MCLC: Twain in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Twain in China
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (1/6/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-curious-and-continuing-a
ppeal-of-mark-twain-in-china/

The Curious, and Continuing, Appeal of Mark Twain in China
By AMY QIN Associated Press

For decades, one of Mark Twain’s satires of American politics was required
reading in Chinese schools.

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
<http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/11/running-for-governor.html> 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
<http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F70C12FA3A59107B93C3A917
8BD95F448784F9> 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.