Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again

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.