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

The title of this book might be misleading, but not necessarily in an unwelcome way. If you expect this book to be about the reception of the work of Mark Twain (1835–1910) by the general public in China, you are getting more than that. In fact, a larger section of the book (the first three chapters) is about Twain’s changing political opinion about China and American imperialism. After a thorough review of how Twain’s view of China and Chinese immigrants was transformed, the final two chapters focus on the reception of Mark Twain’s work in China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Thus, Selina Lai-Henderson provides a broad overview of Mark Twain as an American writer on the international stage, following recent publications such as Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), Susan K. Harris’s God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Hsuan L. Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

The three chapters delineating Twain’s transformed view of the Chinese and the United States as an empire draw on historical records, other historical studies of Twain, and short analyses of Twain’s political commentaries. Lai-Henderson describes the change in Twain’s views by noting that, despite 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” (12). Chapter one is devoted to Twain’s adventures in the American West in the 1860s and his change of opinion toward the Chinese in America at this stage of his life. When he worked as a journalist in New York, shortly after he had left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, he described the Chinese as “human vermin.” His adventures in the American West, especially his experience in San Francisco during the time of a huge influx of Chinese labor, allowed him to grow into someone who showed sympathy to the Chinese, as indicated in writings such as his “Chinese Slaves” (1864), “China at the Fair” (1864), and “Our Active Police” (1865). Returning to the eastern United States, Twain continued to write against racism and social injustice to the Chinese in America. Lai-Henderson includes a discussion of the play Ah Sin (1877) in this chapter and reinterprets the image of Ah Sin, whom many other Twain scholars see as problematic and stereotypical, as a character who actually subverts racist stereotypes.

Chapter two recounts Twain’s two voyages to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands) in 1866 and 1895 and compares his attitudes on each trip toward Chinese coolie labor. Twain’s first visits occurred when the coolie trade was rapidly growing, and Twain’s description of it indicates that he was “more concerned about coolie trade being beneficial to American business and the extension of America’s empire across the Pacific” than about the Chinese, although sympathy can be detected (37). Twain’s practical attitude toward justifying the coolie trade goes along with his support of Chinese rights. His friendship with Anson Burlingame (1820–1870) was a positive influence on his support for Chinese rights in America. Twain penned “The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained” (1868) in support of the Burlingame Treaty, wherein he defended the rights of Chinese [End Page E-9] immigrant workers to vote and to acquire citizenship in the United States. By the time of Twain’s second trip to the Sandwich Islands, he had become increasingly disillusioned with European and American colonialism, and “it was now the Anglo-Saxon crowd that he came to denigrate as the real ‘human vermin’ for their claims to moral superiority” (44). Lai-Henderson points out that Twain’s travelogue Following the Equator (1897) proves that, although he had not addressed the “Chinese question” since Ah Sin...