As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home — A Closer Reading

A Voice That Refuses the ‘Heathen Chinee’ Role

The narrator’s tone is the book’s most striking feature. He does not mimic the broken English expected of a Chinese character in fiction; instead, he writes in polished, idiomatic English, laced with classical references and a dry, amused detachment. When he tells an American lady about the Chinese poet Le-Tai-Pih, he notes that she was “the first American who deigned to take a Chinaman seriously.” The remark cuts both ways: it exposes the condescension he faces and asserts his own intellectual standing. He repeatedly observes that Americans “size us up” and “lump” all Chinese with the “coolie,” yet he refuses to be lumped. His voice is that of a man who knows he is being underestimated and uses his letters to reclaim the narrative.

Satire of American Literary Pretensions

The narrator’s critique of American letters is precise and unsparing. He reports meeting a famous playwright earning $30,000 a year who had never heard of the “Hundred Plays of the Yuen Dynasty” housed in a library not a mile from his own city. The detail is not random; it underscores a pattern of ignorance masked by commercial success. He notes that many American authors are “deplorably ignorant in the sense of broad learning” and that the nation has produced no one to compare with Scott, Dickens, or Tennyson. Yet he also acknowledges a genuine aristocracy of educated people in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. The satire is not blanket dismissal but a calibrated judgment, grounded in specific comparisons and a clear sense of what genuine literary culture should look like.

Pacing and Structure: The Letter as a Controlled Performance

The editor’s decision to rearrange the letters under general heads gives the book a thematic rather than chronological flow, but the pacing within individual passages remains unhurried and deliberate. The narrator often builds a scene slowly—introducing a dinner, a conversation, a cultural artifact—before delivering his punchline. For instance, he describes the playwright’s income and good-natured laughter before revealing the man’s ignorance of a major Chinese dramatic collection. This structure mimics the epistolary form’s intimacy: the reader is a confidant being let in on a joke. The voice never rushes; it savors the contrast between American self-satisfaction and Chinese historical depth. The result is a measured, almost essayistic pace that rewards close attention to detail.

Readers should approach these letters not as a travelogue but as a performance of cultural authority. The narrator’s command of English and his strategic deployment of Chinese learning are themselves arguments against the stereotypes he encounters. Pay attention to what he chooses to describe and what he omits—the gaps are as telling as the observations. The book’s value lies less in its factual accuracy about America than in the voice it constructs: a cultivated, ironic, and deeply loyal Chinese observer who turns the ethnographic gaze back on his hosts.

There’s a particular ache in reading that 1904 visitor’s letters—how sharply he saw through our noise. I remember feeling that same strange clarity years ago, when I first stumbled upon Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life — Reading Companion, where wonder and terror sit together so quietly, almost like old friends. It lingers.