 目無法紀, 穿白襯衫的解 放了的黑人, 並且 . . .” Prowling is translated as 鬼鬼崇崇 guigui suisui, and thieving as 目無法紀 muwu faji, which are four-word catch phrases that are used mostly by educated people to express themselves poetically. This is therefore not a very accurate portrayal of the Pap in Twain’s work who is illiterate and is incapable of articulating his thoughts in a learned manner. On the whole, the differences in the ways that Jim, Huck, and Pap speak in this version are not as distinct as in some of the editions in China, such as those by Zhang, Cheng, and Xu, but the translation is overall quite complete. The remainder of the translations of Huck Finn in Taiwan and Hong Kong are mostly simplified versions, Chinese-English readers, and editions especially designed for children. To put Twain aside for a moment and look at the overall trend from 1950s to 1980s, the World Today Press printed two hundred translations related to American literature, politics, art, and the sciences. In terms of American literature, it has published the works of a wide range of writers and playwrights, such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jack London, ­Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, ­Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, James Thurber, Flannery O’Connor, John O’Hara, ­Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Truman Capote, Conrad Richter, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, John Patrick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.56 Such an outpouring of publications has opened up a fertile ground for conversations between the United States, Taiwan,

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and Hong Kong, and has certainly enhanced a positive reception of American literature and culture in these two Chinese regions during a politically sensitive time in the history of Sino-US relations.

Beyond the Chinese Cultural Revolution With the passing of the Cultural Revolution, and President Richard ­Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, dialogue between China and the United States resumed, thereby opening up an avenue for the importation of works of American literature and their adoption in English classrooms and academic research. Between 1977 and 1982 alone, translations of seven works of Twain’s were reprinted or published for the first time, including The Prince and the Pauper, The Gilded Age, “Running for Governor,” Eve’s Diary, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Zhang Yousong’s and Zhang Zhenxian’s translation of Huck Finn was reprinted by the People’s Literature Publishing House shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978.57 While Chinese translations of Huck Finn in the 1980s were mainly based on those done in the 1950s, they reached new heights starting in the 1990s. From 2003 to 2007, most new translations of Huck Finn were targeted for middle school and high school study curricula, and so they are mostly abridged and simplified versions, digital books, and even comic series.58 The proliferation of Chinese translations of Twain’s work in the last few decades has had much to do with the reopening of China to other countries and cultures and the resulting interest in acquiring western learning ­materials. Stepping into the twentieth century, under the influence of globalization, China, like many other parts of the world, has become more receptive to cultures and ways of life other than its own. A publishing industry that had previously been solely politically driven turned more commercial, focusing on the needs of the curricula in middle schools and high schools. In the four decades between 1949 and 1988, Russian was the dominant second language in China, and most of the books that were translated into Chinese were Russian materials published in the former USSR. From 1989 onward, translation and publication of American works has surpassed that of Russian works in both number of book titles and print volumes.59 As English replaces Russian as the second language in classroom learning, more and more magazines, books, and TV programs in English are appearing and are being produced locally with their increasing popularity among Chinese. In 1994, the Beijing Normal University Publishing Group published a translation of Huck Finn by Tian Yiming (田一明) and Zhao Hongxing

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(赵鸿星) that is a Chinese-English reader based on the simplified English version written by Ellen Smith and published by the USIA in 1991. In the preface to the translation, Joseph Duffey, then director of the USIA, says: On behalf of the United States Information Agency, I congratulate the Beijing Normal University Press on its decision to reprint the books that will constitute the series “A Treasury of English Teaching Materials.” Each of these titles, originally published by the USIA, offers a student the opportunity to improve his or her knowledge of American English, and learn more about the culture, customs and history of the United States. . . . This book and the others in this series will help prepare China’s students for the competitive world of international commerce and cross-cultural contact for which a knowledge of English is essential.60

Duffey speaks of the translation of Twain’s work being an important tool for English language learning in the classroom context and for bridging the gap between the United States and China through commercial trade and cultural exchange. However, we can also consider possible deeper levels of meaning in the drive to translate and publish Twain’s work. Where Huck’s and Jim’s adventure on the Mississippi in search of freedom was an effort to escape from western “sivilization” and enslavement, Huck Finn’s journey to Taiwan and Hong Kong can also be viewed symbolically, in this case as a flight from communism and Chinese “sivilization.” Where translating Twain’s work into a language that is considered a mere dialect by the PRC is politically indicative, the USIA’s effort to promote and translate Twain’s work in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Cold War period casts Huck Finn more as a symbol of free-thinking individualism against oppressive governments than as a work offering the everyday language of the local people. Beijing Normal University’s decision to publish the USIA’s version of Twain’s work could be a gesture signifying a willingness to take a leap forward in Sino-US relations, but it could also be a mere oversight of the under­lying political implications and irony that Twain’s work has been used to represent through the USIA. Indeed, a similar oversight could be involved in the minimal political censorship of Pap’s speech. While Pap’s angry diatribe against the US government could potentially set a model suggesting to Chinese readers that they too ought to be able to freely criticize their own government, it appears in its entirety in full Chinese translations, and is shortened or omitted in simplified versions only to save space and printing costs. In these versions, cutting Pap’s speech seems to have less to do with his troubling presence than with his being unimportant to

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the plot development of Huck’s encounter with, for instance, the Granger­ fords and the Shepherdsons. As the next chapter reveals, Chinese critics and readers tend to genuinely view Huck Finn either as a piece of children’s literature or as a subtle attack on America, rather than as a tool to advocate the expression of political opinions against one’s own government.

chapter 5

Translation, Appropriation, and Continuation Huck Finn’s Chinese Adventures in the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond

The word “translation” comes, etymologically, from the Latin for “bearing across.” Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991

Mark Twain wrote in his “Explanatory” on the front page of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last.” Twain’s note might seem strangely hard to relate to for some, yet it richly resonates for others, depending on how familiar one is with the kinds of dialects the novel deals with. Readers who have not lived in the United States, especially those from non-English speaking regions, could easily be at a loss. They would have a hard time figuring out what Jim is trying to communicate with his nonstandard English, for instance, when he is recounting the reasons for his decision to run away and how he managed to escape. Due to the challenge of its language, Huck Finn was not translated in China until 1942. In 1934, when Wu Guangjian (伍光建) edited the ­Chinese edition of Tom Sawyer, he had commented on the importance of Huck Finn and said that it should be translated before long. However, he also observed that because of that novel’s numerous elements of “slang and mispronounced dialect,” it would be very difficult for nonnatives to do the job. 1

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Twain’s novel has time and again proven to be a tough call for Chinese translators, who often encounter questions such as what does one make of these dialects when they are placed in the context of China, where there are no equivalent dialectal varieties? If the translators translate the “Explanatory,” do they assume the responsibility for approximating all of the dialects named there? That of course is impossible in Chinese, because there are no Missouri negroes in China, nor are there any backwoods Southwesterners or Pike County men, let alone the dialects and their varieties. How then do translators negotiate such an untranslatable aspect of Twain’s work? Despite the inherent challenge, the first Chinese translation of Huck Finn appeared in 1942 and initiated a wave of Chinese translations of the work in twentieth-century China. Among them are translations by dedicated Chinese translators who have invested tremendous efforts in making the speech styles and patterns between the main characters, Huck and

f i g u r e 5 . 1 . The original book jacket for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884. source: The Oxford Mark Twain, Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Jim in particular, distinguishable. They endeavor to communicate to their audience the messages that Twain was trying to deliver by translating their text as closely to Twain’s version as possible. Understandably though, to make the task of translation easier, there also exist a large number of translators who simplify the language (both in English and in Chinese) as well as the plot, while some turn Twain’s work into an English learning tool for schoolchildren by condensing the text into twelve chapters, if not fewer. A majority of these works are not the most accurate translations, as might be expected from their sheer quantity. It is not the purpose of this chapter to rank translations on the basis of accuracy, or to examine the skills or lack of skills of a certain translator. Instead, it studies some of the difficulties that these translators have had when dealing with Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and how that work is being presented in Chinese in terms of language and race, by looking at overall trends during different periods.

f i g u r e 5 . 2 . Cover of the first translation in Mainland China of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1942. source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen, Guang Ming Shuju, Shanghai, 1942.

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In 2008, Li Xinchao (李新朝) and Zhang Lin (张璘) compiled a table of all of the Chinese translations of Huckleberry Finn in 《 “ 哈克》在中国之重 译与流传” “Ha-ke Zai Zhongguo Zhi Zhongyi Yu Liuchuan” (The translation and continuation of Huck Finn in China), which studies the history of translations of Huck Finn.2 They have identified thirty-seven titles published between 1942 and 2007. In their article, Li and Zhang give a brief overview of how Twain was first introduced to China, and the different versions of Huckleberry Finn across six decades. Although far from giving a complete picture of all of the available translations in the stated period, as it lists only thirty-seven titles, their work has made it possible for me to track down the remaining translations, along with identifying translations published after 2007, with the aid of university library search engines across Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and the United States. I found that from the first translation of Huckleberry Finn in 1942 by Zhang Duosheng (章鐸聲) and Guozhen (國振) to the present day, there are about seventy translations, from publishers that traverse the majority of provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in Mainland China. Since Li and Zhang did not include translations published in Taiwan and Hong Kong in their research, I obtained a list of translations of Twain’s work in Taiwan from《四洋文學客在臺灣研究書目1946–2000年》Siyang Wenxueke Zai Taiwan Yanjiu Shumu 1946–2000 Nian (Research bibliography of western literature in Taiwan 1946–2000), by Zheng Jinger.3 This list was also incomplete, and again, I supplemented the list with my own library searches in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, identifying, in the end, twenty-seven translations (including a few reprints from Mainland China) from 1952 to the most recent one in 2012 by Wang An-chi (王安琪). Combining the translations published in Taiwan with those of Mainland China results in a total of over ninety different translations. That said, there are bound to be translations that have not been officially documented due to the difficulty of tracing publication records in all of China over the decades. There has been no centralized effort to keep track of translations of foreign works in China. Furthermore, what makes documenting translations of Twain’s work particularly challenging is the variety of Chinese translations of the relevant names and titles. “Mark Twain” has been transliterated into at least three different names, and Huckleberry Finn has been published under fourteen different titles.4 Such variations fall in the first few decades of the twentieth century and were largely due to the fact that standardizing names and titles for foreign literature was not considered important when the translation industry in China was still nascent. In addition, translators

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in some parts of China may not have known of translations of Twain’s work prior to their own. In what follows, I divide the discussion into three parts, with the first part looking at how the language of Huck himself is translated through examining three translations; I do the same in part two in relation to Jim. The last part explores the treatment of race, first by looking at how various translations have dealt with Pap’s racist diatribe against the black Ohio professor, and then by analyzing how the racially charged word nigger is translated in works from different periods. The reason for choosing Pap as a lens for examining the issue of race is not only that Pap offers the perspective of a white supremacist from the lower social strata, voicing a point of view that was held by many around the time the book was published, but also that the direct translation of the “N” word into its Chinese equivalent, h­ ei-gui (literally, black ghost), happens only in Pap’s speech in quite a number of the Chinese translations, a phenomenon that in itself is worth studying. A consideration of these passages leads to a discussion in the conclusion of how the different history of race and race relations in China might have influenced the perception and presentation of American attitudes toward race and race relations in these translations.

Huck Readers who have not yet read Tom Sawyer and have therefore missed the description of what Huck looks like when he is first introduced in chapter six of that book, should still be able to place him almost immediately at the beginning of Huck Finn by the way he speaks, recognizing that he is not a highly educated child and that he comes from a humble family and social background. Nevertheless, the story he narrates shows him to be a lively and engaging child: You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

A few lines later, Huck tells us: The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out.5 (17)

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In addition to the grammatical mistakes that abound in his speech (“without you have,” “was things,” “sivilize,” “no longer”), Huck also uses a lot of colloquial slang (“that ain’t no matter,” “that book was made by,” “stretched,” “rough living in the house,” “dismal regular and decent,” “lit out”). These errors and nonstandard English expressions can be difficult for non-English speakers (and at times English speakers, as well) to comprehend. They are even more challenging for translators, who need to find language that their readers can understand while also trying to capture the speech patterns of a fourteen-year-old boy. These challenges are immediately visible in the earliest translation, by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen in 1942:6 You do not know me, unless you have not read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but, this is not a problem. That book is Mark Twain’s famous work, mainly, he has told in detail. There are things that he exaggerated, but mainly he has told them realistically. . . . Widow Douglass took me for her son, and educated me; but it is harsh living in the house, obeying all the rules, how boring it is; so, not long after, I ran away.

As apparent in the first line, the translators misinterpreted the double negatives in the original version, “don’t know” and “without you have,” and thus reversed the meaning of the line. They also added a few things that do not exist in the original version (writing, for example, “that book is Mark Twain’s famous work” instead of “that book was made by Mr. Mark Twain”), and changed some of the original content (saying, for example, “he has told in detail” instead of “he told the truth”). As reflected in the tone of the language, Huck is not as lively as he is in the original version, and the translators’ choice of words is also often overly formal and rigid. To cite an example, “言過其實” “yan guo qishi,” a four-character idiom that refers to something that is exaggerated, is used to translate “stretched.” Huck’s use of Chinese idioms defeats the idea that he is an uneducated child because idioms are often spoken by someone who is learned. Similarly, the words “sivilize” and “lit out” are translated as “教育” “jiaoyu” (to educate), and “逃跑” “taopao” (ran away), which are formal terms used by people with a certain level of education. As mentioned in the previous chapter, due to its frequent mistranslations and formal constructions that deprive Huck and other characters of their liveliness, Zhang and Guozhen’s translation is rarely mentioned in Twain scholarship in China. Nonetheless, looking at their translation informs us how Twain’s work was approached for the very first time and what some of

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the challenges were for the translators who had no prior models for their work. It also gives us insights into the kind of progress that later translators of Huck Finn made from the first version. The second translation, by Zhang Wanli (张万里),7 which comes twelve years later in 1954, has made a dramatic improvement from Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen’s work, and remains a popular text in high school and university curricula, as well as in scholarly discussions. Zhang’s edition was published by a prominent publisher, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, which specializes in foreign literature and in recent years has demonstrated impressive results by introducing contemporary foreign literature to China.8 Zhang himself has taught in over ten universities across Beijing, Xibei, Hubei, and Sichuan, including the College of Foreign Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University and the School of Foreign Language in Nankai University. A well-respected translator in China, Zhang is experienced in translating English materials and is articulate in his written Chinese. Rather than treating Huck Finn as a piece of children’s literature, he focuses more on it as a critique of the hypocrisy of a country founded on democratic ideals that was also plagued by racism. In the preface to his translation, Zhang observes, “Mark Twain is a remarkable American realist writer and an excellent and a brave satirist.” He then shares with his readers information about Twain’s anti-imperialist works such as Following the Equator, “A Defense of General Funston,” and “The Czar’s Soliloquy.”9 Zhang’s translation is overall very accurate. It shows Huck as a character that is much closer to Twain’s original than he was in the prior translation; his speech flows naturally and is filled with humorous expressions. To cite an example, Zhang translates the first line as, “If you have not read that book named Tom Sawyer, you won’t know what kind of fellow I am.” Although the original version does not have the phrase “what kind of fellow I am,” what Zhang does with the Chinese translation serves to highlight the vivacious character and speech style of Huck. Another example is that Zhang translates “stretched” as “過火” “guohuo,” which is a lively way of saying “over the top,” and “lit out” as “溜之大吉” “liuzhi daji,” which is a humorous way to deliver “slip away for good.” Likewise, Zhang’s translating “sivilize me” as “教我怎樣做人” “jiaowo zenyang zuoren,” which means “teach me how to be a person,” instead of simply “educate me,” is indicative of his being informed about Twain’s anti-imperialism. Jiaowo ­zenyang zuoren carries a strong connotation of having to civilize someone who is otherwise backward.

