diff --git a/Lib/test/test_gdb.py b/Lib/test/test_gdb.py
index bac8d36..d80acfe 100644
--- a/Lib/test/test_gdb.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_gdb.py
@@ -234,7 +234,9 @@
                 text.encode(encoding)
                 printable = True
             except UnicodeEncodeError:
-                self.assertGdbRepr(text, ascii(text))
+                # Workaround ascii() bug on UCS-2 builds: issue #9804
+                asc = "'" + text.encode('unicode-escape').decode('ascii') + "'"
+                self.assertGdbRepr(text, asc)
             else:
                 self.assertGdbRepr(text)