1. Before I left for China, I was alerted to the desire to shape American Studies programs in ways that are specifically useful to the Chinese by several articles in a special issue of China Exchange News devoted to assessing “A Decade of American Studies in China,” 18 (09 1990)Google Scholar and Yongtao, Zhu's “American Studies in China,” American Studies International 25 (10 1987): 6, 16Google Scholar. My colleague Richard Shek had also told me of the traditional Chinese emphasis in education on practicality and use.

Since then, this same theme, stressing the practical use of American Studies, has been heavily underscored in the two chapters on China-John G. Blair's “Intellectual Trade Imbalances: What Teaching American Studies in China Brought Home to Me,” and Zhu Yongtao's “In Search of Ways of Doing American Studies in China” - of a more recent book, Exporting America: Essays on American Studies Abroad, ed. Horwitz, Richard P. (Garland Publishing, 1993)Google Scholar. Many Fulbright exchange professors emphasize a similar discovery, but the experience in China has been exacerbated, not only by established cultural practice but by the current sense of urgency to modernize China in Chinese ways by learning whatever is useful from the West. For more information on American Studies in China, see Lin, Poping, “Exploring Collection Development Guidelines for American Studies in China,” American Studies International 30 (10 1992)Google Scholar; and Yu, George T., Lee, Thomas B., and Klinkner, Kenneth K., American Studies in China: A Directory (University Press of America, 1993).Google Scholar

2. Consider, for example, the stage versions performed by the traveling “Tom troupes” described by Eric Sundquist, blackface dramas “purged [of] any radical messages,” in which “Topsy became a star, singing ‘I'se So Wicked’ and ‘Topsy's Song: I am but a Little Nigger Gal’; the famous minstrel performer T. D. Rice ‘jumped Jim Crow’ in the role of Uncle Tom; the South appeared as an arena of light-hearted fun …; Tom and Eva were reunited in cardboard heaven; and abolitionism itself was attacked.…” In later film depictions, “an animated Uncle Tom starred Felix the Cat; Shirley Temple performed as the Eva of a Tom troupe in Dimples (1936)Google Scholar and was paired with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson as Tom in The Littlest Rebel (1935)Google Scholar; Judy Garland was Topsy in Everybody Sings (1938)Google Scholar; Betty Grable and June Hoover were twin Topsies … in The Dolly Sisters (1945)Google Scholar and Abbott and Costello masqueraded as Simon Legree and Eva in The Naughty Nineties (1945)Google Scholar.” See Introduction, New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Sundquist, Eric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5Google Scholar, hereafter cited as New Essays.

3. These proofs and others can be found throughout the New Essays as well as Ann Douglas's Introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, Penguin Classics edition (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 10.Google Scholar

4. Lincoln's phrase seldom appears without a pronouncement amending it, as in “the untenable claim” (Sundquist, , New Essays, p. 10Google Scholar), or “Lincoln was not being altogether facetious when he said” (Douglas, Introduction, p. 19), or Dwight Dumond, cited below. One wonders how scholars can be so sure about what was in Lincoln's mind.

5. Or as Harry Birdoff put it, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin (S. F. Vanni, 1947).Google Scholar

6. However, I was lucky by then to have studied for a summer at the University of Minnesota with Charles H. Foster, whose book, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Show and New England Puritanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954)Google Scholar, had appeared all but unnoticed and led me to read the novel I too had been inclined to dismiss.

7. It helped to have Edmund Wilson's appreciation of the work in his Patriotic Gore (1962)Google Scholar, a book that owes much to Charles Foster, but credit for the more recent revaluation of the novel belongs largely, I think, to Tompkins, Jane's Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, which issued the challenge to the canon in a persuasive argument that encompassed both the role of women and the role of popular fiction. See also works listed on the bibliographies in New Essays, pp. 38–39, 198–200.Google Scholar

8. It is noteworthy that, even in the brochure advertising the show, Mrs. Stowe is no longer the target of black rage - the “pious politicians” of the present are blamed instead. The brochure reads:

LOS ANGELES 1992 - riot or rebellion? “Whites wonder, ‘Why are black people so angry?’”