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Zhang’s translation is a work of quality in terms of its accuracy, flow, and literariness. Nevertheless, his high level of literary ability prevents his translation from being even more colloquial, as some of the words he uses still suggest a certain level of school training for the uneducated Huck. “Made by Mr. Mark Twain,” for instance, is translated as “written by Mr. Mark Twain”—“马克吐温先生写的” “Ma-ke Tuwen xiansheng xie de”—using the formal Chinese 寫 xie (to write). Another example is “how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways,” which is translated as “那個寡 婦的舉止動作, 是那麼正經, 那麼規矩得可怕!” 舉止動作 juzhi dongzuo is a rather formal expression for “mannerism” and 那麼正經, 那麼規矩得可怕 name zhengjing, name guiju de kepa, meaning “so serious, so terribly mannered,” is too poetic for Huck’s character. An equally respected and more widely studied translation came only a year after, in 1955. Translators Zhang Yousong (张友松) and Zhang Zhen­ xian (张振先) made a breakthrough in the language that they used to translate Huck Finn.10 Zhang Yousong, in particular, is a dedicated translator of Twain’s works who worked under the conditions of a low budget and an unstable income. He founded Chunchao Publishing House in Shanghai, which survived about a year, and then opened Chenguang Publishing House in Chongqing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He eventually secured a job doing mainly translation work with the People’s Literature Publishing House in Beijing, where he published his translation of Huck Finn with Zhang Zhenxian. This publisher is the most prestigious publisher in China, and has serialized works of the finest Chinese and foreign literary writers in multiple volumes. It has the largest back catalog and publishes five hundred titles every year.11 Apart from Huckleberry Finn, Zhang Yousong has also translated Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, The Prince and the Pauper, Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi, and also “Running for Governor” and other short stories by Twain. Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian’s translation came with a preface by Dong Heng, a professor of literature at Peking University who wrote the award-winning book《美国文学简史》Meiguo Wenxue Jiangshi (A survey of American literature) in 1987. He himself has translated various works of Twain’s: The Prince and the Pauper, “The Million Pound Bank Note,” and “Running for Governor.” In this preface, Dong places special focus on Twain’s support for China during the Boxer uprising. He also comments on Twain’s black characters, who “have their own ideals, and instead of being reduced to the stereotypes of slaves, they are independent individuals who have a lot of good qualities as human beings.”12 The power of Twain’s

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works, he believes, comes from “the humor of the people that he fused with sarcasm.”13 Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian’s translation has been in fact the most popular edition of Huckleberry Finn, as it has the highest number of reprints across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and is often studied in Twain scholarship as well as translation studies. Of all the Chinese translations both before and after the Cultural Revolution, theirs perhaps best captures the spirit of Huck Finn, and indeed of the rest of the characters in Twain’s work. Huck’s nonconformist attitude and nature are vividly expressed through his colloquial and sharp tongue. For example, “made” in “that book was made by Mr. Mark Twain” is translated as “作” “zho,” meaning to “make up” or “create” something, which is much more colloquial than the word Zhang Wanli used: xie, meaning “to write.” The use of this word also reveals to

f i g u r e 5 . 3 . Cover of the second translation in Mainland China of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1954. source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans., Zhang Wanli, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1954.

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readers that a child is speaking, since it is a common slang word used by children or people who have yet to acquire further education and the ability to write better. Similarly, “stretched” is translated as “胡扯” “huche,” which suggests bluffing and blathering; “truth” as “真事” “zhenshi,” which means “real thing”; and “lit out” as “溜掉” “liu diao,” which is an equally informal and humorous way to say “run away.” Likewise, Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian are among the very small number of translators who translate “sivilize” as “教化” “jiaohua.” Jiao means “to teach” or “to educate,” and hua means “to convert.” The term carries a strong connotation of hegemony, so its use is indicative of the translators’ keen awareness of Twain’s message behind the misspelled words. Even where the relevant Chinese grammar and slang are completely different from the English words, the translators do an excellent job of making use of Chinese terms that capture the soul of Huck’s speech in ways

f i g u r e 5 . 4 . Cover of the third translation in Mainland China of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1955. source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian, China Youth Press, Beijing, 1955.

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that are equivalent to the effects of the original version for English readers. To cite another example, “rough” is translated as “活受罪” “huo sho zui” (to endure hell alive), which again carries a strong religious tone and is highly accurate because of the connection between “sivilization” and Sunday schools that Twain insinuates in his work. Like Zhang Wanli’s work, this translation speaks to the translators’ awareness of Twain’s skepticism of white civilization and the American imperial mission abroad.

Jim The language of Jim in Huck Finn has proven to be the most challenging for translators because the dialect Jim uses deviates so significantly from standard English. Over the years, Chinese translators have had a hard time getting every word of Jim’s right in Chinese. Some translators have just avoided the challenge, ridding Jim of his dialect and simply using plain Chinese language, whereas some try to imitate Jim’s vernacular by purposely having Jim speak with a false Chinese tone in some of the words to highlight his dialect and illiteracy. Readers are first exposed to Jim’s vernacular elaborately when Jim recounts to Huck, in chapter eight, the reason he ran away and how he managed to escape: Well, you see, it ’uz dis way. Ole missus—dat’s Miss Watson—she pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans. But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun’ de place considable, lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one night I creeps to de do’, pooty late, en de do’ warn’t quite shet, en I hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans. (69)

If we look at the first translation, by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen, they apparently had a difficult time understanding Jim’s dialect, as quite a portion of the passage is mistranslated: You know, Miss Watson manages me, and although she treats me pretty well, she always says she will sell me down to Orleans. I then started to become cautious. One night, I heard old Miss Watson say to the witch, that she is going to sell me down to Orleans.

Three obvious mistranslations in the passage include Miss Watson treating Jim “pretty well” instead of “pooty rough,” and the mistaking of the “­widder” as a “witch,” which is due most likely to carelessness in recognizing words (“widow” is correctly translated in the rest of the book). This leads to the third mistranslation, which immediately follows the passage

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quoted above and which has the “witch” act as an agent for Miss Watson and get a commission by selling Jim down to New Orleans. Although unintentional, Zhang and Guozhen’s misinterpretation presents Jim as a superstitious believer in witches, thereby undermining the credibility of his narration and of his justification for running away. In addition, as visible from the relative shortness of the translation, the translators left out some of the content, including, “But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun’ de place considable lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one night I creeps to de do’ pooty late, en de do’ warn’t quite shet.” ­Cutting out these lines further deprives the readers of a more complete picture of the slave trade and the inhumanity of slavery. Likewise, the overall tone of Jim’s speech is very much like Huck’s in the translation. Due to the appropriate Chinese that Jim speaks, the reader is likely to think that he has received school training and is able to write, which is far from the Jim in Twain’s version. The frequent translation errors raise questions as to how Zhang and Guozhen’s translation even managed to make its way through publication. David Pollard, in Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918, provides two precise reasons. First of all, in the young translation industry that existed in China in the early 1900s, translators were safe from criticism because it was not a common practice at all to have a second reader to verify the accuracy of works of translation, and indeed, very few people were qualified to point out errors. ­Second, instead of aspiring to accuracy, translators defined their role as bianyi (­editing-cum-translating), yishu (translating-narrating), or yiyi (translating the gist), which is at times still the case nowadays. Pollard explains that these practices were “perfectly reasonable” then, because under the circumstance, they seemed to be the only proper practices.14 After the 1950s, there was dramatic progress in terms of accuracy, not only because people were becoming more educated in general, but also because the booming translation industry was able to provide more people with translation experience so that translators could cross-check one ­another’s work. Indeed, the first translation by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen could easily have become a model for later translations, but Zhang Wanli, Zhang Yousong, and Zhang Zhenxian saved later works from continuing with these mistranslations by setting much better examples in the early 1950s. Jim’s speech manifests numerous informal linguistic features, such as misspellings, short forms, and slang words in phrases such as, “pecks on me all

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de time” (instead of “picks on me all the time”), “roun’ de place considable” (instead of “around the place considerably”), and “creeps to de do’” (instead of “creeps to the door”). Despite the difficulties this presents, Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian’s version vividly grasps Jim’s use of vernacular and lack of education. They turned “pecks on me all de time” into “老找我 的碴儿” “laozhao wode cha er,” which is a very colloquial expression meaning “constantly nitpicks at me,” and is clearly spoken among non-elites. For “roun’ de place considable,” the translators focused on the word “round” and came up with “在这带地方轉” “zhai zhe dai defang zhuan,” which literally means “to keep wandering around that place.” And “creeps to de do’” is an informal way of describing walking to the door quiet­ly, so the translators wrote that as “悄悄儿溜到門口” “qiaoqiao er liudao menkou” (slipping to the door unnoticeably). Two more recent and, indeed, daring attempts to translate Jim’s dialect have been made by Cheng Shi (成时) (1989)15 and Xu Ruzhi (许汝祉) (1995).16 Like Zhang Yousong, they are among the most studied translators of Huck Finn at the university level because of the complexity of the language they use to convey Jim’s dialect. Departing from the methods tried by previous translators of Jim’s dialect, Cheng, followed by Xu, used the technique of malapropism, intentionally misusing words that are similar in sound, to create a Chinese parallel to Jim’s ungrammatical structure and mispronunciations in English. Cheng Shi’s translation was published by the People’s Literature Publishing House in Beijing, the same place that published Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian’s work. In his preface, Cheng marvels at Twain’s use of dialects—“Twain was not the first to write with dialects as his contemporaries in the [American] west also did so in their novels. Nonetheless, while these writers employ dialects for the lowclass communities, Twain did so throughout the novel, and was the first writer to do it so successfully.” Cheng also addresses the challenge that he had in translating Twain’s language: My translation has many inadequacies; first of all is language. Due to the vast difference between the two languages [English and Chinese], the dialects used by Twain are basically untranslatable. Even though European languages are much closer to English, European translators, too, often encountered the problem of translating dialects. In this regard, I can only send my apologies to both the author and the readers.17

Despite Cheng’s awareness of the potential inadequacies in his work, his use of malapropism is highly inventive and deserves applause. The following is Cheng’s translation of the passage in which Jim tells why he ran away.

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To make it easier to read, I have underlined all the intentionally wrong words before the bracketed words (the original intended meaning): 好吧, 你瞧, 史（是）这摸（么）回事. 老太太—就是华珍小姐—她一时一刻也 布（不）放过我, 我科（可）狠啦. 中史（总是）说约（要）把我卖掏（到） 奥尔良去. 近来我发觉有过（个）买卖黑人的主劳（老）上屋里转, 我布放醒 （心）. 天沈（深）夜里, 我偷偷到猛（门）边去听, 我听得老太太跟刮夫（寡 妇）说, 她约把我卖掏下优（游）奥尔良去.18

An equivalent English version would look like the following. Again, I have underlined the malapropisms: Well, you see, it as (is) howl (how) it went. Old missus—that’s Miss Watson— she doan (doesn’t) stop pecking on me, and treats me petty (pretty) rough. She all-ways (always) says she as (is) going to shell (sell) me down to Orleans. ­Recently I noticed there is ah (a) nigger trailer (trader) around the place, and I doan feel aisy (easy). Lay (late) at night, I crept to the do (door), and I heard old missus tell the window (widow), that she is going to sell me done (down) to Orleans.

In the Chinese vocabulary, spoken words are categorized into four different tones; many words share the same way of pronunciation but have completely different meanings. For example, both 史 and 是 (in the first sentence of Cheng’s Chinese translation above) are pronounced like ­English she, but with different tones—one is shǐ (the third tone) the other is shì (the fourth tone), the former meaning “history,” and the latter “yes” or “is.” Cheng made use of this linguistic feature to translate Jim’s nonstandard English by having Jim speak using the wrong tone of various Chinese words, thereby shifting the meaning of these words into something entirely different. To most Chinese readers, this approach is confusing and impedes the flow of reading, but Cheng’s method is still inventive in capturing the spirit of Jim’s speech and mannerisms. As shown in the translation, however, there are a couple of translation errors: that Miss Watson said to Jim that she would sell him instead of wouldn’t sell him, and that Cheng used the malapropism, “doan,” in “I doan feel aisy (easy)” without including the original intended word, “don’t,” in brackets. Contemporary translators, therefore, still experience problems with interpreting Jim’s language. Six years after Cheng’s translation, Xu Ruzhi improved on Cheng’s model with more accuracy and regularity in Jim’s speech patterns, as well as with fewer errors in tone, in an effort to enhance the flow of reading. His translation was published in 1995 by Yilin Chubanshe in Nanjing ( yilin means “translation forest”). Founded in 1988, Yilin is a prominent and fastgrowing contemporary press that has published an impressive number of

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translated works of foreign literature, science, and history. Xu’s translation of Jim’s comments goes like this: 好吧, 听我说, 事情是这样的. 老少姐—就是说华珍小姐—她从早到晚挑剔我— 对我可凶啦—不过她老说, 她不会把我卖到下游奥尔良那里去, 不过我注意到, 最近有一个黑奴贩子, 老在这里走动, 我就心不定. 啊, 一天晚上, 我偷偷到了门 口, 那是很晚了, 门设有关京（紧）, 我听到老小姐告诉寡斧（妇）, 说她要把 我卖到下游奥尔良去.19 Well, listen to me, it is how it goes. Old missus—that’s Miss Watson—she pecks on me from morning till dawn—and treats me pretty tough—but she always says, she won’t sell me down to Orleans, but I noticed, recently there is a black slave trader hanging around here often, and I got uneasy. Ah, one night, I crept to the door, that was very late, and the door was not shed (shut), I heard old missus tell the window (widow), said she is going to sell me down to Orleans.

