The Curious, and Continuing, Appeal of Mark Twain in China
By AMY QIN
There are few authors regarded as quintessentially American as Mark Twain. With his preternatural gift for capturing vernacular expression and his roguish wit, Twain is still widely seen as the founder of the American voice. More than a century after his death, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain’s most celebrated work, remains a mainstay of middle school and high school English classes. Ernest Hemingway famously declared it the book from which “all modern American literature comes.”
Twain’s writings have won him literary fame in China as well. Although “Huckleberry Finn,” with more than 90 different translations in Chinese, is a favorite, a large portion of Twain’s popularity in China derives in fact from another, much more obscure work: a short story called “Running for Governor.”
A humorous account of Twain’s fictional candidacy in the 1870 New York gubernatorial election, “Running for Governor” was taught alongside the writings by Mao Zedong and other prominent Chinese thinkers and literary figures in middle schools across China for more than 40 years. In this time, it was read by several generations and millions of Chinese, making Mark Twain one of the best-known foreign writers in China and “Running for Governor” one of his best-known works.
“Just about anyone who has had a middle-school education in China knows Mark Twain and ‘Running for Governor,’ ” Su Wenjing, a comparative literature professor at Fuzhou University, said in a telephone interview. “And everyone remembers the specific cultural moment and social critique represented in the story, this is certain.”
Published in the literary magazine Galaxy just after the New York gubernatorial election in 1870, “Running for Governor” is a satire that takes aim at what Twain saw as the hypocrisy of the American electoral process and the dog-eat-dog nature of party politics. In the brief yet imaginative sketch, Twain finds himself nominated to run for New York governor on an independent ticket, only to be overwhelmed by a slew of false ad hominem attacks from several unnamed accusers.
In the face of charges that he had, among other things, robbed a poor widow and her family of a small plantain patch in “Wakawak, Cochin China,” as well as slandered the incumbent governor’s dead grandfather, Twain concludes the story with his characteristic élan:
I was wavering — wavering. And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness were taught to rush on to the platform at a public meeting and clasp me around the legs and call me PA!I gave up. I hauled down my colors and surrendered. I was not equal to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the State of New York, and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of spirit signed it,Truly yours,
Once a decent man, but now
MARK TWAIN, I.P., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E.
Included in Twain’s satirical roast of the American electoral process was the role played by the press, which over the course of his fictional candidacy bestowed upon him the various nicknames to which Twain makes reference at the end of the story: Infamous Perjurer, Montana Thief, Body Snatcher, Delirium Tremens, Filthy Corruptionist and Loathsome Embracer.
(A cursory examination of the New York Times’s archives does not disprove Twain’s view of the theatricality of the press. In its Oct. 1, 1870 statement of support for the Republican challenger in the real-life New York gubernatorial race, The Times painted a doomsday scenario for New York City — “the streets given over to rowdies and murderers, the Central Park made the hunting-ground of the castaways of the Fourth and Sixth Wards!” – in the event of victory by the incumbent Democrat, who in the end did in fact win.)
That “Running for Governor” was a critique of the United States written by an American as highly esteemed as Twain was precisely what made it so appealing to the Chinese. Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, it was selected as a required reading for middle school students across the country along with other short stories that were seen to reinforce the anti-Western, anti-capitalist, socialist education agenda.
“One of the major reasons why ’Running for Governor’ is rarely taught in the U.S. is because it satirizes the embarrassing corrupt political community in the U.S. that Twain saw at the time,” said Selina Lai, a lecturer in American Studies at Hong Kong University who is currently writing a book titled “Mark Twain in China.” “Not surprisingly, that makes it an extremely popular piece to teach in Chinese classrooms.”
Teachers were instructed to emphasize the anti-capitalist message of the story prior to any considerations of the story’s style or form. “The ideas in this story extend far beyond the era in which it takes place,” reads a popular teacher’s guide for “Running for Governor” that is available online. “Today, it is still as before: A good lesson in the sham and deception of the democracy of the capitalist classes.”
For more than 30 years, my uncle, Wang Lifeng, taught “Running for Governor” in accordance with these guidelines in a small village school in rural Shaanxi Province. Classroom conditions, particularly before the market-oriented economic changes that began in the late 1970s, were poor, with drafty mud-walled classrooms and few resources for either teachers or students.
Nonetheless, Mr. Wang fondly recalls teaching “Running for Governor” along with other stories deemed suitably critical of social injustice, such as Guy de Maupassant’s “My Uncle Jules” and Anton Chekhov’s “A Chameleon.” But for Mr. Wang, who is retired from teaching but still farms wheat and corn, “Running for Governor” is a favorite, not only because of its humor or its supposed vindication of the Chinese socialist system, but because Twain himself was someone who, as a self-taught, self-made man, knew what it was like to “live in the lower rungs of society.”
“Twain understood the happiness and unhappiness of the people, their pains and difficulties,” Mr. Wang said by telephone from his home in Shicao, a village about a one-hour drive from the city of Xi’an. “He lived in that environment. He was at that level.”
Even before “Running for Governor” became popular in China, Twain’s reputation in China as a social critic had been cemented. Though his colloquial humor did not always translate well into Chinese, his unaffected satires and consistent willingness to take on what he saw as the pervasive inequality and injustice in his own country endeared Twain to many of the most prominent writers and thinkers of early 20th-century China. A fervent anti-imperialist, he even famously once pronounced himself a Boxer in support of the violent nationalistic uprising against foreigners in China in 1900.
In a speech delivered in 1960 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Twain’s death, the eminent Chinese writer Lao She hailed Twain as an “outstanding writer of critical realism in the United States” and a bracing social critic who had been reduced by Americans to a figure who told jokes.
That Twain was until recently remembered more as a humorist than as a satirist or social critic in the United States is not inaccurate, said Shelley Fisher Fishkin, an English professor and expert on Twain at Stanford University.
“In a sense we threw out the baby with the bath water,” said Professor Fishkin, citing the imperatives of the Cold War as a major reason for the distortion of Twain’s more serious accomplishments. For much the same reasons that China played up Twain’s social commentary and critiques of imperialism, the United States, she said, played them down.
“Running for Governor” was moved to the optional reading list by the state-run People’s Education Press in 2003. That decision, said Professor Su of Fuzhou University, may be a reflection of the government’s realization that blunt, anti-Western propagandistic messages are no longer so effective in today’s China, which has itself increasingly come to exhibit the corruption and garish excess documented in “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” the novel Twain co-wrote with Charles Dudley Warner.
But it does not diminish the fact that today in the United States, more than a hundred years after Twain’s death, many of his critiques of hypocrisy, ignorance and greed — “Running for Governor” included — still ring true. “Twain the social critic who uses satire to skewer his society’s foibles is a Twain that is increasingly of value to us today,” Professor Fishkin said.
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