Satire and Indictment: Harte's Chinese-American Portraits

"Plain Language from Truthful James" (1870). Published in the September 1870 issue of the Overland Monthly, Harte's "Plain Language from Truthful James," or "The Heathen Chinee," became an overnight sensation. It was immediately reprinted in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country and appeared in three illustrated chapbook editions. Ironically, though Harte intended the poem to satirize prejudice among the Irish, who were competing with the Chinese for jobs, it was read by many a xenophobic reader as a satire of the inscrutable Chinese. Rather than indict bigotry, the poem seemed to license it.

"For ways that are dark" and "tricks that are vain," the "heathen Chinee is peculiar," the narrator, Truthful James, opines (Luck 216). With his "pensive, childlike," and "blond" smile, the laundryman Ah Sin seems an easy mark to the card shark Bill Nye. But Ah Sin turns the tables on the Irishmen by concealing "twenty-four jacks" in his sleeves and marking them with wax. Nye declares, "We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor" before "he went for that Heathen Chinee" (216). Though the poem omits any mention of overt violence, the illustrations that often accompanied it pictured such violence explicitly.

Surface Stereotype and Resistant Reading. On the surface the text constructs a racial Other in stereotypical terms; only when read against the grain does it resist or subvert the stereotype. Readers tended to identify not with the "heathen" Ah Sin but with his presumed racial superior, Bill Nye, the ostensible victim of his trickery.

Appropriation, Parody, and Commercial Afterlives. "Plain Language from Truthful James" was soon appropriated for a variety of purposes. It inspired a short-lived school of western dialect poets that included Mark Twain and John Hay. It was parodied dozens of times—for example, to satirize the New Woman ("Plain Language from Truthful Jane"), the presidential ambitions of Horace Greeley ("The Heathen Greecle"), and the Treaty of Washington ("Plain Language from Truthful Bull"). It was, of course, soon adapted to the campaign against Chinese immigration. It was cited on the floor of Congress in January 1871; the virulently anti-Chinese senator Ernest Casserly of California wrote to Harte to thank him for joining his cause; and Allen Thurman, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1888, quoted it in his stump speech to prove his support for the Chinese Exclusion Act.

At the nadir of his career in the late 1870s Harte also exploited the popularity of the poem for commercial purposes. His play Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876) featured a Chinese laundryman in a small comic role. Twain later reminisced that with the "perfectly delightful Chinaman in it" the play "would have succeeded if anyone else had written it." In 1877 Harte and Twain together wrote a script entitled Ah Sin centered on the character of the Chinese laundryman, and the result was one of the most disastrous collaborations in the history of American letters. The play closed after three months.

Tropes from "Plain Language from Truthful James" continued to be appropriated well into the 20th century. Harte resurrected Ah Sin to ridicule the free silver plank in the 1896 Democratic Party platform in the poem "Free Silver at Angel's." As late as 1923, Charles R. Shepherd depicted the unscrupulous and inscrutable "heathen Chinee" in his book The Ways of Ah Sin.

For Discussion or Writing
1. What internal evidence is there that "Plain Language from Truthful James" was written with a satirical purpose?
2. Compare Harte's representation of race in this poem with the way Joel Chandler Harris represents race in "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story."
3. Explain why readers in Harte's day found it easier to sympathize with the Irish than the Chinese when they encountered this poem.

"Wan Lee, the Pagan" (1874). While "Plain Language from Truthful James" failed as a satire of anti-Chinese prejudice, Harte's story "Wan Lee, the Pagan" was a more explicit and utterly unequivocal indictment of racism. Published in Scribner's for September 1874, the ostensible "true story" was based at least in part on acts of mob violence perpetrated against the Chinese in San Francisco that Harte remembered from his years there. In his "California Letters" to the Springfield Republican in 1867-68, he had deplored the "late riots and outrages on the Chinese" and the way "the youth" of San Francisco "throw stones at the Chinese in the streets." (At about the same time, Mark Twain wrote a news story for the San Francisco Morning Call excoriating the stoning of a Chinese man by Irish schoolchildren; his editor killed the article on the grounds that it would alienate Irish subscribers to the newspaper.)

Narrative Frame and Characterization. The narrator of "Wan Lee," a genteel newspaperman like the author, introduces the reader in the opening paragraphs to a "grave, decorous, handsome" Chinese patriarch fluent in French and English whose character is radically at odds with the prevailing stereotype of the unscrupulous and inscrutable Oriental. "I doubt if you could find the equal of this Pagan shopkeeper among the Christian traders of San Francisco," the narrator adds (Luck 125). This grandfatherly figure entrusts the impish Wan Lee, whose life has been threatened by "the younger members" of the "Christian and highly civilized race who attend the enlightened schools in San Francisco," to the narrator, who lives in rural Humboldt County (128). Though Wan Lee escapes for a time and he prefers the city, the narrator, his guardian, takes a job in San Francisco and returns there two years later. The narrator concedes that "I do not think he contemplated the change with pleasure" (135).

Wan Lee befriends the white daughter of a widow with whom he lives, an episode that hints at the racial toleration of some children. "This little girl was quite content to fill him with her own Christian goodness" (136), according to the narrator. The story to this point is mere prelude to its pathetic ending. "There were two days of that eventful year which will long be remembered in San Francisco, when a mob of her citizens set upon and killed unarmed, defenceless foreigners because they were foreigners, and of another race, religion, and color, and worked for what wages they could get" (136). Some "eminent statesmen" in California went so far as to "think that the passage in the Constitution which guarantees civil and religious liberty to every citizen or foreigner was a mistake" (136). No puzzling or ambiguous assertions by Irish day laborers in this tale (unlike "Plain Language") that "we" are "ruined by Chinese cheap labor" (216). Wan Lee, an innocent victim of mindless violence, is stoned to death by a "mob of half-grown boys and Christian schoolchildren" (137) taught by their parents to hate Asians. Not to put too fine a point on it, the term pagan in the title of the story, in sharp contrast to the references to "Christian," drips with irony.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Is "Plain Language from Truthful James" or "Wan Lee, the Pagan" the more forceful indictment of racial prejudice? Which strategy—satire and irony or explicit moralizing—seems more effective?
2. Why does Harte choose to narrate "Wan Lee, the Pagan" from the point of view of a young journalist?
3. "Wan Lee, the Pagan" is the only story in this selection that Harte wrote after he left California. How does it differ in tone from the other stories? It is also the only tale in this selection that is set at least in part in San Francisco. What opinions about the city does he betray?