Instead of using fourteen misspoken words as Cheng did, Xu used only two. His translation is also overall more accurate than Cheng’s, who is nonetheless more successful in terms of the language used because it is closer to Twain’s in terms of Jim’s (as well as other characters’) temperament. Xu’s language is at times still rather formal, although he does a good job of showing Jim’s illiteracy through the use of punctuation, with frequent dashes and commas between sentences to imply the lack of structure and pauses in his speech. Another thing worth pointing out about Xu is that he is one of the most dedicated translators of Huck Finn in the period after the Cultural Revolution: he provides over 150 footnotes with details about American history, geography, race relations, language, and culture that are necessary for a thorough understanding of the novel, especially for readers who have little knowledge of the United States. He supplies a page-long footnote even before the start of chapter one, for instance, to explain what Twain means by the original subtitle describing Huck as “Tom Sawyer’s Comrade,” the geographical location and significance of the Mississippi River, the historical background of the time in which the novel is set, the humor of the “Notice,” and the significance of the “Explanatory” in that Twain’s use of regional dialects in novels made an important contribution to American literature as a way of reflecting the regional diversity and the different rich cultural traditions in the United States. An experienced translator of such American literature as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Xu is also a professor of foreign literature at the National Chengchi University and Nanjing Normal University. In his preface to his translation, Xu touches on various key ideas of Huck Finn that illustrate his strong awareness of

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American race relations and Twain’s relationship with China and that many other translators do not articulate in their work. He remarks that Huckleberry Finn is “the treasure of not only American literature but also American culture,” because it has transcended the mere domain of literature. Through humor and the narration of a fourteen-year-old boy, Huck Finn writes out the “everyday life and soul of a nation.”20 Xu further comments that readers from the working class who were frustrated with the constraints of traditional Chinese culture and values could easily identify with Twain’s work. Yearning for freedom and new beliefs, they certainly shared and admired Huck’s and Jim’s spirit in venturing out into dangerous zones to attain freedom despite the risks involved. Xu then explores the term sivilize and remarks that it is the central theme of the novel. He translates “sivilize me” both as “学做人的规矩” “xue ­zuoren de guiju” (to learn the rules of life) and as “教我怎样做人” “jiao wo ­zenyang zuoren” (teach me how to be a person).21 Both are good translations, although not as accurate as Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian’s jiaohua, which has a connotation of religious conversion that Twain may have intended to suggest in his descriptions to give Huck some religion. Xu believes that the essential attraction of the book lies in the several moral dilemmas that Huck as a white boy experiences during his journey with Jim. Citing Twain’s own definition of humor, that it “must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever,” the translator explains that Twain did not create humor for humor’s sake, for behind the laughter there are strong moral messages, and that is what makes him a great writer with such lasting influence.22

Pap Finn and the Treatment of Race Although Pap Finn features in only two and a half chapters (from chapter five through the first half of chapter seven), he plays a significant role in revealing the kind of parental environment in which Huck was brought up as well as the white supremacist ideas at that time that Twain wanted to undermine. Pap’s language is not any easier to translate than Jim’s or Huck’s because he speaks with a lower-class white Southern accent that is as foreign to the Chinese as Jim’s black vernacular. In addition, Pap is almost always drunk and full of rage, and translators have to use a language that can effectively convey his condition and attitude; it is just as challenging as translating the speech mannerisms of the fourteen-year-old Huck.23 Pap’s anger is expressed most strongly in his tirade against the black professor

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from Ohio whom he degrades as a “nigger” and who he thinks should be sold back into slavery: It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and— (50)

If we take a look at the translation by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen again, Pap’s language seems to have been the most challenging for these translators, as Pap’s speech contains numerous mistranslations: I think, what kind of country is this? I am willing to go there, if I also have voting rights. But they said, this government allows black slaves to vote. I say, I will never have voting rights. My country will never let me have voting rights—I will never have voting rights for my entire life. I am worse than a black slave. I am going to ask them, how can a black slave hold such power? Do you think they will sell him? Ah, they said he could be a government official for six months—call this a government.

As shown, the translators have misinterpreted a majority of the content and got the whole voting rights issue wrong. Jim’s social status is elevated here as he has voting rights and, according to Pap, is even better than an average white man like himself. Such a twist in the content has altered to a great extent the racial dynamics in Twain’s work, subsequently simplifying the socio-historical background of race in the United States. The translation also creates more questions and contradictions; the idea that a black Ohio professor is also a government official would be absurd in the world in which the novel is set. Despite the frequent mistranslation, Jim in this version has a respectable status overall and appears to have very strong reasoning ability. Since his speech is translated into normal spoken Chinese, just as Huck’s is, it is hard to distinguish his vernacular or his low social status. Pap in this version is a lot milder than Twain painted him and appears even less educated than Jim because of his limited range of

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vocabulary. Also, instead of using the Chinese equivalent of the “N” word (黑鬼 hei-gui, meaning “black ghost”), Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen replace it with “黑奴” “hei-nu” (black slave) or with “黑人” “hei-ren” (black person) not only in the this speech but also the entire text. While the “N” word appears over two hundred times in the novel, it is spoken most offensively by Pap in this speech. There is certainly a decided difference in how Huck and Pap use it; the former with a certain affection, especially toward Jim, and the latter with strong disdain. Tellingly, in many Chinese translations, hei-gui is used, if at all, almost exclusively in Pap’s speech. The rest of the time, the “N” word is turned into either hei-nu or hei-gui. Translators might do this out of courtesy, intending to avoid the use of derogatory terms. After all, Chinese as a language is generally euphemistic; translators might feel embarrassed about translating the word directly. Truth be told, one possible risk of turning all the “N” words into hei-nu or hei-ren is that readers might genuinely believe that “nigger” means nothing more than “black slave” or “black person,” thereby getting a simplified version of American racism against black people from Twain’s work and, even worse, freely using the term as they address black people, out of ignorance. Hei-gui did not appear in any Chinese translations until Zhang ­Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian (1955) broke the ground and used it in half of Pap’s dia­tribe against the Ohio professor. Out of the six “N” words in the original version, the translators translated three directly as “hei-gui,” and the other three as the respectable “hei-ren”; interestingly, “hei-ren” is used to translate the term “free nigger” in the passage, as if to imply that the “N” word was not the most appropriate term to address free black people. Certainly Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian were aware of the difference between hei-gui and hei-ren, but they might not have been comfortable with translating the racial epithet directly throughout the speech at that time. Putting this aside, the translation overall is very accurate and the translators are able to translate with a language that is characterized by crisp colloquialism, conveying effectively Pap’s anger and disdain. To cite an example, “Why, looky here” is translated as “哼, 你瞧” “heng, nijiao.” Instead of translating “why” directly into Chinese 为什么 weisheme, which does not really fit into the context and would make the overall expression dull, “哼” “heng,” which is an expression to convey anger or disbelief, is used to express contempt of what Pap is communicating. Similarly, “looky,” as a short form to casually say “look at,” is translated as “你瞧” “ni jiao” (you look)—jiao is a colloquial way to say 看 kan.

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After the Cultural Revolution, China was once again open to international affairs. As Chinese readers became more receptive to foreign cultures and expressions, translators began to feel more comfortable translating the whole of Pap’s speech with hei-gui. However, it was not until 2012, that Taiwanese translator Wang An-chi (王安琪) made the bold attempt to use hei-gui throughout her entire translation. Understandably, Wang emphasizes in her preface that “the use of this word does not imply insult; on the contrary, it could in certain circumstance carry a sense of affection.”24 Otherwise, most full and serious translations minimize the use of the “N” word, lest it becomes offensive to readers (neither Cheng Shi nor Xu Ruzhi used it even once). Interestingly, hei-gui seems to appear more often in editions targeted for school children. The unrestricted use of the word in these versions might suggest that children, after all, tend to express more freely

f i g u r e 5 . 5 . Cover of the latest Chinese translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 2012. source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, trans. Wang An-chi, Linking Publishing Company, Taipei, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

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what is in their minds without censoring their thoughts, although these translations certainly run the risk of having young readers grow up using the “N” word and not being aware of the political implications behind it. There has been an explosion of Chinese translations of Huck Finn in all kinds of editions targeting readers at different educational levels: middle school, junior high, senior high, and university. As is to be expected, most of these translations are abridged versions that do not fully communicate the ideas of race and slavery that Twain had intended in his work. Many do not translate the “Explanatory” and “Notice” pages, which do not fit into their simplified versions that display very little linguistic variety and plot development. Chinese-English readers, for instance, turn Twain’s English into simple standard English that completely wipes out the original dialects that Twain used throughout the book. There is basically very little difference in the ways that Huck, Pap, and Jim speak. Given the simplified nature of these translations, instead of looking at Huck’s moral journey with Jim, translators focus on Huck’s adventures on the Mississippi with the Duke and the King and with the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords. On the Mainland, the translation by Ren Aoshuang (任傲 霜), published by Tianjin People’s Publishing in 2003, for instance, shortened Twain’s work to twenty-one chapters, cutting out the second half of Pap’s “govment” speech against the Ohio professor (chapter six), Huck’s and Jim’s debate on a Frenchman’s being a man or an animal (chapter fourteen), Jim’s speech on getting close to freedom that made Huck “all over trembly and feverish” (chapter sixteen), and Huck’s epiphany to “go to hell” rather than send the letter that he had drafted to Miss Watson (chapter thirty-one). The translation by Xiao Baorong (肖宝荣) in 2009, published by the People’s Fine Art Publishing House in Shanghai, condensed Huck Finn into twenty-three chapters and the whole of Pap’s speech against the government into Huck’s one-line description: “他开始大骂政府如何的不 仁慈, 只要他一喝酒, 口才就变得那么的好” “Ta kai-shi da ma zheng-fu ru-he de bu ren-ci, zhi yao ta yi he jiu, kou-cai jiu bian de na-me de hao” (He started to lash out on how unkind the government is, once he drinks, he becomes so articulate). Obviously, Xiao’s translation is not entirely accurate, and the rest of the paragraph focuses on Pap’s habit of drinking instead of the reasons why he was dissatisfied with the government. A similar phenomenon is seen in a majority of the translations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where Chinese-English readers such as the ones rewritten by Lu Ping (綠萍) (1996), published in Hong Kong by Hongguang Bookstore, and Qiu Fan (秋帆) (2003), published by Xingyue Wenhua Lide

Huck Finn’s Chinese Adventures in the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond   /  121

Publishing in Taiwan, turned all of Twain’s narration into standard English and compressed the story into twelve chapters. Similarly, a more recent publication by Youfu Bianji Bu (幼福編輯部) in Taiwan (2007) trimmed the whole text to nine chapters. The illustrations turned all the characters into cartoon-like figures, with Huck looking like a five-year-old instead of a fourteen-year-old boy, and Pap looking much kinder than he should. The main reason for this is obviously readership. Youfu Bianji Bu is targeting its rewritten version to children below ten years of age, thus publishing a Huck Finn with illustrations that are most likely to appeal to this age group. It is quite fair to conclude that numerous aspects of Twain’s book that sparked controversies in the United States concerning language, race, and the representation of Jim have failed to reach China, especially in the simplified translations and rewritten versions. Cutting out or rewriting these passages literally reshapes Twain’s work and simplifies the matter of race in the United States. Of course, shortening various passages in Twain’s work is understandable when the translations are targeted toward middle to junior high school children who are often not fluent in English. Most Chinese readers of Mark Twain, not only schoolchildren, are unaware of the complicated history of race in the United States. On the plus side, Twain’s work has been appropriated for an impressive array of purposes for readers ranging from early English learners to serious Twain students in universities. Since 1978, many Chinese departments at universities started to offer foreign literature programs, and Mark Twain is often included not only in university, but also in middle school and senior high school curricula. Where the People’s Literature Publishing House (人文文學出版社) in Beijing used to be the only major publisher of foreign literature in China, after the 1990s the Shanghai Translation Publishing House (上海译文出版 社), Yilin Chubanshe (译林出版社), New Century Press (新世纪出版社), and Yanbian Renmin Press (延邊人民出版社) began to gain prominence as publishers were established across major cities in China.25 It is certainly exciting to see that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn eventually found its way to autonomous regions like Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang; while Huck closed his story by saying that he would light out for territory in the American West, by the late twentieth century, the story of his adventures had made its way across Chinese territory in the Far East, where it was read by people from Hong Kong to Hubei, and had also reached the autonomous regions from Inner Mongolia to the far west of Xinjiang.

Epilogue

Culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least. Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve

For over a century, China has been overwrought with the question of what constitutes a nation. Although having a population that is ethnically and culturally homogeneous, as over 90 percent are classified as Han Chinese, China still has fifty-five other ethnic groups scattered around its borders. The deep-rooted idea of 民族融和 minzu ronghe (the cultural and ethnic melding of the different ethnicities into one Chinese nation) has existed for more than five thousand years of Chinese civilization. Nevertheless, the concept of unifying all ethnic groups into a political and cultural monolith did not solidify until the last ruling phase of the late Qing Empire (1644–1911) in the late nineteenth century, when China was confronted with the imminent threat of foreign invasion. In 1903, Liang Qichao (梁啓 超) highlighted the vitality of the coming together of the terms 中華 zhonghua (one Chinese people) and 民族 minzu (one ethnicity) by alluding to the Swiss political philosopher Johann Bluntschli’s eight criteria for what makes a nation: common territory of inhabitance, blood relationships at the time of origin, bodily structure, spoken and written language, religion,

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customs, and livelihood.1 Liang’s discussion of zhonghua minzu initiated an important platform for future leaders, among them Sun ­Yat-sen (孫中 山), to use when considering the direction of China regarding its political agenda and territorial integrity upon the collapse of the thousands of years of imperial rule. Throughout the history of China, apart from the Mongols (1206–1368), the Manchurians (1644–1911) were the only non-Han ethnic group that succeeded in ruling China. Despite initial efforts by the Manchurian government to preserve the ethnic features of their own people, the influx of Han immigrants into the Manchurian regions (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces in northeast China) brought with it the Han ways of life, culture, language, and agriculture that would slowly infiltrate and take over the Manchurian language and customs. The Qing government even sent Han Chinese officials there to govern the immigrant communities. The huge flow of Han Chinese into Manchuria would boost the population to one million by the end of eighteenth century and to three million by the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, many Manchurians would lose their culture and even their mother tongue. By the time the Qing dynasty collapsed, the difference between the Manchus and the Han was minimal to nonexistent. As Colin Mackerras remarks, “[i]t is among the ironies of Chinese history that one of the long-term consequences of the Manchu conquest of China was the Han takeover of Manchuria.”2 The assimilation of Manchurians into the Han traditions, culture, and beliefs is perhaps the best example of 汉化 hanhua (sinicization, or the process of becoming or “converting” into Han Chinese) in the recent history of China. In China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (1994), Mackerras posits three levels of cultural and racial melding of national minorities into the majority Han population in China, ranging from complete absorption on one end to minimal absorption on the other. Pluralism is the most liberal situation, as it fosters mutual interdependence, respect, and equality by allowing minority groups sufficient autonomy to maintain their own systems and ethnic qualities. A ­ ssimilation is the opposite end, where members of minority groups, sometimes as a result of experiencing violence and exploitation, absorb the customs, culture, values, and ways of life of the dominant groups. In the extreme case, they lose their own characteristics until they possess no difference from that dominant group. The Manchurian absorption of the Han way of life would be a typical example of assimilation. In Chinese, the term used would be 同化 t­ onghua (to make the same), which contains an underlying

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political agenda to compel national minorities to sacrifice their ethnic distinctions to become part of a national whole. Between pluralism and assimilation is fusion (融和 ronghe), whereby “two or more cultures combine to produce another, that is significantly different from the parent cultures.” Fusion is similar to the Marxist idea of the eventual disappearance of different nationalities upon the establishment of a communist society, where nationality demarcations no longer exist.3 Sinicization of 少數民族 shaoshu minzu (national minorities) culturally, economically, and politically varies from place to place, and it is met with the strongest resistance in Tibet and Xinjiang. National minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs appear to have been viewed as tribal, inferior Han, or even barbarians who need to be sinicized.4 Where Han superiority is not perceived as a form of racism, sinicizing the borderlands through territorial and pedagogical control is commonly believed to be a most natural thing to do. In this regard, it is very similar to the American claim to white superiority and a special mission to civilize people of color. Although the Qing Empire by the mid-eighteenth century had finally succeeded in putting Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia under territorial control, questions concerning these borderlands reappeared upon that empire’s collapse in 1910. The new republic was once again confronted with, first, the “frontier question” (邊疆問題 bianjiang wenti)—that is, the mapping, colonizing, and political incorporation of the remote and desolate frontier to defend the nation’s territorial sovereignty—and, second, the “national question” (民族問題 minzu wenti)—that is “identifying, classifying, and assimilating the twenty to forty million frontier indigenes into a single national identity.”5 Sun Yat-sen was one of the few Chinese leaders in the early twentieth century to highlight the concept of the nation, or “nationalism” (民族主 義 minzu zhuyi). During the Guomindang’s First National Conference, on January 27, 1924, he brought up the Three Principles of the People (三民 主義 sanmin zhuyi), the first being “nationalism,” the second “democracy,” and the third “people’s livelihood.” He addressed the five main nationalities of China—Han, Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and Muslim Turks (nationalities of Xinjiang, especially the Uyghurs)—and symbolized them in the original flag of the Republic of China by using five different colors. Born a Cantonese, Sun grew up in Hawaii and was educated in Japan. Dru C. Gladney, in Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects, notes that Dr. Sun was influenced by strong currents of national­ism mostly during his longtime residence in Japan, for minzu is taken directly from the Japanese term minzoku, and did not enter the Chinese vocabulary

