Sitting in Darkness

Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization

Hsuan L. Hsu

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479818389
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Perhaps the most popular of all canonicalAmerican authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirizeAmerican formations of race and empire. While many scholars have exploredTwain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and AsianAmericans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsuexamines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relationswith China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chineseimmigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery andanti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain’s ideas about race were notlimited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully craftedassessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, includingAfrican Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship,comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting inDarkness engages Twain’s best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, HuckleberryFinn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as well as hislesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as theallegorical tale “A Fable of the Yellow Terror” and the yellow face play AhSin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of ChineseExclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connectionsbetween immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

1

“A Witness More Powerful than Himself”

Race, Testimony, and Twain’s Courtroom Farces

BOSTON: You’ve got to talk.

FERGUSON: Yes, or hang.

1ST MINER: Talk and hang both! (They all make a dive for ah sin who scrambles between their legs and upsetting one or two of them—jumps on table, seizes flat iron, shrieking and gibbering Chinese. Picture of consternation by miners. Quick curtain.)¹

While the uncomfortable blend of farce, mob violence, and racist caricature presented in this scene from Twain and Bret Harte’s collaborative play, Ah Sin, may not surprise readers familiar with similar mob scenes in Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Those Extraordinary Twins, the double imperative—“Talk and hang both!”—invokes a predicament specific to nonwhite populations in California and other western states. When the California Supreme Court in People v. Hall (1854) extended the state’s prohibition on “black” and “Indian” testimony to the Chinese, it both marked the Chinese population as a target for violent crimes and endangered those Chinese who attempted to bear witness to crimes. If the civic order required that subjects provide testimony in courts of law, the decision that Chinese were incompetent witnesses—grounded in both Chief Justice Hugh Murray’s spurious racial science and in the popular suppositions about the vulgar and unbinding nature of Chinese oaths²—disabled their testimony. Thus, a Chinese witness who provided information about a crime might be in danger of retaliation if the culprit could not be convicted on the basis of Chinese evidence: as William Speer reports of one Chinese man who did not provide information about a robbery in Tuolomne County, “The reason why he did not go and give information to Mr. G. was that the facts could not be proven on account of their testimony being invalid, and he feared that, if left at large, his life would be taken by the robbers or their associates.”³ Whereas witnesses are generally empowered with the knowledge that their testimony can convict a criminal, this Chinese witness understood that talking about what he’d seen was much more likely to endanger him than to convict the robbers. Similarly, the Chinese laundryman in Ah Sin must negotiate the legislated vulnerability and impotence of Chinese testimony (“Talk and hang both.”).

This chapter situates Ah Sin—a work that has been marginalized in the Twain canon by its formal idiosyncrasies and yellowface stereotypes—amid the public debates about the racialization of testimony precipitated by People v. Hall. The ban on testimony both responded to and reproduced the racialization of the Chinese as dishonest, “inscrutable,” and withdrawn from civic life. If, in most western states and territories, “slyness was interpreted by courts as a character flaw that jeopardized Chinese participation in the criminal justice system,”⁴ the lack of Chinese participation exacerbated both the criminalization of the Chinese and their apparently “sly” hesitance to present public testimony that could not hold up in court. Twain’s responses to the prohibition on Chinese testimony highlight the political force inherent in the act of testifying, as well as the everyday forms of violence and injustice to which this legal disability subjected the Chinese. Reading Ah Sin as a response to California’s prohibition on Chinese testimony also highlights how Twain’s other courtroom farces—from his early journalism in the San Francisco Daily Morning Call to the troubling conclusion of Pudd’nhead Wilson—critique the political framing of what counts as “evidence” by interrogating the distinction between testimony and nontestimonial evidence. A closer look at historical responses to the People v. Hall decision elucidates the stakes of racialized and racializing evidence in the courtroom scenes of Twain’s early sketches, Ah Sin, and Pudd’nhead Wilson.

