The straightforward account by Tao Jie of the history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in China raises questions of great interest to contemporary American Studies scholarship. To the old question - how shall we represent America's “usable past?” - is added another: “Usable to whom?” This question, now being asked by a wide variety of multiculturalists reexamining our literature and history from revisionist perspectives, is the central issue raised by Tao's essay. Here we are given a specific case study for cross-cultural comparison that allows us to contrast the America we imagine we have been exporting to the America other cultures reinvent. Equally important, Tao provides us with the opportunity to examine one of the most compelling of our cultural documents from the perspective of 20th-century Chinese history and see how, stage by stage, the translators interpreted the story to respond to changing forces in Chinese cultural history.