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until the early twentieth century.6 As someone who spoke heavily accented Mandarin and had few connections in northern China, ­Gladney observes, Sun would easily have elicited traditional northern suspicions of southern radical movements, suspicions extending back to the Sung dynasty (960– 1279). Nevertheless, he “found a way to rise above deeply embedded northsouth ethnocentrism” and mobilized “other non-Cantonese, especially northern Mandarin-speakers, and the powerful Zhejiang and Shanghai merchants, into one overarching national group against the Manchu and other foreigners then threatening China.” By identifying internal foreigners, such as the Manchus, Tibetans, Mongols, and Hui, the Nationalists “cultivated a new, broadly defined identity of the Han.”7 Despite Sun’s acknowledgment of national minorities in the Republic of China, he also concluded that “as far as the great majority are concerned, 400 million Chinese, we can say they are entirely Han; the same blood relationships, the same spoken and written language, the same religion, the same customs and habits, entirely one nationality.”8 In a speech in Guangzhou on March 6, 1921, Sun elaborated on the idea of a republic by using the example of America: The name “Republic of Five Nationalities” exists only because there exists a certain racial distinction which distorts the meaning of a single Republic. We must facilitate the dying out of all names of individual peoples inhabiting China, i.e. Manchus, Tibetans, etc. In this respect we must follow the example of the United States of America, i.e. satisfy the demands and requirements of all races and unite them in a single cultural and political whole.9

To Sun, as Mackerras notes, it is “the nation as a whole which is paramount, not the individual ‘races’ within it.”10 In other words, assimilation by means of sinicization, or hanhua, would be the best way to unify this cultural and political whole. This policy would dominate the ideology of Chinese politics throughout the twentieth century. With the communist takeover of China in 1949, even though on paper (Article 3 of the first Constitution adopted by the First National People’s Congress on September 20, 1954) all nationalities enjoy equal rights, regional autonomy, and the “freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or reform their own customs and ways,” they are “inseparable parts of the People’s Republic of China,” and “acts which undermine the unity of the nationalities, are prohibited.”11 Despite the PRC’s emphasis on minorities’ right to their own language, culture, and customs, the republic, Mackerras continues, is “non-committal about secession from a larger state or rights to independence.”12 During the Great Leap Forward (大跃

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进 dayuejin), begun in 1958 under the leadership of Mao Zedong, China pursued a number of radical reforms that would further move national policy on minorities toward the path of assimilation rather than pluralism or fusion. The ongoing question of the Chinese borders and the resistance there against the influence of the PRC is most evident in the recent political revolts and violence in Tibet and Xinjiang just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In Tibet, a series of riots and incidents of burning, looting, and killing filled the streets of Lhasa and also affected other Tibetan areas, including monasteries outside that autonomous region, and were equally intense in Xinjiang, where an attack that caused the deaths of sixteen police officers happened just four days before the Olympics.13 The unrest in Xinjiang continued into 2009, when riots in Ürümqi resulted in many deaths of Han Chinese and Uyghurs, and 2010, when a bombing in Aksu led to at least seven deaths and fourteen injuries.14 All this is to say that the historical presence of the frontier and the spirit of venturing out into the frontier captured in Huckleberry Finn are certainly not exclusive to America. Where America perceived its western borders as less civilized compared to the more established eastern United States during the westward expansion, minorities in the Chinese borderlands, too, symbolize savagery that ought to be “tamed” and educated so the country can become one Chinese nation. One can easily draw parallels between the perceived Manifest Destiny of the United States to spread “sivilization” over people of color in the American West and eventually those beyond its national boundaries as well and the Chinese mission to sinicize “savages” (蛮夷 manyi) in non-Han regions to achieve national and territorial integrity. The frontier mentality and the urgency to stay away from white “sivilization” that Huck Finn is simultaneously communicating therefore cannot be said to be entirely foreign to Chinese readers. Nevertheless, although the ideas of the American “nation” (or “empire”) and “civilization” seem to translate when put in the Chinese context, as illustrated in the discussion earlier, these are slippery terms that assume different meanings once they are placed in a different historical and socio-political framework. Indeed, the same could be said about the Chinese perception of race and the understanding of the kind of US racism that Huck Finn sets out to reject. Unlike the thinking about race in the United States, where the racial composition is much more diverse and the idea of race more often discussed, the discourse of race in China is almost nonexistent because of the predominance of Han Chinese in the country and, essentially, the country’s

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much longer process of social and political sinicization. However, this does not suggest that Chinese audiences have no concept of black faces and slavery, despite their rare presence historically. In fact, accounts of black slavery are found in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), when African slaves were shipped to China. Julie Wilensky, in “The Magical Kunlun and ‘Devil Slaves’: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-Skinned People and Africa Before 1500,” tells us that in the beginning of the Tang dynasty, Arab traders brought East African slaves to China and controlled a vast slave trade between East Africa, Arabia, and China from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries.15 Slavery became a popular topic in literature in the early Sung dynasty. In《太平廣記》Taiping Guangji (A collection of Tang and earlier tales, dating from 977–978), for instance, stories were written about black slaves being simple-minded but obedient and loyal to their masters. Later, during the Ming dynasty in 1381, the Javanese, too, sent thirty thousand black slaves, as a tribute to the Chinese Emperor.16 In other words, China did have a type of slavery and a sense of “blackness,” and the equation of “black” and “slave,” as Frank Dikötter remarks, was “realized at a relatively early stage in China. It existed well before Westerners established themselves at the frontiers of the Empire.”17 Nevertheless, one should not make too much of superficial equivalences in the broad categories of race and slavery between the United States and China; despite general similarities, there are major differences between what slavery meant in China and the slavery practices in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the latter, slavery was largely a form of commodification and a means of developing imperial economies; in China individuals were degraded to the status of slaves mostly due to criminal offenses or captivity by rival tribes during wartime. The practice of black slavery died out in the Qing dynasty and by modern times it had been an unfamiliar idea for a few centuries. The presence of Africans or African Americans in China was also extremely rare until the early 1980s, when China, interestingly, made an effort to work together with African countries as a partner nation, advocating that “we blacks stick together” against the “white race.”18 This effort was far from successful; Chinese racism toward black people was brought to its height when African students were sent to study in China.19 In December 1988, clashes between African and Chinese students in Hehai University in Nanjing peaked when a mob of more than three thousand Chinese students gathered outside the foreign students’ dormitory and shouted the slogan, “Kill the black devils!”20 Nevertheless, while black racism is certainly not unfamiliar to

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the Chinese, Chinese readers do not necessarily understand what Jim goes through in the novel, or what it means for Huck to tear up his letter and help a black person run away, to the degree that American readers do, because the perception and practice of race and slavery in China has been, after all, formed under a very different system and structure. Despite the country’s efforts to educate its citizens, the incoming of black students had somehow reinforced black racism. Putting this aside, China’s reluctance to interrogate racism among its own ethnic groups makes the understanding of race in different cultural and historical contexts difficult; much work and education is direly needed in the country to raise the awareness of the kind of damage that racism brings to humanity. Ironically, despite the ongoing tension between the People’s Republic of China and Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet, Huck Finn has been warmly received in all of these regions. As discussed in Chapter 3, where Twain’s work communicates the need to flee white “sivilization,” its spirit could easily be embraced by readers in the Chinese borders in terms of thoughts of breaking free from PRC “sinisization” politically, economically, and ideologically. Nevertheless, Chinese critics and scholars on both sides of the frontier seem to have bypassed the political irony that Twain’s multifaceted work could encompass. Rather than transcending the local subtleties of Huck Finn, they view it in general as a critique of the US society and government and nothing more. In 2002, Nima Buchi (尼玛布赤) published the article “简评《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》” “Jianping Ha-ke Beili Feien Lixianji ” (A brief discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) in the Journal of Tibet University. The article introduces the novel mainly by discussing Huck’s moral journey and Jim’s search for freedom, without delving deeper into the global meaning of Twain’s work and its parallels to the Tibetans’ own quest for political freedom.21 That same year, in the Journal of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities, Zhao Yu (赵宇) published “浅 析马克吐温的悲观人生与文学之路” “Qianxi Ma-ke Tuwen Di Bei Guan Rensheng Yu Wenxue Zhi Lu” (An analysis of Mark Twain’s pessimistic view of life and road to literature), which comments on Twain’s attack on social foibles in America and the pessimism he displayed in the last phase of his life. While the writer does briefly discuss Twain’s anti-imperialism, he does not mention his connection with the Chinese Boxers, nor does he elaborate on Twain’s anti-imperialist views by drawing a parallel to the Mongolians’ search for political independence.22 It is deeply fascinating to see the ways in which Twain and his work are interpreted and appropriated outside of the US territories, especially

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in regions that conflict with one another in terms of socio-political and ideological agendas. Mainland Chinese readers embrace Twain as an ally and a heroic figure because he spoke up for the Chinese immigrants against US oppression in the American West and later declared his support for the Boxers against US and European imperialism. And yet, during the Cold War era and the Cultural Revolution, Huckleberry Finn’s voyage to ­Taiwan and Hong Kong suggests that work’s being less as an “ally” than a work that flees communism and oppressive governments. Similarly, given the continuous political struggles in today’s Chinese borderlands, Tibet, ­Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia might as well be the territories that Huck is lighting out for because of his refusal to be sinicized. Evidently, Twain’s work is equally welcomed by all of these regions, drawing on otherwise mutually contrasting political implications. How then do Chinese readers negotiate the irony of Twain’s text that their local presses and governments have overlooked? Would Twain’s popularity be affected in these Chinese communities if readers obtained a fuller picture of the kinds of meanings his work could carry in these regions? If so, how would translators approach his work differently? Placed on a transnational terrain, Huck Finn becomes an invaluable tool of an ongoing dialogue that reflects the politics and poetics of transcultural communication. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as race, slavery, and nationality, and helps us rethink the alternative legacies of these concepts in countries that have dynamics of race and culture dramatically different from those of the United States. While it is an immense challenge to put China and the United States together in a literary history, it is the intention of my work to bring us a step forward in appreciating just how complicated and important a global sense of literary studies will be, not only to Twain but also to US studies and literature.

Notes

Introduction 1.  Milton Meltzer, Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 150. 2.  “Mark Twain Papers & History: A Brief History,” Mark Twain Project Online, accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.marktwainproject.org/about_projecthis tory.shtml. 3.  Guy Adams, “After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All,” The Independent, May 23, 2010, accessed July 19, 2012, http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting -for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html. 4.  The debate over whether Twain should be labeled a “quintessential American” writer is discussed at length in Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 5.  Lu Xun, “A Short Introduction to ‘Eve’s Diary,’” by Mark Twain, trans. Gongzhao Li, in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Library of America, 2010), 174; Lu’s comments about Twain will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. 6.  Lao She, “Mark Twain: Exposer of the ‘Dollar Empire,’” trans. Zhao Yuming and Sui Gang, in The Mark Twain Anthology, 288. In 1968, Lao She was ranked first among the nominees for the Nobel Prize in literature. At this time China was at the summit of the Cultural Revolution. The Swedish Ambassador to China searched for Lao, but was informed that Lao had passed away. The Nobel committee then reassessed the other four nominees, and awarded the prize to a Japanese author, Kawabata Yasunari. For details, see “Lao She and Nobel Prize,” Beijing Attractions, accessed January 30, 2013, http://www.beijingattractions.org/Beijing-History/Lao -She-and-Nobel-Prize.html. 7.  Twain to Jane Lampton Clemens, 31 August 1853, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/ view?docId=letters/UCCL02712.xml&brand=mtp&style=letter.

132  /  Notes to Introduction 8.  Mark Twain, “United States of Lyncherdom,” in Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), 483; this article will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 2. 9.  Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 122. 10.  William Dean Howells, “Mark Twain: An Inquiry,” in Fishkin, The Mark Twain Anthology, 91. 11.  Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: HarperCollins, 1959), 8, 39. 12.  Shelley Fisher Fishkin addresses the Chinese influence on Twain’s changing perception of US racism directed toward African Americans in both From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), and her essay “Mark Twain and Race” in A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13.  H. L. Mencken, “Review of Albert Bigelow Paine’s Biography of Mark Twain,” Smart Set (February 1913). 14.  Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 22. 15.  William Faulkner, Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert A. Jelliffe (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1957), 88. 16.  See Hsuan L. Hsu, “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (January 2013): 69–84, and “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo,” Commonplace: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 11, no. 1 (October 2010), http:// www.common-place.org/vol-11/no-01/hsu; Xilao Li, “The Adventures of Mark Twain in China: Translation and Appreciation of More Than a Century,” Mark Twain Annual 6, no. 1 (2008): 65–76; Hsin-yun Ou, “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 2 (September 2010): 33–59; Martin Zehr, “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’ and the Chinese Connection,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2, no. 1 (2010), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t02n321#page-1; and Darren ChiangSchultheiss, “Representations of the Chinese Other in Mark Twain’s World,” Mark Twain Studies 2 (2006): 158–179. 17.  See Li Xinchao and Zhang Lin, “Zhongyi Zhong De Wudu He Wuyi” [The translation and history of Huck Finn in China], Journal of Northwest A&F University (Social Science Edition) 12, no. 6 (November 2008): 116–121; Chen Mei and Wang Xiaojie, “Zhui Meng Ren, Jingzi he Tizuiyang—Qianxi Ma-ke Tuwen Zhonghua Ren Xingxiang” [The dream-seeker, the mirror and the scapegoat—on the Chinese image in Mark Twain’s works], Journal of Beijing International Studies University (Foreign Languages) 2 (2007): 61–65; and Shi Weiming, “Zhonghua Chuanbo De Wudu Yu Tiejin: Lun Ma-ke Tuwen Zuopin Zhong De Huaren Xingxiang Yiyi” [The mis-interpretation and proximity of the dissemination of Chinese culture: a discussion of the portrayal of the Chinese image in the work of Mark Twain], Dongnan Chuanbo 1, no. 53 (2009): 192–194. 18.  Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975 [1866]), 272.

Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1  /  133 19.  Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1884], 366.

