Hugh Auld’s words connect Douglass’s tale to a fictional instance of human trafficking. In Ken Liu’s story “The Paper Menagerie,” a Chinese woman tells the story of being smuggled into Hong Kong and “adopted” against her will by a family that made her a servant for their children, beat her regularly and locked her in a cupboard at night. The woman says she was beaten if she tried to learn English, and that the man who made her a captive said “‘Why do you want to learn English…You want to go to the police?'” Much like Hugh Auld understands that Douglass could use his literacy to escape, the man who has virtually enslaved this Chinese woman understands that she will be better-prepared to get away if she learns to use words in a new way.

The story of the Chinese woman also provides a link between Douglass’s narrative and that of Harriet Jacobs. The woman recalls that an older woman pulled her aside and warned her that she could be sexually assaulted in the home where she was being held captive. The older woman said “‘One day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll look at you and pull you to him and you can’t stop him. The wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell'” (191). The prospect of sexual assault by one’s “owner” and resentment from the wife of the assaulter associates Liu’s tale with the testimony of Jacobs, who was pursued by her enslaver for several years and harassed by his jealous wife.