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Abstract: This essay argues that Ah Sin-a character in American poet Bret Harte's satirical poem, "Plain Language from Truthful James"-became a meme used in racial-ized thinking across the nineteenth-century Anglophone world. Variations of the Ah Sin character appeared in forms ranging from newspapers and the burlesque to Anthony Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now. Trollope's The Way We Live Now deploys the meme to critique the workings of a media landscape prone to oversimplification and exclusion. By contrast, the novel renarrativizes Ah Sin by invoking the poem's contexts of the American West. However, instead of Harte's Chinese gold miner, Trollope creates an imaginary Chinese emperor, thereby reflecting the complicated geopolitics of British and American attitudes toward Chinese migration and the Qing empire.
Jessica R. Valdez ([email protected]) is the author of Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel (Edinburgh UP 2020) and has published in journals including Studies in the Noveland Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of East Anglia in the UK, and in August 2024 she will become an assistant professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Louisiana State University. She is currently working on a monograph called "Despots and Democrats: China and America in British Literature, 1832-1901."
In Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1874-75), Lord Nidderdale worries about playing cards with the American Hamilton K. Fisker at a London club, the Beargarden; he comically conflates the American speculator with the "'Heathen Chinee,' such as he had read of in poetry" (78). His comments allude vaguely to American poet Bret Harte's 1870 poem about the American West that features a character named Ah Sin. Harte wrote the poem-titled "Plain Language from Truthful James" but popularly known as the "Heathen Chinee"-to critique anti-Chinese sentiment in California in the 1860s and 70s, as Chinese migrants traveled to the region first to join the Gold Rush and later to work on the transatlantic railroad. Most readers, however, failed to note Harte's irony and instead used the character as racist shorthand. The "Heathen Chinee" became a stock figure in popular culture, proliferating in pamphlets advertising American railways and American music and theatre as well as in the transatlantic newspaper and periodical press. The process catapulted Harte...