Chapter 1: Sam Clemens the Missourian 1.  Mark Twain, “Address at a Meeting of the Berkeley Lyceum,” in Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 144–146. 2.  Diana Preston, Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising (London: Constable & Robinson, 1999), 35, 148–151. For more on the Boxer uprising, also see Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Mark Twain, too, mentions the Chinese belief in the disturbance of ancestral graves by railroad construction, in Roughing It, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1872]), chap. 54. 3.  “Mark Twain Home, an Anti-Imperialist,” New York Herald, October 16, 1900, 4. 4.  Twain to Jane Lampton Clemens, 31 August 1853, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/ view?docId=letters/UCCL02712.xml&brand=mtp&style=letter. 5.  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain’s Historical View at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”  (1999 keynote lecture), in Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Seminar (Kyoto: Ritsumeikan University, 2000), 124, and “Originally of Missouri, Now of the Universe: Mark Twain and the World,” Joseph S. Schick Lecture, March 22, 2012, Indiana State University. 6.  Twain to the Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal, 24–26 February 1855, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL09994.xml;query=;searchAll=;sectionTyp e1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;br and=mtp#1. 7.  Twain, Roughing It, 391. 8.  These figures from Robert McClellan, Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890–1905 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 5, are rough estimates. 9.  Oakland Museum of California, “California Perspectives on American History: Early Statehood: 1850–1880s; Railroads Tie California to the Rest of the Nation,” accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.museumca.org/picturethis/timeline/early -statehood-1850–1880s/railroads-tie-california-rest-nation/info. 10.  Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 200. 11.  Gordon Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Dongfang Shao, and others are currently working on the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, http://chineserailroadworkers.stanford.edu (accessed January 5, 2014). The project, as described on the website, “seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West. The project coordinates research in the United States and Asia in order to create an on-line digital archive available to all.”

134  /  Notes to Chapter 1 12.  Mark Twain, “Chinese Slaves,” in Clemens of the ‘Call’: Mark Twain in San Francisco, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1864]), 72. 13.  Mark Twain, “China at the Fair,” in Clemens of the ‘Call,’ 2. 14.  Mark Twain, “The New Chinese Temple,” in Clemens of the ‘Call,’ 80. 15.  Twain, Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 2, 1864–1865, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Robert H. Hirst, and Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 511; this piece originally appeared in San Francisco’s The Dramatic Chronicle, December 12, 1865. 16.  Mark Twain, “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” in Mark Twain’s San Francisco, ed. Bernard Taper (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 189–191. A more complete version of this January 19, 1866, Daily Morning Examiner article is available in facsimile in William B. Secrest, California Feuds: Vengeance, Vendettas & Violence on the Old West Coast (Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 2005), 83. 17.  Twain to William Wright (Dan De Quille), 15 July 1864, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/ view?docId=letters/UCCL00084.xml;query=;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionT ype2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1. 18.  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 75. 19.  Hsuan L. Hsu, “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (January 2013): 70–71. 20.  Bernard Devoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 256. 21.  Ibid., 256–257. 22.  Ibid., 258. 23.  In a lecture explaining what Huckleberry Finn was about, Twain first remarked that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience.” He then described Huck Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” See Stuart Hutchison, ed., Mark Twain: Critical Assessments (New York: Routledge, 1993), 193. 24.  Gregg Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 560. 25.  Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 56. 26.  Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 206. 27.  Ibid., 217. 28.  Ibid., 218. 29.  Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 128. 30.  Camfield, Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 474. 31.  Thomas Nast, “The Chinese Question” [Cartoon], Harper’s Weekly, February 18, 1871, accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.harpweek.com/09cartoon/BrowseBy DateCartoon.asp?Month=February&Date=18. 32.  Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939), 66–67.

Notes to Chapter 1  /  135 33.  “Chicago Workingmen Resolve,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1881, 1. 34.  McClellan, Heathen Chinee, 6–7, 10. 35.  Mark Twain, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” in Sketches, New and Old, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1875]), 119. 36.  Mark Twain, “John Chinaman in New York,” in Sketches, New and Old, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Fishkin, 231–232. 37.  Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9. 38.  Darren Chiang-Schultheiss, “Representations of the Chinese Other in Mark Twain’s World,” Mark Twain Studies 2 (2006): 162. 39.  Hsin-yun Ou, “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 2 (September 2010): 33–59. 40.  “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” The Galaxy, October 1870, accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/187010b.html. This remark, as readers would later notice, has a striking resemblance to the warning note that Twain sounded in his most famous anti-imperialist work, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901). 41.  “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” appeared in three installments in The Galaxy (accessed July 19, 2012): October 1870, Letters 1–4, http://www.twain quotes.com/Galaxy/187010b.html; November 1870, Letters 5–6, http://www.twain quotes.com/Galaxy/187011c.html; January 1871, Letter 7, http://www.twainquotes .com/Galaxy/187101e.html. 42.  Frederick Anderson, preface to “Ah Sin”: A Dramatic Work, by Mark Twain and Bret Harte (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961), xv. 43.  Anderson, preface to Ah Sin, xiii. 44.  Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, 28; Bret Harte, Selected Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 4. 45.  Devoto, Mark Twain in Eruption, 266. 46.  Gary Scharnhorst, “‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 (December 1996): 378. 47.  Quoted in Henry J. W. Dam, “A Morning with Bret Harte,” McClure’s Magazine, December 1894, 43. 48.  Scharnhorst, “‘Ways That Are Dark,’” 394. 49.  Quoted in Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, 80. 50.  Ibid., 57. 51.  “Ah Sin on the Stage: An Interesting Sketch of An Interesting New Play,” Daily Rocky Mountain News, May 19, 1877. Accessed from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, July 19, 2012, http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/on stage/playscripts/ahsinrev01.html. 52.  “Ah Sin,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 21, 1877. Accessed from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, November 7, 2014, http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev02.html. 53.  New York Herald, August 1, 1877, col. 5, 6. 54.  Anderson, preface to Ah Sin, xiii.

136  /  Notes to Chapter 1 55.  Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1924), accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2988/2988-h/2988-h.htm. 56.  Anderson, preface to Ah Sin, v. 57.  “Ah Sin on the Stage,” 1877. 58.  Quoted in “Chinese Immigrants in California,” Timaru Herald, May 12, 1877, accessed November 7, 2014, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/papers past?a=d&d=THD18770512.2.20. 59.  Lee, History of Asian American Theatre, 13. 60.  Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Ah Sin: A Dramatic Work, ed. Frederick Anderson (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961 [1877]), 10–11. 61.  Jacqueline Romeo, “Irony Lost: Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee and the Popularization of the Comic Coolie as Trickster in Frontier Melodrama,” Theatre History Studies 26 (2006): 130. 62.  “Ah Sin on the Stage,” 1877. 63.  McClellan, Heathen Chinee, 43, 45. 64.  In her chapter on Ah Sin in Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Duckett does discuss a specific incident in which Twain cut a scene of Ah Sin displaying skills of squirting water onto an ironing board and replaced it with a scene of Ah Sin blowing out clouds of ashes, as he thought that the audience on the East Coast would not appreciate the humor of the original scene as people in the West would. 65.  “Ah Sin on the Stage,” 1877. 66.  Harte, Selected Letters of Bret Harte, 147. 67.  “Ah Sin on the Stage,” 1877. 68.  Chiang-Schultheiss, “Representations of the Chinese Other in Mark Twain’s World,” 165. 69.  Shi Weiming, “Zhonghua Chuanbo De Wudu Yu Tiejin: Lun Ma-ke Tuwen Zuopin Zhong De Huaren Xingxiang Yiyi” [The mis-interpretation and proximity of the dissemination of Chinese culture: a discussion of the portrayal of the Chinese image in the work of Mark Twain], Dongnan Chuanbo 1, no. 53 (2009): 192–194. 70.  See Chen Mei and Wang Xiaojie, “Zhui Meng Ren, Jingzi he Tizuiyang— Qianxi Ma-ke Tuwen Zhonghua Ren Xingxiang,” [The dream-seeker, the mirror and the scapegoat—on the Chinese image in Mark Twain’s works], Journal of Beijing International Studies University (Foreign Languages) 2 (2007): 61–65. 71.  The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall was a murder case in the 1850s; on appeal the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants had no rights to testify against white citizens. The court consequently freed Hall, a white man, who had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Ling Sing, a Chinese miner in Nevada County. Three Chinese witnesses had testified to the killing, to no avail. 72.  Hsuan L. Hsu, “A Witness More Powerful Than Himself ”: Ah Sin and Racialization of Testimony,” paper presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, October 20–23, 2011. 73.  Qin Liyan, “Ertong Wutuobang: Bula-te Ha-te De Huaren Fenxi He Tantao” [The utopia of the children: Bret Harte’s writings on the Chinese], Research of Chinese Literature 2 (2011): 112.

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2  /  137 74.  Zhang Longhai, “Meiguo Dongfang Zhuyi Yujing Xia de Huaren Xing­ xiang” [The image of the Chinese under the lenses of US orientalism], Yingmei Wenxue Yanjiu Luncong 12 (Spring 2010): 47. 75.  Hsin-yun Ou, “American Gender Issues and Chinese Ethnicity in Ah Sin,” NTU Studies in Language and Literature 24 (December 2010): 127, and “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” 55. 76.  Mao Jian, “Meiguo Xiangtu Zuojia Ha-te Yanzhong De Zhongguoren Xingxiang” [The Chinese image in the eyes of the American writer Bret Harte], Nantong Daixue Xuebao Shehui Kexueban 22, no. 4 (July 2006): 75, 77. 77.  Quoted in Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, 52–53. 78.  Ibid., 114. 79.  McClellan, Heathen Chinee, 52–53.

Chapter 2: From the Mississippi to the Big Sea 1.  Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1869]), 650. 2.  Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975 [1866]), 272. 3.  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain’s Historical View at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (keynote lecture presented at the 1999 Kyoto American Studies Seminar), in Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Seminar (Kyoto: Ritsumeikan University, 2000), 123. 4.  Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Signet Classics, 2009 [1883]), 124. 5.  While Clemens was at times viewed as a deserter from the Confederate Army, scholars such as Terrell Dempsey and David Rachels explain that Twain was never a Confederate, nor was he fully aware of the nature of his duty. See Terrell Dempsey, “Why Sam Clemens Was Never a Confederate and a Few Other Things You Should Know About Hannibal in 1860 and 1861,” Mark Twain Forum TwainWeb, 2001, accessed November 20, 2013, http://www.twainweb.net/filelist/1861.html; and David Rachels, introduction to Mark Twain’s Civil War, by Mark Twain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). 6.  Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 54. 7.  Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 12. 8.  Ibid., 21–24. 9.  Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 95. 10.  Char Tin-Yuke, and Wai Jane Char, “First Chinese Contract Laborers in Hawaii, 1852,” Hawaiian Journal of History 9 (1975): 128. 11.  Jung, Coolies and Cane, 92. 12.  Twain wrote this on September 10, 1866, in Honolulu, and it was published in the Sacramento Daily Union on September 26, 1866; accessed November 27, 2013, http://www.twainquotes.com/18660926u.html. 13.  Jung, Coolies and Cane, 17. 14.  Rob Wilson, “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing ­Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai‘i,” American Literature 72, no. 3 (2000): 528–529.

138  /  Notes to Chapter 2 15.  Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 272. 16.  The law barring court testimony from Chinese individuals was dropped from California’s Civil Procedure Code in 1872. 17.  Jung, Coolies and Cane, 22. 18.  Ibid., 23. 19.  Wilson, “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar,” 531. 20.  Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 81. 21.  Wilson, “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar,” 536–537. 22.  See Twain’s “My Debut as a Literary Person” [1899], in My Debut as a Literary Person: With Other Essays and Stories (1903) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010). 23.  Twain to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, 27 June 1866, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwain project.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL00103.xml;query=burlingame;search All=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5; style=letter;brand=mtp#1. 24.  Martin Zehr, “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’ and the Chinese Connection,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2, no. 1 (2010), 9. 25.  Anson Burlingame, “The Speech,” in The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States, ed. William Speer (Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton, 1870), 675, 678. 26.  Zehr, “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’” 7, 9. 27.  Thomas J. Osborne, Empire Can Wait: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981), 36. 28.  Quoted in Jung, Coolies and Cane, 116. 29.  Jung, Coolies and Cane, 9. 30.  Hsuan L. Hsu, “Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 69–84. 31.  Twain to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, 6 February 1868, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.mark twainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL00190.xml;query=nominated ,%20minister%20to%20china;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;section Type3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1; on the same web page, under note 4, see Clemens’s letter to Livy of 24 January 1869. 32.  Mark Twain, “Anson Burlingame,” Buffalo Express, February 25, 1870. 33.  Gregg Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 87. 34.  Ibid., 87. 35.  Twichell’s diaries and papers concerning the Chinese Educational Mission and his friendship with Twain and Yung Wing, as well as Ulysses S. Grant’s involvement in the mission, are to be found in the Joseph H. Twichell Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See also Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt, 1909). 36.  Twain to Whitelaw Reid, 3 January 1873, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3  /  139 Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/ UCCL00852.xml;query=burlingame;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sect ionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1. 37.  Jim Zwick, Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the AntiImperialist League (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity, 2007), 83. 38.  Fishkin, “Mark Twain’s Historical View,” 131. 39.  Mark Twain, Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1897]). All page numbers for quotations from this book in the text refer to this edition. 40.  Twain to Jane Lampton Clemens, 31 August 1853, in Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853–1880, Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/ view?docId=letters/UCCL02712.xml&brand=mtp&style=letter. 41.  Gore Vidal, introduction to Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist ­Essays, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, xxxiv. 42.  Fishkin, “Mark Twain’s Historical View,” 124. 43.  Twain to Joseph Twichell, 12 August 1900, in The Letters of Mark Twain, vol. 4, 1886–1900 (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library–Literary Society, 2004), 328. 44.  Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 66. 45.  David Zmijewski, “Mark Twain’s Dual Visions of Hawai‘i: Censoring the Creative Self,” Hawaiian Journal of History 38 (2004): 99–119. 46.  “Mark Twain at the Mercantile Library Hall Tuesday Night,” Daily Missouri Democrat, March 26, 1867, accessed from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, December 15, 2013, http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/ stldemo.html. 47.  Mark Twain, “The Sandwich Islands—Concluding Views of Mark Twain,” New York Tribune, January 9, 1873, accessed from hannibal.net, December 15, 2013, http://www.marktwainhannibal.com/twain/works/sandwich_conclude_view_1873. 48.  Zwick, Confronting Imperialism, 87. 49.  On his first trip, Twain wrote of the civilizing work of the missionaries in the Sandwich Islands: “The missionaries have clothed them [the native people], educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs. . . . The contrast is so strong—the wonderful benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable, and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the Sandwich Islands of Captain Cook’s time, and their condition today. Their work speaks for itself ” (Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 55). 50.  Fishkin, “Mark Twain’s Historical View,” 130. 51.  Ibid.

Chapter 3: Mark Twain the Chinese Boxer 1.  Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 358, 382. 2.  “Mark Twain Home, an Anti-Imperialist,” New York Herald, October 16, 1900, 4. 3.  Ibid.

140  /  Notes to Chapter 3 4.  Twain to Joseph Twichell, 27 January 1900, in The Letters of Mark Twain, arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, vol. 4, 1886–1900, http://www .gutenberg.org/files/3196/3196-h/3196-h.htm. 5.  Mark Twain, “Address at a Meeting of the Berkeley Lyceum,” in Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 144–146. 6.  Martin Zehr, “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’ and the Chinese Connection,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): 7, 9. 7.  For details of the foreign invasion, see Richard O’Connor, The Spirit Soldiers: A Historical Narrative of the Boxer Rebellion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). 8.  Larry Clinton Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris and the “Ideal Missionary” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 7. 9.  Ibid., 9, 10. 10.  Ibid., 7. 11.  R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), 118–123. 12.  O’Connor, Spirit Soldiers, 29–30. 13.  Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17. 14.  James Ricalton, China Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising (New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1901), 233, 234, 252. 15.  Twain to Joseph Twichell, 12 August 1900, in The Letters of Mark Twain, arranged with comment by Paine, vol. 4. 16.  Mark Twain, Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 350–351. 17.  Harris, God’s Arbiters, 54. 18.  For details, see Jim Zwick, Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity, 2007). 19.  Mark Twain, “Introducing Winston S. Churchill,” in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992 [1900–1908]), 10–11. 20.  Zwick, Confronting Imperialism, 115. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” North American Review 172, no. 531 (February 1901). All page numbers for quotations from this book in the text refer to this edition. 23.  Harris, God’s Arbiters, 16. 24.  Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion, 2. 25.  Quoted in Diana Preston, Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer ­Rising (London: Constable & Robinson, 1999), 215–217. 26.  Peter Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 142. 27.  Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness, 143. 28.  Letter dated January 10, 1901, in Twain, Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, 20. 29.  John Kendrick Bangs, “Is the Philippine Policy of the Administration Just? Yes,” Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1901, 155.