I. People v. Hall and the Racialization of Testimony

“Of all the wrongs visited upon the Chinese in the period from 1850 to 1870,” writes legal historian Charles McClain, “the ban on their testimony in the state’s courts—not surprisingly, given its fateful implications—rankled most deeply, and the removal of this disability was consistently the chief item on the agenda of the community leadership.”⁵ The ban on Chinese testimony was established in People v. Hall, when the California Criminal Procedures’ ban on black, mulatto, or Indian testimony against a white man was extended to the Chinese. Writing for the majority, California Supreme Court chief justice Hugh Murray argued that the term “Indian” applied to “the Mongolian, or Asiatic” because Christopher Columbus had mistaken the New World’s inhabitants for Asian Indians; he also argued that the generic term “black” was intended to include all nonwhites.⁶ The immediate consequences of the case anticipated its broader effects throughout California and other western territories influenced by California’s laws: when People v. Hall reversed the conviction (on the testimony of three Chinese witnesses) and the death sentence of George W. Hall for the murder of Chinese miner Ling Sing in Nevada County,⁷ it effectively announced that the Chinese could be killed with impunity provided that no white witnesses sympathetic to the Chinese were around. More broadly, the prohibition on testimony debarred Chinese immigrants from the capacity and civic duty to bear witness—a right that, as the communication theorist John Durham Peters explains, Western cultures associated with Enlightenment reason and manhood (in both ancient Greek and Latin, the same word denotes both “witness” and “testicle”; in German, zeugen means both “testify” and “procreate”).⁸

If Murray’s analogies between Chinese, “black,” and “Indian” contributed to a “Negroization of Chinese immigrants” and an extension of racist laws that southern Democrats had brought west from slave states,⁹ his opinion also set the Chinese apart as foreigners: “The anomalous spectacle of a distinct people, living in our community, recognizing no laws of this State except through necessity, bringing with them their prejudices and national feuds, in which they indulge in open violation of law; whose mendacity is proverbial . . .”¹⁰ California’s prohibition on Chinese testimony produced only a partial analogy between Chinese and African American subjects because the formal prohibition colluded with discursive and economic factors to intensify the racialization of Chinese immigrants. In addition to Murray’s charges of “proverbial” “mendacity” and a refusal to recognize or abide by the state’s laws, the Chinese were often viewed as unfair labor competition, linguistically inarticulate, inherently deceitful, and heathen. Ironically, their inability to testify reinforced these stereotypes, along with prevalent notions about Chinese stoicism: “In the nineteenth century suffering in silence becomes one of features [sic] of the Chinese most interesting and impressive to Western observers.”¹¹

These racial beliefs led California’s legislature to adopt a new foreign miners’ tax in 1852 (an 1850 version of the tax had been used to displace Mexican Americans from mining claims) targeting Chinese miners. Justified by the notion that the political and economic interests of Chinese immigrants were in China rather than the United States (the Chinese were wrongly accused of observing foreign laws and sending most of their earnings back to China rather than spending them in the United States)—as well as by sensationalist predictions that the United States would be overrun by millions of Chinese¹²—the new tax attempted to control the influx of Chinese immigrants in western mining camps in 1851–1852. This monthly tax became indispensable to California’s economy, accounting for up to half of the state’s revenue between 1852 and 1870.¹³ Whereas taxation generally entails some measure of state protection and representation, the decision in People v. Hall undercut Chinese access to the protection of the courts. In fact, historian Sucheng Chan has suggested that the prohibition on Chinese testimony was in part intended to “handicap” Chinese miners who had been appealing “to the local courts when they were robbed of their gold dust either by other Chinese or by white miners or when they were evicted from claims they were working. Such action contradicts the stereotype of them as a people who insulated themselves from the larger society around them.”¹⁴ Chan’s comments indicate the extent to which the ban on testimony produced the very conditions of social segregation and “foreignness” that were cited as reasons for taxing and legally disabling the Chinese.

