page_title: The Heathen Chinee
section_title: Response
hierarchical_section_title: The Heathen Chinee / Response
caption_attribution_description: English: The "Heathen Chinee", hand-colored lithograph illustrating Bret Harte's 1870 narrative poem satirizing anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California.
context_page_description: "The Heathen Chinee", originally published as "Plain Language from Truthful James", is a narrative poem by American writer Bret Harte. It was published for the first time in September 1870 in the Overland Monthly. It was written as a parody of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and satirized anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California.
  The poem became popular and was frequently republished. To Harte's dismay, however, the poem reinforced racism among his readers instead of challenging it as he intended. Nevertheless, he returned to the character years later. The poem also inspired or influenced several adaptations.
context_section_description: "Plain Language from Truthful James" (or "The Heathen Chinee") was very popular among general readers. One New York newspaper reported on the frenzy over the poem: "Strolling down Broadway... we saw a crowd of men and boys, of high and low degree, swarming about a shop-window, pushing, laughing, and struggling... Elbowing our way through the crowd, we discovered an illustrated copy of Bret Harte's poem 'The Heathen Chinee.'"
  The poem's popularity came, in part, from the ambiguity over its racial message. The narrator implies that the cheating of the Chinese man was no worse than that of the white man, but the irony was too subtle for general readers. The message matched one Harte had written elsewhere in exposing white people's hypocrisy. As he wrote later, the Chinese "did as the Caucasian did in all respects, and, being more patient and frugal, did it a little better". 
  Harte had repeatedly opposed anti-Chinese sentiment since as early as 1863, both privately and publicly. In 1866, for example, he wrote a letter defending the "peaceable citizens" of San Francisco's Chinatown who were "patient under abuse, and that patience, I am ashamed to say, they have to exercise continually in California". After the discovery of a murdered woman in Chinatown, whose cause of death was uncertain, Harte wrote, "as her head was caved in it is thought by some physicians that she died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type".
  In this vein, Harte intended "Plain Language from Truthful James" to be a satire of the prevalent prejudice among Irish laborers in northern California against the Chinese immigrants competing for the same work. However, the predominantly white middle-class readership of the Overland and the periodicals that reprinted it interpreted and embraced the poem as mocking the Chinese. These immigrants had been drawn in by the California Gold Rush and a boom in labor jobs, but relations with American-born citizens were tense. The more recent economic downturn in California had made tensions even worse. Readers took certain phrases of the poem out of context, including "we are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!", and used the poem to reinforce their own racism.
  The poem was also frequently parodied. The poem "Three Aces", signed "Carl Byng", was published in the Buffalo Express in December 1870, not long after "Plain Language from Truthful James" first appeared. The poem was widely attributed to Mark Twain and labeled a "feeble imitation" of Harte. Twain angrily denied the charge and demanded a retraction, writing to the editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "I am not in the imitation business". Harte, in turn, targeted Twain years later in his 1893 story "Ingénue of the Sierras" by creating an unsavory character named "Charley Bing", modeled after Twain. The incident was one of several in a long rivalry between the two authors. In 1898, The Overland Monthly ran a poem making fun of Harte himself, who had moved to Europe in 1871 and never returned, for forgetting what life was like in the west.
caption: c.1871 Currier & Ives lithograph
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