Notes to Chapter 3  /  141 30.  Twain, “To My Missionary Critics,” North American Review 172, no. 533 (April 1901): 520. 31.  Ibid., 522. 32.  Ibid., 523. 33.  Ibid., 527. 34.  Ibid., 530. 35.  Twain, “The Stupendous Procession,” in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, 43–44. 36.  Ibid., 56. 37.  Fishkin explains that Twain might have seen the cartoonist Francis Gilbert Attwood’s satirical political cartooning in the humor magazine Life, as “The Stupendous Procession” reveals striking parallels to a two-panel Attwood cartoon published in 1887; Fishkin, “Mark Twain and the Jews,” Arizona Quarterly 61 (Spring 2005): 156. 38.  Quoted in Henry Dwight Porter, William Scott Ament: Missionary of the American Board to China (New York: Revell Books, 1911), 221. 39.  Ibid., 210. 40.  Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 355. 41.  “Dr. Ament Answers Critics,” New York Times, May 10, 1901, accessed July 19, 2012, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=940CEFDC1030E1 32A25753C1A9639C946097D6CF. 42.  Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion, 213. 43.  Ibid., 214. 44.  Harris, God’s Arbiters, 54–55. 45.  Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion, 2. 46.  John R. Haddad, “The Wild West Turns East: Audience, Ritual, and Regeneration in Buffalo Bill’s Boxer Uprising,” American Studies 49, no. 3/4 (Fall/­ Winter 2008): 6, 18. 47.  Ibid. 6, 19. 48.  Ibid., 7, 23. 49.  Ibid., 22, 34. 50.  This piece was not published until 1972, when John S. Tuckey included it with other of Twain’s published and unpublished works in The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s “Great Dark” Writings; The Best from Which Was the Dream? and The Fables of Man, selected and with an introduction by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 51.  Twain, “The Fable of the Yellow Terror,” in The Devil’s Race-Track, 369. 52.  Ibid., 370. 53.  Ibid., 371. 54.  Ibid., 372. 55.  For details on German aid in westernizing Japan’s military, see the early chapters of Meirion Harries, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (New York: Random House, 1994). 56.  For a more detailed discussion of the representation of the Chinese and the Japanese in America in the early twentieth century, see William F. Wu, The ­Yellow

142  /  Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 Peril: Chinese-Americans in American Fiction, 1850–1940 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982). 57.  Twain, “The Fable of the Yellow Terror,” 429. 58.  Quoted in Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 365. 59.  Mark Twain, “United States of Lyncherdom,” in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), 483. 60.  Ibid., 484. 61.  Mark Twain, “True Patriotism at the Children’s Theater,” in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, 187–188. 62.  At this banquet, Ambassador Joseph Choate called on Mr. Clemens to respond to the toast “The Day We Celebrate,” and Twain’s speech was published in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 408. 63.  William M. Gibson, “Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists,” New England Quarterly 20, no. 4 (December 1947): 449, 550; Twain, “The Anglo-Saxon Race,” in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, 182. 64.  Abel Startsev, “Mark Twain in America,” in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Library of America, 2010), 295. 65.  Zwick, Confronting Imperialism, 156. 66.  Lao She, “Mark Twain: Exposer of the ‘Dollar Empire,’” trans. Zhao Yuming and Sui Gang, in The Mark Twain Anthology, 283, 286. Lao She’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in 1968 is described above in the introduction, note 6. 67.  Zhou Jueliang, “Lun Ma-ke Tuwen de Chuangzuo ji Qi Sixiang” [A discussion of Mark Twain’s writings and thoughts], Shijie Wenxue 4 (1960): 126–137. 68.  Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: HarperCollins, 1959), 466–467. 69.  Twain’s preference for “a sound heart” over “a deformed conscience” was discussed in Chapter 2. 70.  Li Tianqiao, “Ma-ke Tuwen De Zhongguo Xin” [Mark Twain’s heart for China], Journal of Xinyang Teachers College 4 (1988): 88.

Chapter 4: Lighting Out for the Pacific 1.  For more on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a global phenomenon, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “‘DEEP MAPS’: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects (DPMPs, or ‘Deep Maps’),” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3, no. 2 (2011): 1–31. 2.  Liu Haiming, Mark Twain in China: A Survey & an Annotated Bibliography (MA diss., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1983), 1. 3.  In 1981, the Commercial Press in Beijing published the translation of Huckleberry Finn made by Xing Zhiyuan (邢志远). 4.  David Pollard, introduction to Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), 11. 5.  Lin Shu, preface to Hei-nu Xu-tian Lu [Uncle Tom’s Cabin], trans. Lin Shu and Wei Yi (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1981 [1901]). English translation courtesy of Yao Lan.

Notes to Chapter 4  /  143 6.  Ironically though, slavery was still legal in China at the time Stowe’s work was first translated, and even after a law was passed in 1909 to ban slavery, the practice continued until at least 1949. For details, see Nicole Hallet, “China and Antislavery,” in Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 154–156; Zhou Gang, Man and Land in Chinese History: An Economic Analysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 158; Philip C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17; and Junius Rodriguez, “China, Late Imperial,” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 146. 7.  Cheng Shi, preface to Ha-keni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Cheng Shi (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 2004 [1989]), 1. 8.  Wang Hongzhi, ed., Fanyi Yu Chuangzuo—Zhongguo Jindai Fanyi Xiaoshuo Lun [Translation and creation—a discussion of contemporary Chinese translation of novels], (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2000), 157. 9.  Cheng, preface to Hakeni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], 1. 10.  Xilao Li, “The Adventures of Mark Twain in China: Translation and Appreciation of More Than a Century,” Mark Twain Annual 6, no. 1 (2008): 65. 11.  Liang Qichao, “Yiyin Zhengzhi Xiaoshuo Xu” [Preface to the translation and printing of political fiction], in Ershi Shiji Zhongguo Xiaoshuo Lilun Ziliao [Twentieth-century Chinese fiction and theory archive], ed. Zai Chenping and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1989), 1:21–22. 12.  Tong Zhen, Digengsi Yu Zhongguo [Charles Dickens and China], (Xiangtan: Xiangtan University Press, 2008), 81. 13.  Wang Xiaoming, “From Petitions to Fiction: Visions of the Future Propagated in Early Modern China,” in Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918, ed. David Pollard (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), 45. 14.  For more on Liang’s reform, see Andrew Nathan, “Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Chinese Democracy Movement,” in Chinese Democracy, chap. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 15.  Pollard, introduction to Translation and Creation, 9. 16.  Liang, “Yiyin Zhengzhi Xiaoshuo Xu” [Preface to the translation and printing of political fiction], 21–22. 17.  Qin Shaode, Shanghai Jindai Baokan Shilun [A history of contemporary journals in Shanghai], (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1993), 17. 18.  Pollard, introduction to Translation and Creation, 6. 19.  Ibid., 7. 20.  The Treaty of Versailles (1919) gave Japan control over Germany’s economic possessions in Shantung, including railways, mines, and the port at Tsingtao, although Japan eventually agreed to return control of Shantung to China, in February 1922. 21.  Tong, Digengsi Yu Zhongguo [Charles Dickens and China], 81. 22.  Liu, Mark Twain in China, 15.

144  /  Notes to Chapter 4 23.  Wang Bingqin, 20 Shiji Zhongguo Fanyi Sixiang [Twentieth-century Chinese translation historical overview], (Tianjin: Nankai Daxue Chubanshe, 2003), 95. 24.  Tarumoto Teruo, “A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction 1840–1920,” in Translation and Creation, ed. Pollard, 37. 25.  Indra Levy has discussed the controversy around the two famous Japanese translators Hara Hōitsuan and Yamagata Iso’o: Yamagata’s incensed accusation that Hara had failed to grasp Twain’s subtle sense of humor in Hara’s translation of “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’” eventually led to Hara’s death. See Indra Levy, “Comedy Can Be Deadly: The Story of How Mark Twain Killed Hara Hōitsuan” (paper presented at the Mark Twain Circle of America Quadrennial Conference, San Diego, December 9–12, 2010). 26.  For a more in-depth study of Japanese translations of Huckleberry Finn, see Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). 27.  Wen Shan and Tu Guoyuan, Waiguo Wenxue Fanyi Zai Zhongguo [Translation of foreign literature in China], (Hefei: Anhui Wanyi Chubanshe, 2003), 60–61. 28.  Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quanji [The selected works of Lu Xun], ed. Wang Haibo (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 2005), 6:235. 29.  Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “China’s Orwell,” Time, December 7, 2009, accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1943086,00.html #ixzz1dqzIMfcN. 30.  Wang, 20 Shiji Zhongguo Fanyi Sixiang [20th century Chinese translation historical overview], 95. 31.  Li, “Adventures of Mark Twain in China,” 68. 32.  Lu Xun, “A Short Introduction to Eve’s Diary,” by Mark Twain, trans. Gongzhao Li, in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Library of America, 2010), 174. 33.  Ceng Xubai, Meiguo Wenxue ABC [American literature ABC], (Shanghai: Shijie Shuju [World Press], 1929), 92. 34.  Ibid. 35.  Chen Bochui, preface to Wantong Liulang Ji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen (Shanghai: Guangming Shuju, 1947 [1942]. 36.  Estimates of deaths among Vietnamese soldiers and civilians ranged from fewer than a million to over 3 million, whereas American deaths of approximately 58,200 were dramatically lower by comparison. Figures for Vietnamese casualties are documented in, for example, Associated Press, “Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting for North,” April 3, 1995; Charles Hirshman, Samuel Preston, and Vu Manh Loi, “Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,” Population and Development Review 21, no. 4 (December 1995): 783–812; and Philip Shenon, “20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate,” New York Times, April 23, 1995. US casualties can be found in United States Department of Veteran Affairs, America’s Wars (factsheet), accessed November 19, 2011, http://www1.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf; and Anne Leland and Mari-Jana Oboroceanu, American War and Military Operations

Notes to Chapter 4  /  145 Casualties: Lists and Statistics (Congressional Research Service, February 26, 2010), accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf. 37.  Mark Twain, “Running for Governor,” in Sketches, New and Old, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1875]), 311-315. 38.  Amy Qin, “The Curious, and Continuing, Appeal of Mark Twain in China,” New York Times, January 6, 2014, accessed January 10, 2014, http://sinosphere.blogs .nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-curious-and-continuing-appeal-of-mark-twain-in -china. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Yudi, “Wo Yu Wenxue Fanyi” [Literature translation and I], in Dangdai Wenxue Fanyi Bai Jia Tan [A notebook of contemporary translations], ed. Ba Jin et al. (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1989), 641–643. 41.  Wen and Tu, Waiguo Wenxue Fanyi Zai Zhongguo [Translation of foreign literature in China], 62. 42.  Sun Zhili and Tang Huixin, “1949-1966: Meiguo Wenxue Zai Zhongguo de Fanyi Chuban” [Chinese translation and publication of American literature in the period 1949–1966], Journal of the People’s Liberation Army Institute of Foreign Languages 4 (1995): 71–79. 43.  Li Xiaowei, “Mark Twain in China,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Translation, ed. Lin Huangtian (Hubei: Hubei Education Press, 1997), 462–463. 44.  Jiang Xiaoli, Zhongguo Jindai Dazhong Chuanmei Yu Zhongguo Jindai Wenxue [Contemporary Chinese mass media and literature], (Chengdu: Bashu Shushe, 2005), 139–140. 45.  Beijing Foreign Studies University, “Beijing Foreign Studies University,” accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.bfsu.edu.cn/en/html/about/history. 46.  Xin Guangwei, Publishing in China: An Essential Guide, trans. Zhao Wei, Li Hong, and Peter F. Bloxham (Boston: Thompson Learning, 2005), 19. 47.  Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945– 1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne, 1994), 81. 48.  Ibid., 80, 89. 49.  Ibid., 82. 50.  United States Information Agency, “United States Information Agency,” accessed July 19, 2012, http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia. 51.  Shan Te-shing, Fanyi Yu Mailuo [Translations and contexts] (Taipei: Shulin Chuban Youxian Gongsi, 2009), 118. 52.  Ibid., 120–122. 53.  Ibid., 133–134. 54.  This information is from the back page of Wantong Liulang Ji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Li Yuhan (Taiwan: Yingwen Zazhishe Youxian Gongsi, 1988 [1963]). 55.  Taiwanese Hokkien (臺語 Tai-gi) is spoken by 70 percent of the population in Taiwan, according to Wang An-chi, preface to Ha-ke Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Wang An-chi (Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2012), 39. 56.  Shan, Fanyi Yu Mailuo [Translations and contexts], 120–131.

146  /  Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 57.  Wen and Tu, Waiguo Wenxue Fanyi Zai Zhongguo [Translation of foreign literature in China], 63; Liu, Mark Twain in China, 64. 58.  Li Xinchao and Zhang Lin, “Zhongyi Zhong De Wudu He Wuyi” [The translation and continuation of Huck Finn in China], Journal of Northwest A&F University (Social Science Edition) 8, no. 1 (January 2008), 138. 59.  Xin, Publishing in China, 231. 60.  Ellen Smith, preface to Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Tian Yiming and Zhao Hongxing (Beijing: Beijing Normal University Publishing Group, 1994–1995).