The collusion of the Foreign Miners’ Tax and the prohibition on testimony indicates how the racialization of the Chinese was both analogous to and divergent from that of other groups. Formally prohibited to testify in courts along with African Americans and Native Americans, the Chinese were rendered powerless against abusive collectors of a tax that expressly targeted them. As the Presbyterian minister William Speer wrote in “An Answer to the Common Objections to Chinese Testimony; and an Earnest Appeal to the Legislature of California, for Their Protection by our Law” (1857),

Scarce a man that reads this has not seen or heard of acts of barbarity and fraud on the part of “Foreign miners’ tax collectors,” that ought to have been severely punished; such as whipping, cutting, taking the blankets and tools of even those that have been sick, dating back their licenses one or two weeks in the month, snatching their dust when weighing out the amount due, charging $6 instead of $4 monthly, requiring one to pay for others, perhaps a stranger for a company of half-a-dozen, re-issuing old licenses, and the like.¹⁵

These widespread abuses by corrupt tax collectors—or by white men masquerading as tax collectors—could not be “severely punished” without the testimony of white witnesses. Speer suggests that, even when collected honestly, the exorbitant amount of the Foreign Miners’ Tax (which, despite its name, was collected almost entirely from Chinese) “beggars [Chinese miners]. It drives them to the mountains and thickets like wild beasts. It fills them with hunger, sickness and despair. It turns them, what [sic] their honorable character with our trading population in the country shows is not necessary, into cheats and liars. It will in time fill our prisons.”¹⁶

Foreign Miners’ Tax collectors were not the only Californians who regularly attacked Chinese immigrants. Hostility toward the Chinese increased in the 1850s when surface mines were becoming scarcer and white placer miners struggled to compete with the rise of company mines (which used hydraulic and quartz mining and sometimes employed Chinese laborers).¹⁷ Speer details some of the worst excesses enabled by the prohibition of Chinese testimony, including a band of masked desperados robbing and terrorizing Chinese settlements¹⁸ and this brutal attack reported in the Auburn Whig:

On the night of May 3d, about 12 o’clock, a party of eight or ten Chinamen, encamped on Shirt Twain Canon, about 150 yards above the Iowa Hill and Yankee Jim’s trail, were attacked by a party of four Americans, when a scene of fiendish butchery was enacted, which makes the blood thrill with horror in the narration. Armed with the noiseless knife, these ruffians commenced their horrid work upon the helpless Asiatics.¹⁹

Speer argues that such crimes—which frequently included outright murder—would have repercussions well beyond the legally unprotected Chinese community, for “as long as crimes cannot be proven and punished before our Courts, upon Chinese testimony, so long must this great, wide-scattered, helpless class offer inducements for the commission of crime. They furnish a school for the increase, education and support of criminals.”²⁰ In addition to inducing citizens to commit crimes under conditions of impunity, Speer notes that the ban on testimony barred Chinese immigrants from performing an important civic duty. Finally, the law was detrimental to the nation’s international reputation: “In this question our national character is involved. The people of California are, to all the vast coasts of the Pacific Ocean, the representatives of Western Civilization—of the results of Christianity. . . . Men from every people under heaven are walking our streets, threading our mountain trails, sipping our streams, watching and, by the eternal axioms of right and wrong in every breast, judging of our principles by their fruits.”²¹

Speer’s arguments resonated with middle-class Chinese immigrants’ criticisms of the prohibition on testimony. In an open letter responding to an anti-Chinese speech by California governor John Bigler, San Francisco merchant Lai Chun-chuen attacked People v. Hall by dissociating the Chinese from Native Americans: “[Your people] have come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes, and your courts will not allow us to bear witness. And yet these Indians know nothing about the relations of society; they know no mutual respect; they wear neither clothes nor shoes; they live in wild places and in caves.”²² In rejecting People v. Hall’s analogy, however, Lai reproduced stereotypes about Native Americans and conceded the notion that some racial groups should be disqualified from bearing witness. In a remonstrance to Congress written at the request of numerous Chinese businessmen in San Francisco sometime between 1856 and 1868, the merchant Pun Chi enumerated the “perpetual vexations of ...