Ah Song Hi leaves Shanghai with comic, buoyant faith in America as the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave," only to discover that liberty comes with fees, suspicion, and humiliation at every turn. In this sharp satirical series of letters, Mark Twain turns his narrator's earnest praise into a devastating critique of immigration, hypocrisy, and the false promise of welcome, as debt, exploitative officials, and racist violence steadily strip away his dignity and savings. From the moment he lands in San Francisco, Ah Song Hi is kicked, searched, vaccinated, cheated, and left penniless, then set upon in the streets while police look on. His misfortunes carry him into a filthy city prison, where overcrowding, brutality, and casual prejudice rule even among the inmates. There he encounters drunks, thieves, con artists, two fighting women who prefer jail to freedom, and other prisoners whose crimes expose the city's hidden corruption. Dragged before a biased court, he finds that Chinese witnesses cannot testify against white men and that justice is dispensed in minutes, not truth. Twain's darkly comic portrait of prisons and police courts reveals a nation that proclaims equality while punishing the foreign, the poor, and the powerless. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Twain, Mark

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Missouri, grew up along the Mississippi River, a landscape that shaped both his imagination and his enduring voice. After working as a printer’s apprentice, riverboat pilot, miner, journalist, and lecturer, he turned his sharp eye and restless humor toward literature, becoming one of America’s most influential writers. His fiction and essays transformed the plainspoken rhythms of everyday speech into art, blending satire, adventure, and moral insight with remarkable ease. He is especially admired for his unforgettable portrayals of boyhood, friendship, hypocrisy, race, class, and the contradictions of American life, and for his ability to expose social pretension while still sounding warm, humane, and deeply entertaining. Twain’s writing remains relevant because he understood how power, prejudice, vanity, and greed distort public life, yet he also believed in the resilience of individual conscience and the possibility of decency. His legacy endures not only in the canon of American literature but in the very way writers aim for clarity, wit, and authenticity. Readers who enjoy sharp humor, vivid storytelling, and social criticism wrapped in irresistible narrative will find him especially rewarding.