Chapter 5: Translation, Appropriation, and Continuation 1.  Xilao Li, “The Adventures of Mark Twain in China: Translation and Appreciation of More Than a Century,” Mark Twain Annual 6, no. 1 (2008): 69. 2.  Li Xinchao and Zhang Lin, “Ha-ke Zai Zhongguo Zhi Chongyi Yu Liuchuan” [The translation and continuation of Huck Finn in China], Journal of Northwest A&F University (Social Science Edition) 8, no. 1 (January 2008): 136–140. 3.  Zheng Jinger, Siyang Wenxueke Zai Taiwan Yanjiu Shumu 1946–2000 Nian [Research bibliography of western literature in Taiwan 1946–2000], (Taipei: Xingzhengyuan Guojia Kexue Weiyuanhui, 2004). 4.  Qian Bin, “Tan Ying Mei Mingzhu Hanyi Zhong De Duo Shuming Wenti” [The problem of translating book titles in British and American literature], Journal of Shaoxing University 23, no. 1 (February 2003): 65–69. 5.  Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1884]). All page numbers in the text refer to this edition. 6.  Ma-ke Tuwen [Mark Twain]. Wantong Liulang Ji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen. Shanghai: Guangming Shuju, 1947 [1942]. All quotations from this translation are from this edition. 7.  Ma-ke Tuwen [Mark Twain], Ha-ke Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Zhang Wanli (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1954). All quotations from this translation are from this edition. 8.  Xin Guangwei, Publishing in China: An Essential Guide, trans. Zhao Wei, Li Hong, and Peter F. Bloxham (Boston: Thompson Learning, 2005), 45. 9.  Zhang Wanli, preface to Ha-ke Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain, trans. Zhang Wanli (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1954), 1. 10.  Ma-ke Tuwen [Mark Twain], Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 1978 [1955]). All quotations from this translation are from this edition. 11.  Xin, Publishing in China, 44. 12.  Dong Heng, preface to Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain, trans. Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian (Beijing: ­Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 1978 [1955]), 5. 13.  Ibid., 8. 14.  David Pollard, introduction to Translation and Creation: Readings of West-

Notes to Chapter 5 and Epilogue  /  147 ern Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), 11–12. 15.  Ma-ke Tuwen [Mark Twain], Hakeni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Cheng Shi (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 2004 [1989]). All quotations from this translation are from this edition. 16.  Ma-ke Tuwen [Mark Twain], Ha-keni Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Xu Ruzhi (Nanjing: Yilin Publishing, 2002 [1995]). All quotations from this translation are from this edition. 17.  Cheng Shi, preface to Hakeni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain. trans. Cheng Shi (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 2004 [1989]), 12. 18.  Tuwen [Twain], Hakeni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Cheng, 48. 19.  Tuwen [Twain] Ha-keni Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], trans. Xu, 47. 20.  Xu Ruzhi, preface to Ha-keni Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain, trans. Xu Ruzhi (Nanjing: Yilin Publishing, 2002 [1995]), 1. 21.  Ibid., 9. 22.  Ibid., 6. 23.  Cheng Shi expressed the challenge of writing with a child’s language, saying that he tried “to write the whole text all in spoken language, and in the style of a child, but only to discover in the end that I have not been able to achieve this end with a lot of success.” Cheng, preface to Hakeni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], 12. 24.  Wang An-chi, preface to Ha-ke Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain, trans. Wang An-chi (Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2012), 38. 25.  Qian, “Tan Ying Mei Mingzhu Hanyi Zhong De Duo Shuming Wenti” [The problem of translating book titles in British and American literature], 61.

Epilogue 1.  Fei Xiaotong, Toward a People’s Anthropology (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), 1–2. 2.  Colin Mackerras, China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 29–30. 3.  Ibid., 7–8. 4.  James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6. 5.  Ibid., 3. 6.  Dru C. Gladney, Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (London: Hurst, 2004), 14. 7.  Ibid., 15. 8.  Mackerras, China’s Minorities, 55. 9.  Sun Yat-sen, “Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary,” Shanghai, December 30, 1918, accessed from the Pennsylvania State Library archive November 7, 2014,

148  /  Notes to Epilogue https://archive.org/stream/memoirsofchinese00snya/memoirsofchinese00snya_ djvu.txt. 10.  Mackerras, China’s Minorities, 56. 11.  Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), 9. 12.  Mackerras, China’s Minorities, 145. 13.  Andrew Jacobs, “Ambush in China Raises Concerns as Olympics Near,” New York Times, August 5, 2008. 14.  “China Prosecuted Hundreds over Xinjiang Unrest,” The Guardian (London), January 17, 2011. 15.  Julie Wilensky, “The Magical Kunlun and ‘Devil Slaves’: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-Skinned People and Africa Before 1500,” Sino-Platonic Papers 122 (July 2002): 1. 16.  Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 152. 17.  Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 15. 18.  Alan Hutchison, China’s African Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1975), 179. 19.  Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 194. 20.  Jonathan Mirsky, “Black Student Tells of Humiliation and Violence in China,” The Independent, January 26, 1989, 12. 21.  Nima Buchi, “Jianping Ha-ke Beili Feien Lixianji” [A brief discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], Journal of Tibet University 1 (2002): 60–62. 22.  Zhao Yu, “Qianxi Ma-ke Tuwen Di Bei Guan Rensheng Yu Wenxue Zhi Lu” [An analysis of Mark Twain’s pessimistic view of life and road to literature], Journal of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities 2, no. 1 (2002): 8–9.

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Selected Works of Mark Twain (in Chronological Order) Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Letters [1853–1880]. The Mark Twain Project Online. General Editor Robert H. Hirst. http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/search? category=letters;rmode=landing_letters;style=mtp. ———. Clemens of the ‘Call’: Mark Twain in San Francisco. Edited by Edgar M. Branch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1864]. ———. Early Tales & Sketches: Volume 2, 1864–1865. Edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Robert H. Hirst, and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. ———. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii. Edited by A. Grove Day. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975 [1866]. ———. “The Treaty with China.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010) [1868]. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2r87m203. ———. The Innocents Abroad. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with an introduction by Mordecai Richler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1869]. ———. “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again.” Memoranda. The Galaxy, January 1871. Accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/187101e.html. ———. Mark Twain’s Civil War. Edited by David Rachels. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007 [1872–1907]. ———. Roughing It. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with an introduction by George Plimpton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1872]. ———. Sketches, New and Old. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with an introduction by Lee Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1875]. ———. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. With an introduction by John Seelye and notes by Guy Cardwell. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 [1876].

150  /  Bibliography ———. Life on the Mississippi. With an introduction by Justin Kaplan and an afterword by John Seelye. New York: Signet Classics, 2009 [1883]. ———. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with an introduction by Toni Morrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1884]. ———. The Letters of Mark Twain. Vol. 4, 1886–1900. Arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine. Accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/3193/3193–h/3193–h.htm. ———. The Letters of Mark Twain. Vol. 4. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library–Literary Society, 2004 [1886–1900]. ———. Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910. Edited by Louis J. Budd. New York: Library of America, 1992. ———. The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s “Great Dark” Writings; The Best from Which Was the Dream? and The Fables of Man. Selected and with an introduction by John S. Tuckey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972 [1896–1908]. ———. Following the Equator and Anti-imperialist Essays. The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin with an introduction by Gore Vidal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1897]. ———. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the PhilippineAmerican War. Edited by Jim Zwick. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992 [1900–1908]. ———. My Debut as a Literary Person: With Other Essays and Stories (1903). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010. ———. Mark Twain’s Speeches. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. ———. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Edited by Charles Neider. New York: HarperCollins, 1959. ———. A Pen Warmed-up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest. Edited by Frederick Anderson. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. ———. Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews. Edited by Gary Scharnhorst. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Twain, Mark, and Bret Harte, “Ah Sin”: A Dramatic Work. Edited by Frederick Anderson. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1961 [1877].

Chinese Translations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (in Chronological Order) Tuwen, Ma-ke [Twain, Mark]. Wantong Liulang Ji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Zhang Duosheng and Guozhen. Shanghai: Guangming Shuju, 1947 [1942]. 章鋒聲, 國振 译《頑童流浪記》上海: 光明書局, 1947 [1942] 年. ———. Ha-ke Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Zhang Wanli. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1954. 张万里 译《哈克贝里 · 芬历险记》上海译文出版社, 1954 年. ———. Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian. Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 1978 [1955]. 张友松, 张振先 译《哈克 贝利 · 费恩历险记》北京: 人民文學出版社, 1978 [1955] 年.

Bibliography   /  151 ———. Wantong Liulang Ji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Li Yuhan. Taipei: Taiwan Yingwen Zazhishe Youxian Gongsi, 1988. 黎裕漢 译《顽童流浪 記, 美國文學名著選集》台灣英文雜誌社有限公司, 1988 年. ———. Ha-keni Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Cheng Shi. Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 2004 [1989]. 成時 译《哈克你贝利 · 费恩历险记》北京: 人民文 學出版社, 2004 [1989] 年. ———. Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Tian Yiming and Zhao Hongxing. Beijing: Beijing Normal University Publishing Group, 1994–1995. 田一明, 赵鸿星 译《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》北京: 北京 师范大学出版社, 1994–1995 年. ———. Ha-keni Beili, Fen Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Xu Ruzhi. Nanjing: Yilin Chubanshe, 2002 [1995]. 許汝祉 译《哈克你贝利 · 芬历 险记》南京: 譯林出版社, 2002 [1995] 年. ———. Ha-ke Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]. Translated by Wang An-chi. Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2012. 王安琪 译《赫克歷險記》台北: 聯 經出版事業股份有限公司, 2012 年.

Additional References Adams, Guy. “After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All.” The Independent, May 23, 2010. Accessed July 19, 2012, http://www .independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waitingfor-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html. “Ah Sin on the Stage: An Interesting Sketch of An Interesting New Play.” Daily Rocky Mountain News, May 19, 1877. Accessed from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, July 19, 2012, http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/ onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev01.html. Arac, Jonathan. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Associated Press. “Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting for North.” April 3, 1995. Beijing Foreign Studies University. “Beijing Foreign Studies University.” Accessed July 19, 2012, http://www.bfsu.edu.cn/en/html/about/history. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966. Camfield, Gregg. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ceng Xubai. Meiguo Wenxue ABC [American literature ABC]. Shanghai: Shijie Shuju [World Press]), 1929. 曾虚白: 《美国文学ABC》上海: 世界書局, 1929. Char, Tin-Yuke, and Wai Jane Char. “First Chinese Contract Laborers in Hawaii, 1852.” Hawaiian Journal of History 9 (1975): 128–134. Chen Mei and Wang Xiaojie. “Zhui Meng Ren, Jingzi he Tizuiyang—Qianxi ­Ma-ke Tuwen Zhonghua Ren Xingxiang” [The dream-seeker, the mirror and the scapegoat—on the Chinese image in Mark Twain's works]. Journal of Beijing International Studies University (Foreign Languages) 2 (2007): 61–65. 陈梅, 王孝 杰: “追梦人, 镜子和替罪羊—浅析马克吐温中华人形象” 析北京第二外国语学 氏院学报 外语版》2007年第2期, 61–65頁.

152  /  Bibliography Chiang-Schultheiss, Darren. “Representations of the Chinese Other in  Mark Twain’s World.” Mark Twain Studies 2 (2006): 158–179. Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. Accessed January 5, 2014, http://chineserailroadworkers.stanford.edu. Dempsey, Terrell. “Why Sam Clemens Was Never a Confederate and a Few Other Things You Should Know About Hannibal in 1860 and 1861.” Mark Twain Forum TwainWeb, 2001. Accessed November 20, 2013, http://www.twainweb.net/ filelist/1861.html. Devoto, Bernard, ed. Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940. Dikötter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Dong Heng. Preface to Ha-ke Beili, Feien Lixianji [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], by Mark Twain. Translated by Zhang Yousong and Zhang Zhenxian. Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe [People’s Literature Publishing House], 1978 [1955]. “Dr. Ament Answers Critics.” New York Times, May 10, 1901. Accessed July 19, 2012, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=940CEFDC1030E132A25 753C1A9639C946097D6CF. Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Esherick, Joseph. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Faulkner, William. Faulkner at Nagano. Edited by Robert A. Jelliffe. Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1957. Fei Xiaotong. Toward a People’s Anthropology. Beijing: New World Press, 1981. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “‘DEEP MAPS’: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects (DPMPs, or “Deep Maps).” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3, no. 2 (2011): 1–31. ———. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———. ed. A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Mark Twain and the Jews.” Arizona Quarterly 61 (Spring 2005): 137–166. ———. ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work. New York: Library of America, 2010. ———. “Mark Twain’s Historical View at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Keynote lecture presented at the 1999 Kyoto American Studies Seminar. In Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminar, 123–140. Kyoto: Ritsumeikan University, 2000. ———. “Originally of Missouri, Now of the Universe: Mark Twain and the World.” Joseph S. Schick Lecture, March 22, 2012, Indiana State University. Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

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Index

Abolitionism, 7, 16, 36, 39 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1, 5, 6, 9, 18, 29, 34, 74–75, 85, 101–103, 127, 130, 134n23; Chinese translations of, 3, 4, 6, 9, 74–75, 87–89, 91, 94–98, 101–121; in Mainland China, 8, 10, 77, 87–89, 98, 127, 129; in Taiwan, 9, 91, 94, 96–97, 99, 119, 130; in Hong Kong, 9, 91, 94– 95, 97, 99, 130; Chinese scholarship on, 77, 87–88, 100, 104, 107–108, 116, 129 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1, 73–74, 105–106; Chinese translations of, 3, 87, 90, 101, 107–108; in Hong Kong, 94. See also Harte, Bret: and Twain African-American history and presence in US, 5, 18, 20, 38, 47, 49–50; in China, 76, 96, 128–129 Ah Sin: Twain-Harte collaboration, 7, 18, 21, 26, 42, 136n64; plot of, 25, 28–30; reception of, 24, 26–27, 30; scholarship on, 24, 30–32; socio-political context of, 27 Ai Siqi, 89 Ament, William, 8, 60–61, 64–68 American Anti-Imperialist League, 3, 8, 32, 44, 56, 59–60, 62, 73 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 8, 60, 64–65, 68 American China Development Company, 57

American exceptionalism, 53–54 American Sugar Refining Company, 57 Anderson, Frederick, 27, 73 Anti-Chinese sentiments in US, 3–6, 12, 14–15, 18–23, 26–27, 29, 32, 38, 41–43, 76. See also Chinese Exclusion Act Arac, Jonathan, 131n4 Asia Foundation, 92 Attwood, Francis Gilbert, 141n37 Autobiography (Twain), 1, 2, 5, 18; Chinese translations of, 115; in Mainland China, 98 “The Awful German Language,” 75 Bangs, John Kendrick, 63–64 Barzun, Jacques, 123 Beijing Foreign Studies University, 90–91 Beijing Normal University, 99, 107 Beijing Normal University Press, 99 Bixby, Horace, 34 Bluntschli, Johann, 123 Book Club of California, 24, 27 Boxer Uprising: background: 12, 48, 56–61, 65, 74, 77, 81; origin, 11, 133n2; reception in US, 68–69. See also Twain, Mark: and the Chinese Boxer Budd, Louis J., 142n59 Buffalo Express, 42, 88 Burlingame, Anson, 7, 16, 39, 40–43 Burlingame Treaty (also known as the Burlingame-Seward Treaty), 39–41

