The Memetic Form of Bret Harte’s Ah Sin: From the American West to The Way We Live Now

Abstract

This essay argues that Ah Sin—a character in American poet Bret Harte’s satirical poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James”—became a meme used in racialized thinking across the nineteenth-century Anglophone world. Variations of the Ah Sin character appeared in forms ranging from newspapers and the burlesque to Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Way We Live Now. Trollope’s The Way We Live Now deploys the meme to critique the workings of a media landscape prone to oversimplification and exclusion. By contrast, the novel renarrativizes Ah Sin by invoking the poem’s contexts of the American West. However, instead of Harte’s Chinese gold miner, Trollope creates an imaginary Chinese emperor, thereby reflecting the complicated geopolitics of British and American attitudes toward Chinese migration and the Qing empire.