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

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In Category - Historical Psychological Social Fiction

Authors: Gratton, Henry Pearson [Editor] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2007 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 50,913

Reading time 222 min

Text sections 6

As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home — A Closer Reading can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 50,913 words, 3 hr 42 min estimated reading time, and 6 detected text sections.

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Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “United States -- Description and travel,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #22831

Passages from a cultivated Chinese visitor's letters home, offering a caustic and amused critique of American society, literature, and manners circa 1904, with a distinctive voice that blends satire, erudition, and cultural loyalty.

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File: pg22831

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Immigration was resumed, and all nations again sent their refuse population to America. I have facts showing that for years English poorhouses and hospitals were emptied of their inmates and shipped to America. It was a distinct policy of the anti-home-rule party in Ireland to encourage the poor Irish to go to America; and now when there are more Irish in America than in Ireland the fate of Ireland is assured. Yet the American air takes the fight out of the Irishman, the rose from his cheek, and makes a natural-born politician out of him. America still continued to receive immigrants, and not satisfied with the natural flow of the human current, began to import African slaves to a country founded for the benefit of those who desired an asylum where they could enjoy religious and political freedom. The Africans were sold in the cotton belt, their existence virtually creating two distinct political parties. America long remained a dumping-ground for nearly all the nations of the world having an excess of population. Great navigation companies were built up, to a large extent, on this trade. They sent agents to every foreign country, issued pamphlets in every European language, and uncounted thousands were brought over--the scum of the earth in many instances. There was no restriction to immigration until the Chinese were barred out. After accepting the outlaws of every European state, the poor of all lands, they shut the door on our "coolie" countrymen.

In this way, briefly, America has grown to her present population of 80,000,000. The remarkable growth and assimilation is still going on--a menace to the world, but in a constantly decreasing ratio, which has become so marked that the leading Americans, the class which corresponds to our scholars, are aghast at the singular conditions which exist. Non-assimilation shows itself in labor riots, in the murder of two Presidents--Garfield and Lincoln--in socialistic outbreaks in every quarter, and in signal outbreaks in various sections, at lynchings, and other unlawful performances. I am attempting to give you an idea of the constituents of America to-day; but so interesting is the subject, so prolific in its warnings and possibilities, that I find myself wandering.

To glance at conditions at the present time, about 600,000 aliens are coming to America yearly. What is the result? I was invited to meet a distinguished German visiting in New York last month, and at the dinner a young lady who sat by my side said to me, "I wish I could puzzle him." "Why?" I asked, in amazement. "Oh," was her reply, "he looks so cram full of knowledge; I would like to take him down." "Ah," I said. "Ask him which is the third largest German city in the world. It is New York; he will never guess it." She did so, and I assure you he was "puzzled," and would scarcely believe it until a well-known man assured him it was true. There are more Germans in Chicago than in Leipsic, Cologne, Dresden, Munich, or a dozen small towns joined in one. Half of the Chicago Germans speak their own tongue. This city is the third Swedish city of the world in population. It is the fourth Polish city and the second Bohemian city. I was informed by a professor in the University of Chicago that, in that strange city, the number of people who speak the language of the Bohemians equaled the combined inhabitants of Richmond, Atlanta, Portland, and Nashville--all large cities. "What do you think of it?" I asked. "We are up against it," was the reply. I can not explain this retort so that you would understand it, but it had great significance. The professor, a distinguished philologist, was worried, and he looked it. A lady who was a club woman--and by this I do not mean that she was armed with a club, but merely a member of clubs or societies for educational advancement and social aggrandizement--said it was merely his digestion.

I learned from my friend, the dyspeptic professor, that over forty dialects are spoken in Chicago. About one-half only of the total population speak or understand English. There are 500,000 Germans, 125,000 Poles, 100,000 Swedes, 90,000 Bohemians, 50,000 Yiddish, 25,000 Dutch, 25,000 Italians, 15,000 French, 10,000 Irish, 10,000 Servians, 10,000 Lutherans, 7,000 Russians, and 5,000 Hungarians in Chicago. You will be surprised to learn that numbers do not count. The 500,000 Germans are not the dominating power, nor are the 100,000 Swedes. The 10,000 Irish are said absolutely to control the political situation. You will ask if I believe that this monster foreign element can be reduced to a homogeneous unit. I reply, yes. Fifty years from to-day they will all be Americans, and a majority will, doubtless, show you their family tree, tracing their ancestry back to the Mayflower.

[1] This passage was written just before the assassination of President McKinley.

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The editor’s preface frames this collection as a successor to Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, promising a similarly caustic view—but from a Chinese perspective. The letters, written over a decade by a graduate of an English school and a German university, address a friend in China who has seen few foreigners. The editor claims to have preserved the original shape of the correspondence while rearranging it under general heads. What emerges is a voice that is neither the pigeon-English of stereotype nor the deferential tourist, but a deliberately cultivated, sometimes ironic observer who measures American customs against the fixed habits of a centuries-old civilization.

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.