Although Hsuan L. Hsu's claim to have written the “first extensive study of Twain's representation of Asians” is true, the second such study, by Selina Lai-Henderson, appeared just three months after the claim was made, a fact not to be chalked up to mere coincidence. Differing in approach and focus, and not entirely in agreement regarding the place of China in Mark Twain's works, these two new studies nevertheless both express the increasingly felt need to reevaluate national literatures in a global context.
Selina Lai-Henderson's Mark Twain in China attempts to do two things: first to trace the career-long evolution of Twain's representation of and attitudes towards the Chinese, and then to lay out the history of the reception of Twain's writings in China. Of these, the second is the more eye-opening contribution, but the first several chapters offer nonspecialists a useful summary of Twain's less well-known early depictions of Chinese immigrants in the West. Notwithstanding the disparaging comments Twain made about Chinese immigrants as a young man, when he witnessed repeated injustices visited upon them as a journalist in San Francisco he began writing of their plight with sympathy, and heaped scorn on their persecutors. For Lai-Henderson, these sallies amounted to “a rehearsal” for his mature works depicting race relations in the South, a crucial step on the “moral journey” that allowed Twain to divest himself of the bigotry with which he grew up. Lai-Henderson briefly summarizes comparatively little-known works such as “John Chinaman in New York” (1870), “Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again” (1870–71) and Ah Sin (1877), a farce on which Twain collaborated with Bret Harte – all works for which Hsuan L. Hsu provides far more detailed readings than Lai-Henderson attempts. Hers is a commonsense approach that depicts Twain's mature middle works as mostly irrelevant to Asian matters, which emerge as a dominant theme again in Twain's later travel books and fiery attacks on American imperialism, such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), his acid response, in part, to the United States' role in helping to put down the Boxer Rebellion.
Lai-Henderson is a useful, although not infallible, guide to Twain's works with Chinese themes and characters (she mistakenly says that a murder occurs in Ah Sin, whereas one is only supposed to have occurred), but her chapters on Twain's posthumous reputation in China are full of information previously unavailable in English or scattered in journals and library stacks. Twain is unsurprisingly revered as an enemy of the United States' imperial designs upon China, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) has appeared in some ninety translations – mostly faulty or severely abridged – but the work of his perhaps most widely read in China is “Running for Governor,” an 1870 column satirizing Tammany Hall electioneering, and thus revealing the corrupt nature of politics in capitalist society. If ideological considerations can partly account for the shaping of the Twain canon in China, the role chance has played is suggested by the way Eve's Diary (1905) got singled out for translation: a writer's maid and child found an English copy in a neighbour's trash, and brought it home to use for origami. Lai-Henderson focusses, however, on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and her translations of various Chinese versions back into English brilliantly demonstrate the special difficulties facing anyone trying to convey Twain's use of dialect in a nonalphabetic language, and in a country where the dialects that might potentially be employed are wholly incomprehensible to the great majority of readers, and thus may not realistically be availed of.
The most lively parts of Lai-Henderson's discussion involve suggestive, if not always entirely substantiated, consideration of political uses to which Twain has been put – and has failed to be put. One major translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was promoted during the Cold War by the United States Information Agency, a fact that Lai-Henderson claims rendered the novel “a symbol of free-thinking individualism against oppressive governments” (99). That it was thus understood, however, seems an open question; Lai-Henderson herself notes that the novel has mostly been thought of as an adventure story or as children's literature. Most incisively, she argues for the analogy between Huck's struggle with “sivilization” and the struggle of Tibetans and Uighurs, among others, against sinicization. The fact that dominant Han attitudes towards minorities echo those of whites as depicted in Twain's works could allow Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to seem dangerously subversive. In general, however, that subversive potential has been ignored, perhaps because “China's reluctance to interrogate racism among its own ethnic groups” has stymied the development of critical discussion along these lines (129). It may be that Mark Twain in China's greatest service will be to invigorate Twain criticism in China. Hinting as much, Lai-Henderson herself writes that “Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia might as well be the territories that Huck is lighting out for because of his refusal to be sinicized” (130).
Occasional lapses in copyediting detract from the argument. The frequent use of “where” when “whereas” is meant occasions much potential for ambiguity. There are errors in punctuation, diction (Twain's works have been “used to suit different political implications” (10), for example), and modification (“similar to conditions in the transatlantic slave trade, the mortality rate of coolies … was high” (38)). The worst that can be said on this score about the next book under review is that a three-line inventory of things found in the West and the Pacific appears twice in the same paragraph.
According to Hsuan L. Hsu, Lai-Henderson's study is precisely the kind of work that needs to be supplemented with the cultural interventions he wants to offer in Sitting in Darkness. Previous studies have connected Twain's way of representing Asians and blacks through a “reliance on empathy and analogy” (Hsu 6); like Lai-Henderson's, they show Twain sympathizing with different minorities suffering from similar sorts of oppression. The shortcoming of this method, Hsu thinks, is that it “downplays the historical specificity” of the disparate ways Asians, blacks, and other minorities were racialized and disciplined at the time, and therefore misses the light Twain's works shed “on racial discourses that insistently compared and contrasted African American and Chinese immigrant populations” (6, 9).
