The Heathen Chinee

"The Heathen Chinee", originally published as "Plain Language from Truthful James", is a narrative poem by American writer Bret Harte.

[3]: 24  According to Mark Twain, Harte wrote the poem "for his own amusement" and "threw it aside, but being one day suddenly called upon for copy he sent that very piece in.

[5] After the sudden success of "The Heathen Chinee", Fields rushed to produce a collection of Harte's poetry in time for the Christmas market; its first six editions sold out in five days.

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".

[13] 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".

[14] His 1874 short story Wan Lee, the Pagan attacked stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and sought to portray white Americans as the true savages.

[3]: 24 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.

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.

[17] Twain angrily denied the charge and demanded a retraction, writing to the editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "I am not in the imitation business".

[18] 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.

[1] The poem was especially relevant to Harte's fame as his other most popular works, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat", were originally published without the author's name.

[4] It inspired a series of west coast songwriters, for example, to produce songs which looked at Chinese immigrants through negative stereotypes and questioned their place in America.

[20] In November 1875, Union Porcelain Works in Long Island announced the release of a pitcher decorated with figures from "The Heathen Chinee".