160  /  Index Burns, Ken, 73 Cai Luosheng, 94 “The Californian’s Tale,” 84 Camfield, Gregg, 19–20, 43 “Cannibalism in the Cars,” 83 Carnegie Endowment, 92 Casserly, Eugene, 26 “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” 6, 35, 75, 88–89 Ceng Xubai, 87 Central Intelligence Agency, 92 Central Pacific Railroad, 13 Chamberlain, Joseph, 63 Chang, Gordon, 133n11 Chen Bochui, 87 Chen Duxiu, 82 Chen Jinghan, 83 Chen Mei, 6, 24, 30–31 Cheng Shi, 77, 79, 97, 113–115, 119, 147n23 Chesterton, G. K., 11 Chiang-Schultheiss, Darren, 5, 23–24, 30 “China at the Fair,” 15–16 Chinese “coolie”: background, 36–38, 41; and Twain, 7, 16, 33, 37, 39, 46, 51 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 9, 89–91, 98, 109, 115, 119, 130 Chinese Educational Mission, 42–43, 138n35 Chinese Exclusion Act, 20, 40, 42, 55. See also Anti-Chinese sentiments in US Chinese immigration to US, 3, 7, 13–14, 16, 18–20, 23–27, 39–41, 55, 73, 130 Chinese in the American West, 4, 13, 14, 21 Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, 133n11 Chinese rights in US: citizenship, 40–41, 55, to give testimony in court, 17, 31, 38, 40, 42, 136n71, 138n16; voting, 18, 40 “Chinese Slaves,” 14, 55 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 94 Chinese and US citizenship, 40–41, 55 Christianity, 7, 33, 58; Chinese as potential converts to, 43, 57; in “The Fable of the Yellow Terror,” 70; missionaries in Ceylon, 49; missionaries in China, 11, 15, 56, 58–61, 64–68, 74, 81;

missionaries in Hawaii, 48, 139n49; missionaries in India; missionaries in the Philippines, 61; Twain’s attitudes toward, 3, 14–15, 46, 48–49, 59–60, 62, 65–66, 68, 72 Churchill, Winston S., 59 Civil War: China (1945–1949), 89; Korea (1950–1953), 88; US (1861–1865), 34, 38, 64; Vietnam (1959–1975), 88 (Dowager) Cixi, 43, 57, 74, 80 Clemens, Jane (Twain’s mother), 5, 12, 39, 42 Clemens, Olivia (Livy) (Twain’s wife), 7, 16, 30, 42, 63 Clemens, Orion (Twain’s brother), 13, 35 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain, Mark Cody, William “Buffalo Bill,” 68–70 Cohen, Paul, 57 Colonialism, 7, 12, 33–34, 36, 38, 44, 46–47, 50, 52, 54, 57–60, 62–63, 71, 73, 125. See also Imperialism; Twain, Mark: and anti-imperialism Columbia University, 94 Commercial Press, 76 Communism, 9, 45, 85, 88–89, 92–93, 96, 99, 125–126, 130 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 74, 85 Conness, John, 41–42 “A Czar’s Soliloquy,” 74; 107 “A Defense of General Funston,” 107 Dempsey, Terrell, 137n5 Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects (“Deep Maps”), 142n1 Dikötter, Frank, 128 “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” 19, 21–22, 28, 42, 55 Dong Heng, 108–109 Duckett, Margaret, 19, 26, 29, 32, 136n64 Duffey, Joseph, 99 Eight-Nation Alliance, 12, 58, 65, 71, 74, 81 Esherick, Jonathan, 133n2 Eve’s Diary, 2, Chinese translations of, 85–86, 98

Index  /  161 “The Fable of the Yellow Terror,” 8, 46, 70–71, 141n50 Faulkner, William, 5, 85, 97 Fei Xiaotong, 147n1 Fenn, William Purviance, 32 Finn, Huckleberry (fictional character), 4, 9, 29, 34, 74–75, 85, 99; Chinese scholarship on, 87; Chinese translations of, 94, 96–97, 100, 102, 105–111, 118, 120–121, 129–120. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Finn, Pap (fictional character), 105; Chinese translations of, 9, 94, 96–97, 99, 105, 116–121 See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 6, 12, 16, 34, 44, 46, 51, 67, 132n12, 141n37 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 4, 97 Following the Equator, 44–48, 52; Chinese translations of, 108; in Mainland China, 74, 107 Foner, Eric, 13, 19–20 Ford Foundation, 92 Fulbright Association, 92 The Galaxy, 19, 21, 88 The Gilded Age, 88; in Mainland China, 98, 108 Gladney, Dru C., 125–126 Goldsmith, Oliver, 23 “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” 3, 19–21, 23–24, 42, 55, 135nn40, 41 Gould, Jay, 13, 48 Grant, Ulysses S., 43, 138n35 Grimm, Henry, 27 (Emperor) Guangxu, 79–80 Guozhen, 87–88, 91, 103–104, 106–107, 111–112, 117–118 Haddad, John R., 69 Hallet, Nicole, 143n6 Han Dihou, 94–96 Hannibal, (Missouri), 2–4, 12, 33, 50–51 Hara Hōitsuan, 82, 144n25 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 39 Harper’s Weekly, 20, 53, 64 Harries, Meirion, 141n55 Harris, Susan K., 59, 61, 68

Harte, Bret: and Twain, 7, 18–19, 24–25, 27–32, 42; “The Heathen Chinee” (“Plain Language from Truthful James”), 25–26, 28; works other than Ah Sin featuring Chinese protagonists, 26 Harte, Robert, 65 Harvard-Yenching Foundation, 92 Hawaii (Sandwich Islands), 7, 16, 33–36, 39, 43–46, 48–49, 51; import of Chinese labor to, 7, 16, 20, 33, 36–39, 41, 46, 51–52, US annexation of, 7, 16, 33, 43–44, 47–48, 51, 59 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 86, 97 Hay, John, 58 Hehai University, 128 Hemingway, Ernest, 5, 97 Hirshman, Charles, 144n36 Hirst, Robert H., 2 Hoffman, John T., 88–89 Holbrook, Hal, 2, 73 Hong Kong Baptist University, 94 Hong Qingquan, 91 Howells, William Dean, 4, 24, 54 Hsu, Hsuan L., 5, 18, 24, 31, 41 Hu Shi, 81–82 Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, 133n11 Huang Wenfan, 91 Huange, Philip C., 143n6 Hughes, Langston, 33 Hundred-Day Reforms, 79, 81 Hutchison, Stuart, 134n23 Imperialism, 2–4, 7–8, 12–13, 31–32, 41, 43–48, 52, 53–74, 79–80, 86, 88, 107, 111, 124, 128–130. See also colonialism; Twain, Mark: and anti-imperialism The Innocents Abroad, 16–17, 33, 47; Chinese translations of, 90; in Mainland China, 108 Ionesco, Eugène, 75 Irving, Washington, 76–77, 97 “Italian Without a Master,” 75 Jay Cook and Company, 19 Jenkins, Mark, 1 Jiang Xiaoli, 90 Jim (fictional character), 4, 34, 74–75, 99; Chinese translations of, 9, 94, 96–97,

162  /  Index 101, 103, 105, 111–118, 120–121, 129. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “John Chinaman in New York,” 19, 21–23, 28, 42 Jung, Moon-Ho, 36, 38, 40–41 Kang Youwei, 79–80 Kaplan, Amy, 39 Kawabata Yasunari, 131n6 Langdon, Jervis (Twain’s father-in-law), 7, 16–17 Langdon, Olivia. See Clemens, Olivia Langdon Lao She, 2, 73–74, 131n6 Latourette, Kenneth Scott, 141n40 Leng Xue (Cold Blood), 83 Levy, Indra, 144n25 Li Hung Zhang, 43 Li Lan, 86 Li Rutong, 94–96 Li Tianqiao, 74 Li Xiaowei, 145n43 Li, Xilao, 5, 79 Li Xinchao, 6, 104 Liang Qichao, 8, 79–80, 82, 123–124 Licht, Walter, 20 Life on the Mississippi, 35; Chinese translations of, 90, 108 Lin Shu, 76–77 Lin Yutang, 89 Lincoln, Abraham, 35, 38 Liu, Haiming, 81 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 76–77 Lu Ping, 120 Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren), 2, 84–86, 90 Lynch, George, 61, 65 Mackerras, Colin, 124, 126 Mao Jian, 24, 32 Mao Zedong, 85, 127 Mark Twain Project Online, 2, 131n2, 133nn4, 6, 134n17, 138nn23, 36 May Fourth Movement, 81–86, 88 McClellan, Robert, 29, 32 Meiguo Wenxue ABC (American literature ABC), 87 Meisterschaft (Virtuosity), 75

“The Million Pound Bank Note,” 108 Moffett, Pamela A. (Twain’s sister), 39, 42 Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal, 13 Nanjing Normal University, 115 Nankai University, 107 Nathan, Andrew, 143n14 National Chengchi University, 115 National Taiwan Normal University, 31 National Taiwan University, 92 Neider, Charles, 142n68 New Culture Movement, 77 New York Herald, 27, 53–54, 65 New York Sun, 24, 27, 30, 60, 64–65, 68–69 New York Tribune, 25, 40, 48 New York World, 58, 70 Nima Buchi, 129 North American Review, 60, 67 Northern Pacific Railroad, 19 Nye, Joseph, 92 O’Connor, Richard, 140n7 Oakland University, 94 Open Door Policy, 58 Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860), 56, 76, 79–80 Orientalism, 32, 38, 55 Osborne, Thomas J., 40 Ou, Hsin-yun, 5, 23–24, 32 “Our Active Police,” 15–16, 39, 46 Overland Monthly, 25 Oxford Mark Twain, 45, 102 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 27, 72 Parker, Peter, 38 Parsloe, Charles T., 26–27, 30–31 Peking University, 32, 94, 108 People v. Hall, 31, 136n71 People’s Literature Publishing House, 98, 108, 113, 121 Philippine-American War, 48, 54, 58, 62–63 Poe, Edgar Allan, 86, 97 Pollard, David, 112 Porter, Henry Dwight, 141n38 Preston, Diana, 133n2

Index  /  163 Preston, Samuel, 144n36 The Prince and the Pauper, 74; Chinese translations of, 90; in Mainland China, 98, 108 Qin, Amy, 89 Qin Liyan, 24, 31 Qiu Fan, 120 Quille, Dan De (William Wright), 16 Rachels, David, 137n5 Ralph, Lester, 86 Reid, Whitelaw, 43 Ren Aoshuang, 120 Rhodes, Cecil, 48, 52 Ricalton, James, 58 Rodriguez, Junius, 143n6 Romeo, Jacqueline, 28 Roughing It, 13, 17–19, 75, 133n2 “Running For Governor,” 6, 88–89; in Mainland China, 98, 108 Rushdie, Salman, 101 Russell, Nellie Naomi, 67 Russo-Japanese War, 71 The Sacramento Daily Union, 7, 16, 33, 35, 48 Said, Edward, 53 San Francisco Morning Call, 14, 18, 25, 35, 48 Scharnhorst, Gary, 140n16 Schmidt, Peter, 62–63 Schoppa, R. Keith, 140n11 Seward, William H., 40. See also Burlingame Treaty Shan Te-shing, 93 Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 107, 109, 121 Shao, Dongfang, 133n11 Shen Pao (Trust News), 81 Shenon, Philip, 144n36 Shi Weiming, 6, 24, 30 Sinicization (also Sinification), 124–130 Sino-Japanese War, First (1894–1895), 56, 76, 79 Sino-Japanese War, Second (1937–1945), 89, 108 Slaves and slavery in China, 128–130,

143n6; in Chinese translations, 108, 112, 118, 120 Smith, Arthur, 21 Smith, Ellen, 99 Smith, Judson, 64–65, 68 Spanish-American War, 12, 44, 54, 58–59 Spence, Jonathan, 133n2 Springfield Republican, 25, 60 Standard Oil, 57 Stanford University, 94 Startsev, Abel, 73 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 87 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 76–77, 143n6 “The Stupendous Procession,” 66–67 Su Wenjing, 89 Sun Yat-sen, 124–126 Sun Zhili, 145n42 Tang Huixin, 145n42 Thompson, Larry Clinton, 68 Thurman, Allen, 26 Tian Yiming, 98 “To My Missionary Critics,” 8, 46, 64–70 “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” 8, 46, 60–64, 66–68, 135n40 Tom Sawyer Abroad, 90 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 34, 45, 49, 74 A Tramp Abroad, 47 Transnationalism, 5, 6, 8, 62, 82, 92, 130 Treaty of Paris, 54, 58 Treaty of Versailles, 81, 143n20 “The Treaty With China,” 18, 32, 40–42, 55 “True Patriotism at the Children’s Theater,” 72 Tsai Shih-shan Henry, 148n16 Tsinghua University, 90 Tsuyoshi Ishihara, 144n26 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens): and anti-imperialism, 3, 4, 7–8, 32, 43–44, 46, 47, 52–54, 56, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 66; 70, 73;74, 79, 88, 107, 129; boyhood of, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 34, 50–51, 72; as candidate for US Minister to China, 41–42; and the Chinese Boxer, 3, 11–12, 16, 34, 47, 52, 54–55, 59; 60, 66; 73–74; 79, 108, 129–130;

164  /  Index on the Chinese “coolie,” 7, 16, 33, 37, 39, 46, 51; Chinese scholarship about, 3, 5–6, 73–74, 79, 88, 90, 105; Chinese translations of, 8–9, 74, 83–84, 88, 104– 105; on civilization (“sivilization”), 8, 9, 15, 19; 22; 27, 29; 66; 70, 72–73; 75; 105–106; 62–63; 66; 106–107, 110, 116; death of, 1, 2, 31, 73; encounters with the Chinese and, 3, 7, 12–16; fame and popularity of, 1–5; humor of, 2, 4, 15, 17–18, 35, 41, 48, 53, 68, 73–77, 84, 86, 109, 115–116; on import of Chinese labor to Hawaii, 7, 16, 33, 36–39, 41, 46, 51–52; on missionaries in Hawaii, 48, 139n49; piloting by, 34–35; as quintessential American author, 2, 51, 131n4; racist attitudes of, 3, 5, 16; on US annexation of Hawaii, 7, 16, 33, 43, 47–48, 51; views on racism of, 3–5, 7, 9, 12, 15–20, 34, 43–45, 48, 49, 67, 72–73, 88, 105; views on slavery of, 4–5, 8, 12; 13–14, 16–17, 34, 36–39, 45–46, 48, 49, 50–52, 55; 67, 73; worldwide travels of, 3, 7, 12–13, 17, 33–36, 39, 44–46, 48–51 Twichell, Joseph 42–43, 54, 58, 63, 138n35 Tweed, William “Boss,” 20, 88 Tu Guoyuan, 84 Tuckey, John S., 141n50 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 76–77, 143n6 United States Information Agency (USIA), 93–94, 99 “The United States of Lyncherdom,” 3, 8, 18, 43, 46, 72–74 University of California, Berkeley, 2 University of Detroit Mercy, 94 University of Hong Kong, 94 University of Missouri, 94 University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 135nn51, 52, 139n46 Vidal, Gore, 45 Vietnam War, 88, 144n36 Vu Manh Loi, 144n36 Wang An-chi, 96, 104, 119 Wang Xiaojie, 6, 24, 30–31

Wanguo Gongbao (Review of the Times or Globe Magazine), 81 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, 85 Wei Yi, 76–77 Wen Shan, 84 “What Have the Police Been Doing?”, 3, 15, 39, 46, 55 Whitman, Walt, 86 Wilensky, Julie, 128 Wilson, Rob, 37–39 Woodford, Stewart L., 89 World Today Press, 91, 93–95, 97 Wu Guangjian, 101 Wu Tao, 83 Wu, William F., 141n56f Xiao Baorong, 120 Xin Qingnian, 82 Xin Xiao Shuo (New Fiction), 78–80, 82 Xin Xin Xiao Shuo (New New Fiction), 83 Xu Ruzhi, 97, 113–116, 119 Yale College, 42 Yamagata Iso’o, 82, 144n25 Yanching University, 94 Yao Lan, 142n5 Yu Yelu, 94–96 Yudi, 90 Yung Wing, 42–43, 138n35 Zehr, Martin, 5, 39 Zhang Duosheng, 87–88, 91, 103–104, 106–107, 111–112, 117–118 Zhang Lin, 6, 104 Zhang Longhai, 24, 32 Zhang Wanli, 74, 88, 107–109, 111–112 Zhang Yousong, 88, 91, 97–98, 108–110, 112–113, 116, 118 Zhang Zhenxian, 88, 91, 97–98, 108–110, 112–113, 116, 118 Zhao Hongxing, 98 Zhao Yu, 129 Zheng Jinger, 104 Zhou Gang, 143n6 Zhou Jueliang, 74 Zhu Shenghao, 89 Zwick, Jim, 44, 48, 73