As the subtitle of Hsu's study makes clear, he aligns himself with the burgeoning study of comparative racialization, a field seeking to highlight the interrelations among racist discourses directed at different groups – how the dominant group might use stereotypes of one minority, for example, as a tool for suppressing other minorities. Until now, readers interested in Twain's relation to discourse surrounding Asians have focussed on the early and late phases of his career, passing over the middle period in which Asian characters and themes rarely appear. Hsu, however, argues that since Twain was writing in the period when “the legal and discursive groundwork of comparative racialization was established,” even texts that appear to feature only one racialized group or character “implicitly draw on and respond to the larger field of comparative racial discourse” (8, 9). For Hsu, then, there is a “ghostly African American presence haunting” Twain's representation of Asians, and there are “Asian presences that haunt his treatments of African Americans” (9).
The nature of this haunting varies depending on the work under consideration. In a chapter devoted to Ah Sin, Hsu argues that the play critiques an already vacated California Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Chinese witnesses from testifying against whites. The comparativist element relies on the justices' rationale, according to which the word “black” in a statute explicitly prohibiting such testimony by African Americans was properly interpreted to comprehend all nonwhites. Ah Sin itself, whose plot, for Hsu, demonstrates why such bans undermine the administration of justice, does not reveal significant comparison between racialized minorities, but the historical background Hsu provides enriches our understanding of the complexities of race. To appreciate the potential of Hsu's project, one has only to read the objections to the ban raised by one Chinese immigrant indignant at being grouped with Native Americans, who, he agreed, had no business testifying in court.
For many readers, the central interest of Sitting in Darkness will be its attempt to show how Twain's works with scant mention of Asia or Asians have something to say about the racialization of the Chinese. To create a comparativist context for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's treatment of black–white relations, Hsu focusses on the theme of vagrancy, arguing that the “romanticized white vagabondage at the heart of Huckleberry Finn” depended on “the relative immobilization of Chinese, Native American, and black bodies” (55). His inclusion of “Chinese” in this list relies on the idea that one “source text” of the novel is Twain's “Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again,” in which a Chinese visitor to America runs afoul of a bigoted judicial system and ends up arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned. Having established “Twain's concern with racialized vagrancy” (61), Hsu focusses his attention on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's implied critique of post-Reconstruction restrictions on black mobility, which are registered in the novel by the contrast between Huck's ability to go where and be who he wants, and Jim's need to stay hidden and immobile. These latter claims do not depend on, and do not seem modified by, Hsu's earlier discussion of Chinese vagrancy, but the chapter fully justifies Hsu's unexceptionable idea that “legal and discursive constructions of vagrancy perpetuate racial hierarchies” (54).
Probably the most ambitious argument in the book is mounted in the chapter “‘Coolies' and Corporate Personhood in Those Extraordinary Twins.” Although the conjoined twins at the centre of that novel are Italian, readers would, of course, have thought of them as Siamese twins, so to some extent any such twins are haunted by an Asian presence regardless of their ethnicity. Moreover, once the Supreme Court had endowed corporations with personhood in the 1880s, several commentators had compared them to Siamese twins, since such enterprises, like conjoined twins, seemed now to confound normal assumptions about the equation of personhood and individuality. In addition, attacks by labour on corporations sometimes melded with attacks on Chinese immigrants, who were thought to drive down wages and were themselves often represented as a swarming mass in which individuality was extinguished. The novel, for Hsu, therefore can be seen as registering “the problem of corporate agency embodied by Chinese immigrant laborers” (97).
If such multifarious and sometimes tenuous connections render Hsu's argument diffuse at times, his next chapter, on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), is much more direct in its efforts to establish a Chinese context for Twain's work. Hsu highlights Twain's support of Chinese efforts in the 1870s and 1880s to counteract the influence of Western missionaries and imperialists by seizing control of their own development, partly by sending Chinese boys to America for their education so they could bring useful Western ideas back home. Twain's support of one such program a few years before starting on A Connecticut Yankee prompts Hsu to see in that work a critique of Western interference in China, as it depicts the disastrous consequences of an outsider's attempt to foist modern ways on a society deemed backward. He finds another “reference point” for Twain's novel in Wong Chin Foo's 1889 Wu Chih Tien, a romance set in ancient China featuring – like A Connecticut Yankee – anachronistic explosives, and functioning as an allegory for China's ability to modernize itself (135).
Hsu concludes his study by turning to Twain's late, explicitly anti-imperialist writings, focussing on Twain's exposure of the way imperialists reduced indigenous populations to statistics, and the role that “the politics of counting” plays in the imposition of “deindividualizing forces on subject populations” (149). Like the rest of the book, this argument is replete with fascinating historical detail derived from wide reading in the archive. By bringing many disparate topics together, Hsu will no doubt stimulate further contemplation of the sometimes suppressed presence of Asia in nineteenth-century American writings.
