The Race Card. Tara Fickle

Language from Truthful James,” the poem was soon circulating as the more familiar “The Heathen Chinee.” It dramatizes a game of euchre34 played between the eponymous Irish American narrator, his compatriot Bill Nye (no apparent relation to the scientist), and a Chinese immigrant named Ah Sin. “Truthful James,” while initially “grieve[d]” upon discovering Bill’s intent to cheat the “childlike and bland” Ah Sin, is soon consumed by a more “frightful” revelation: Ah Sin is an even more skillful cheat than Bill, ultimately trouncing the two Irish cardsharps at a game he initially professed not “to understand.” In response, an outraged Bill lets loose an exceptionally strange war cry—“We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor”—and falls on Ah Sin, revealing “twenty-four jacks” concealed in the latter’s voluminous sleeves and, staining his long fingernails, the wax he had been using to mark cards.35

      Within days the poem had been reprinted in dozens of newspapers and magazines, and soon emerged as a virtual motto for anti-Chinese labor organizations—adapted into speeches, read before meetings, and even presented on the floor of Congress—all despite Harte’s emphatic protests that the poem was intended to be a “satiric attack on race prejudice,” not an endorsement of it. Although contemporary scholars have echoed Harte’s own protestations, they have mainly attributed the poem’s “misappropriation” by its intended targets to the “ambiguity” of the work itself, comparing it to a Rorschach test, in which one could see any pattern, and could thus put it toward any purpose.36 The assumption, then, has been that the poem’s obliqueness was largely a product of its genre and thus, like all satires, fully reliant on the reader to enact an ironic reading rather than a literal one; that it contributed to an especially hostile and charged debate topic simply compounded the likelihood of it being read as anti-Chinese. Yet the irony of the anti-Chinese movement co-opting Harte’s poem lay less in their misreading than in Harte himself unintentionally giving rhyme and reason to the conflation of work and play that had already been implicit in the movement itself. Harte’s poem became the perfect narrative instrument for translating Chinese labor from economic virtue to moral vice, for seeing it as not simply “cheap” but as a form of “cheating.”

      Figure 1.1. Illustrated versions of “The Heathen Chinee,” often vividly depicting the violence visited on Ah Sin, were common. Illustration by Joseph Hull. “The Heathen Chinee,” unauthorized printing, Chicago Western News Company, 1870.

      Although one can easily read Bill Nye’s outburst about being “ruined by Chinese cheap labor” as a Freudian slip, revealing his desire to work out within the magic circle of the card table the violent frustrations he had long wished to physically unleash beyond it, Nye’s semantic conflation of Ah Sin’s gaming habits and labor practices was, as we have seen, also giving voice to a long-developing intimacy between “cheap” labor and “cheap” play. The poem allowed exclusionists to frame the Chinese laborer as a cheat by reframing labor itself as a different sort of game: one guided less by the rules and logic of what Roger Caillois called agon (competition) or the “economic rationality” of supply and demand, and instead by alea (chance) and the abstract virtues of honor and absolute, instantaneous justice.

      To cheat at a game is to transform honesty from a fact to an illusion: indeed, what appears most honest becomes most suspect, and gives the game much of its dynamic excitement, as with bluffing in poker. So, too, did exclusionists use Harte’s poem to render Chinese honest labor only a bluff, a deliberate deception for the race’s actual “dark ways.” The metaphor of a chance-based card game had further rhetorical and ideological uses, many of which Harte likely did not even intend. Caillois observed that “recourse to chance helps people tolerate competition that is unfair or too rugged. At the same time, it leaves hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still possible in the lowly stations in life.… Anyone can win. This illusory expectation encourages the lowly to be more tolerant of a mediocre status that they have no practical means of ever improving. Extraordinary luck—a miracle—would be needed. It is the function of alea to always hold out hope of such a miracle.”37 To cheat at a game of chance is accordingly to cheapen the game itself and the ideals it stands for, absolute fairness and equal opportunity chief among them. Ah Sin’s cheating, then, could be seen (and was, at least by James, Nye, and their real-life counterparts) as not simply a personal affront, but, like the parasitic stock investors, an affront to the very honor of virtuous free labor. In short, it robbed white workingmen of their necessary fantasies.

      As “cheap” laborers, Chinese immigrants, Colleen Lye has noted, “represent[ed] a paradoxical condition of ‘willing slavery,’” such that “Asiatic racial form emerged as an historical expression of the actual unfreedom of free wage labor.”38 As “cheap” players, Chinese immigrants further translated that economic system’s unfreedom into an expression of its unfairness. Through the invocation of aleatory tropes and logic, exclusion was reframed as an effort to level the playing field, an imposition of restrictive rules that made it, like all game rules, at once less free and more fair. Decreasing the freeplay of the market, exclusionists argued, allowed for greater abstract freedom as a national ideal.39 Conceived in this way, white workingmen like Nye and James were absolved of moral responsibility. For while Harte may have intended to rationalize Ah Sin’s cheating as a prudent response to Bill Nye’s own, it could easily be—and indeed was—read the other way around: Bill Nye might even be said to have been forced to cheat in order to compete with the cheating Ah Sin. In seeking to abolish Chinese labor, one could even argue that the Bill Nyes of the nation were simply seeking, through cheating, to redeem themselves from the depths of moral depravity into which that labor would force them as helpless victims: for it was inevitable that Chinese labor, claimed numerous witnesses before the Canadian Royal Commission on Chinese immigration, would “degrade and dishonor labor.”40 Such an argument might seem especially bereft of “logic or humanity”; but, as with all gaming discourse, the meaning of “cheating” is itself quite flexible. As critics like Mia Consalvo and Josh Bycer have noted of contemporary video game culture, “cheating” is frequently distinguished by players (and some designers) from “exploitation,” the latter defined as the use of existing mechanics in unintended ways, the former as going “outside the game” to “alter, modify or change the experience of the game from the developer’s original intent.”41 Even when cheating is recognized as cheating, Consalvo notes, moral opprobrium does not always follow; such actions can even be perceived positively, a means for an outmatched player to “turn the tables” or “even the odds.”

      For all his authorially intended ignorance and awkward verses, then, it is Truthful James who ultimately emerges as perhaps the most skilled cheater of all; for beneath the clumsy stanzas lies a sophisticated series of “rhetorical contortions” that produced a version of the truth that Harte’s exclusionist readers found more than sound. In this, they were not so different from some of their enemies. Just as Eastern investors and speculators framed themselves as virtuous producers instead of immoral gamesmen, so did this scene of euchre provide sufficiently elastic material for white workingmen to refashion themselves as moral authorities. By the very logic according to which Harte launched his satire—the justice of being cheated by a superior cheater—so was the anti-Chinese movement able to turn the tables on his message in the name of fair play—or more precisely, fair pay.