Harriet Beecher Stowe understood “family values” better than any of today's pious politicians, and she knew the price America would pay for slavery.… [This show] traces black anger back to its roots, allowing no easy answers and reminding us that not enough has changed. This “Uncle Tom” is different — challenging in concept and viewed from an African American perspective.… If Mrs. Stowe's novel is the book that sparked the Civil War, then this play reminds us there is still a debt to be paid (San Francisco Mime Troupe, a coproduction with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, San Francisco, November 11–December 5, 1992).

9. I am thinking here of comparing the response of those Chinese critics who insisted that audiences should not weep for the black slaves but work to improve conditions for the yellow race to Richard Wright's comment explaining why he invented Bigger Thomas, in reaction against the sentimental response to his book of short stories called Uncle Tom's Children: “When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake, I found I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and Weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” Quoted by Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays, p. 67Google Scholar (emphasis added). For the debate over the function of sentimentality in American fiction see Yellin, Jean Fagan's The Intricate Knot (New York University Press, 1972)Google Scholar and her chapter in New Essays, pp. 45–102Google Scholar; Tompkins, ' Sensational DesignsGoogle Scholar; Jenkins, Jennifer L., “Failed Mothers and Fallen Houses: The Crisis of Domesticity in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 38 (1992): 161–187Google Scholar; and, for a different view, Fluck, Winfried, “The Power and Failure of Representation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,” in New Literary History 23 (Spring 1992): 319–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See Yellin, Jean Fagan's “Doing It Herself: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Woman's Role in the Slavery Crisis”Google Scholar and Ammons, Elizabeth' “Stowe's Dream of a Mother-Savior: Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Women Writers”Google Scholar (in which Uncle Tom himself emerges as a mother-savior figure), both in New Essays, plus discussions on this theme in works by Jane Tompkins, Ann Douglas, Thomas Gossett, Gerda Lerner, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and others listed in the bibliographies of New Essays. Jane Tompkins argued in 1985 that the novel offers to “reorganize culture from a woman's point of view: It is the summa theologica of nineteenth-century America's religion of domesticity, a brilliant redaction of the culture's favorite story about itself- the story of salvation through motherly love.… the sentimental novelists elaborated a myth that gave women the central position of power and authority in the culture” (Tompkins, , Sensational Designs, pp. 124–25Google Scholar). Evaluating Tompkins' argument, Jennifer Jenkins in 1992 agreed that Stowe attributed motherliness to women of all classes and races, and along with other authors, made “the good Christian mother” the “compelling icon in American culture,” but she went on to argue that the mothers in the novel “appropriate this position of authority not by means of love, but of fear” — their fear of male disapproval (Jenkins, , “Failed Mothers and Haunted Houses,” p. 163).Google Scholar

In sum, while American scholars for over two decades have been debating the role of women in the novel, the Chinese have ignored it. When I raised the issue of women with her, Tao Jie responded, “I don't think we Chinese ever think of the book as a women's book. We are not so aware of the division between male and female. I know nothing about the implication of the male-focussed dialectic for Chinese women. Maybe we think of it mainly as a book about oppression and suffering and we admire whoever stands up and fights, regardless of the gender difference.” Tao Jie to Betty Ch'maj, 17 November, 1992, private correspondence.

11. See, for instance, Chow, Rey, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).Google Scholar

12. Sundquist, , Introduction, p. 7.Google Scholar

13. Letter to Betty Ch'maj from Tao Jie, November 17, 1992.

14. It is interesting to read Tao's essay after reading the chapters on China and elsewhere in Exporting America (see n. 1). One develops a two-way vision, looking from East to West and West to East simultaneously, a valuable exercise for those planning to travel abroad.