§ 83. The Chinese Temple
21 August 1864
(This headnote is repeated in numbers 82–85.)
These four sketches appeared in the San Francisco Morning Call while Clemens was working as its local reporter. Although they are of course unsigned, Clemens' authorship is assured by the fact that all four are preserved as clippings in his scrapbooks, and by the fact that Albert S. Evans, who is ridiculed in the last two sketches, publicly acknowledged Clemens as the author.
The subject of the series is the opening of the San Francisco temple of the Ning Yeung Association, a social and quasi-judicial organization that was formed in 1854 and became the largest of the Chinese Six Companies.1 Clemens may have culled some facts from his scrapbook clip- [begin page 39] pings when he described the Ning Yeung Association in chapter 54 of Roughing It. There he explained:
On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. . . . The Ning Yeong Company . . . numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple. . . . In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked.2
The careful but informal description in the opening sketch, with its subdued, friendly humor and casually inserted information, gives way in the second piece to broader comedy: a burlesque portrait of “the old original Josh.” In the third sketch Clemens finds himself in danger of “becoming imbued with Buddhism” and losing his national identity, but is recalled by the prospect of a drink to his “noble American instincts.” This in turn leads to his ridicule of Evans, his counterpart on the San Francisco Alta California.3
Comic feuding among reporters and editors was a standard feature of Nevada journalism which Clemens brought with him when he moved to San Francisco and started working for the Call: two months before he wrote these sketches on the Josh House, he had begun baiting Evans in his local items column. Evans, who returned the compliment, created a character whom he called Mr. Stiggers, or Armand Leonidas Stiggers, a rather pathetic and dandyish fellow who was apparently meant as a parody of bohemians like Clemens. Perhaps to annoy Evans, Clemens regularly identified Stiggers with his creator, as he does in the third sketch here, where he accuses him of having consumed the temple's entire liquor supply. In the fourth sketch he extends this attack by quoting from Evans' Alta article on the new temple4 and predicting that “Mr. Stiggers, of the Alta” will reply to his ridicule. Of course Evans did precisely that, addressing his remarks to “the gentle aborigine from the land of sage brush and alkali, whose soubriquet was given him by his friends as indicative of his capacity for doing the drinking for two.” Evans [begin page 40] went on to explain why Clemens found the temple's liquor cabinet empty, saying that the Chinese barkeeper maintains
two liquor cases—one from which to treat gentlemen who look as if they were disposed to indulge moderately and keep out of the calaboose, and the other, an empty one, which he shows to those whose faces indicate unmistakably that they can't be trusted when liquor is free. . . . There was a time . . . when you might have wrung in and got a drink with the rest, but that happy time is past, long past—Mark that, my boy, and go on with your weeping.5
Clemens continued to bait Evans for the next two years, not only in his columns in the Call, but also in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle.
William Hay, The Chinese Six Companies (San Francisco: The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, 1942), pp. 5, 16.
For additional information about Evans and Mark Twain's continuing public feud with him, see “Mark Twain Improves ‘Fitz Smythe’ ” (nos. 129–134), as well as Appendix B, volume 2, which reprints a number of attributed items about Fitz Smythe.
“Opening of a New Temple,” San Francisco Alta California, 23 August 1864, p. 1.
“That's What's the Matter,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 August 1864, p. 1.
The new Chinese Temple in Broadway—the “Ning Yong Wae Quong” of the Ning Yong Company, was dedicated to the mighty Josh night before last, with a general looseness in the way of beating of drums, clanging of gongs and burning of yellow paper, commensurate with the high importance of the occasion. In the presence of the great idol, the other day, our cultivated friend, Ah Wae, informed us that the old original Josh (of whom the image was only an imitation, a substitute vested with power to act for the absent God, and bless Chinamen or damn them, according to the best of his judgment,) lived in ancient times on the Mountain of Wong Chu, was seventeen feet high, and wielded a club that weighed two tons; that he died two thousand five hundred years ago, but that he is all right yet in the Celestial Kingdom, and can come on earth, or appear anywhere he pleases, at a moment's notice, and that he could come down here and cave our head in with his club if he wanted to. We hope he don't want to. Ah Wae told us all that, and we deliver it to the public just as we got it, advising all to receive it with caution and not bet on its truthfulness until after mature reflection and deliberation. As far as we are concerned, we don't believe it, for all it sounds so plausible.
The first printing in the San Francisco Morning Call for 21 August 1864 (p. 1) is copy-text. Copies: clipping in Scrapbook 4, p. 7, MTP; PH from Bancroft. There are no textual notes or emendations.