Mark Twain in China

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

Mark Twain in China

SELINA LAI-HENDERSON

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

For Seth Henderson

and

my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Sam Clemens the Missourian: Early Acquaintances with Chinamen

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

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

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

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

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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