Mark Twain in China by Selina Lai-Henderson (review)

Many years ago, when I first looked up “Mark Twain” in the New York Public Library’s card catalog (remember those?), I was struck by the number of languages into which his works had been translated. His global presence continues to increase: Twain’s writings have been translated into most of the world’s major languages and not a few of its minor ones. Equally important is the burgeoning presence in the United States of Twain scholars from around the world, who are introducing new perspectives not just on Twain and his writings, but on the cultural contexts in which his works are read. Selena Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China falls into this category: she gives us a brief history of Twain’s relationship to the Chinese in the United States, she surveys the landscape of Chinese translations of his work, especially Huck Finn, and she lays out some of the Chinese cultural contexts in which Twain’s work has been read.

Mark Twain in China is grounded in a fact that few Americans know: people in other parts of the world value Mark Twain for different reasons than Americans do, in large part because they read Twain selections that most Americans don’t even know exist. Even when they read traditional Twain texts, they read them through their own cultures’ histories, not through ours. This is terrain Shelley Fisher Fishkin opened up with her admirable The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (Library of America, 2010), which features commentary about Twain from writers as diverse as José Martí, Rudyard Kipling, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lu Xun, and Kenzaburō Ōe. This collection illustrates how highly Twain is valued abroad for his political writings, especially those critical of U.S. imperialism. China is a case in point; Lai-Henderson shows us that early twentieth-century Chinese readers knew and appreciated Twain’s championing of the Chinese in the United States at a time when American racism against the Chinese was at its height.

Twain’s sympathy for the Chinese evolved during his years in the American West. Lai-Henderson begins her study with a survey of his growth out of knee-jerk American ethnocentrism and into a growing appreciation for America’s Chinese immigrants and their natal culture. Twain’s evaluation of Chinese coolies during his 1866 visit to Hawai’i was basically utilitarian; he saw them as a labor force, pure and simple. However, Twain’s sojourn in Hawai’i also brought him into contact with Anson Burlingame, former U.S. ambassador to China and admirer of Chinese culture, and in the long run the lessons about Chinese history and culture that Sam Clemens learned from Burlingame are far more important than the young Mark Twain’s facile racism. By the time he was back in San Francisco Twain was generating articles (some censored by his white employers) critical of the racist violence perpetrated against Chinese immigrants, and the lessons he learned about the racist structures underlying the development of U.S. civil and criminal law during the period would percolate through his writings for years to come. At Burlingame’s request, Twain wrote a lengthy analysis of the 1868 trade treaty with China that Burlingame had overseen— arguably the most liberal treaty the United States has ever signed with that country. Discursive and informed, the analysis was published in the New York Tribune in 1868. Predictably, it was lost from the Mark Twain canon and only rediscovered recently by the independent scholar Martin Zehr. For those of us interested in shifting the general image of Twain away from “regionalist writer” to “engaged internationalist,” Twain’s critique of the Burlingame Treaty establishes his interest in, and grasp of, world affairs at a relatively early stage of his career. It also provided a foundation for his critique of American imperialism at the turn into the twentieth century, and for his declaration of solidarity with the Boxers, who were trying (unsuccessfully) to kick imperial Europe out of...