A Floating Chinaman — Hua Hsu； H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971)

周末，我嫌紐約時報的旅遊版多介紹西方世界。還好在書評版看到

VIET THANH NGUYEN 寫的簡單書評；

A FLOATING CHINAMAN

Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific

By Hua Hsu

書的主角是旅美的作家和演員 H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971 採左派批評賽珍珠等美國的中國專家的觀點，受FBI調查、監視，據原書， H. T. Tsiang 在1941年6月5日曾寫信給駐美大使胡適之，據說沒回信，我查一下胡適的日記，當時情勢極緊張，日記只4月21日、5月23日、6月16日、7月8日.....) ，他在30年代寫的兩本小說，近日在美國得予再版。

A Floating Chinaman — Hua Hsu | Harvard University Press

A Floating Chinaman — Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific, By Hua Hsu, HUP, 2016

Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American–Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of America’s leading China expert.

The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth—Pearl Buck’s novel about a Chinese peasant family—spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with “four hundred million customers,” as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins—in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos—a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place.

A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.–China relations. His “floating Chinaman,” unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars—and today, as well.

• Introduction: What Means the World to You?
• 1. Theoretical China
• 2. Naïve Melody
• 3. Four Hundred Million Customers
• 4. Pink Flag
• 5. Down and Out in New York City
• 6. Pacific Crossings
• 7. Too Big to Fail
• Conclusion: The Floaters
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

RELATED LINKS

• In the New Yorker, read an excerpt from A Floating Chinaman on the life and career of H. T. Tsiang, an obscure contemporary—and rival—of Pearl S. Buck
• Read Hua Hsu’s New Yorker posts on music, literature, food, and more
• At The Fader, read a conversation between Hsu and fellow author Yaa Gyasi on using history to make sense of the world today
• At The Margins, read an interview with Hsu about music, writing, representation, and how his fascination with rap beef inspired A Floating Chinaman

A Chinese exile in the United States, H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971) wrote several ... Tsiang created a new, hybridized literature by reworking formal and thematic ...


H. T. Tsiang, China Marches On (New York: Published by Author, 1938), 4. 77. Ibid., 4. 78. Ibid., 5. 79. ... Tsiang to Hu Shih, 5 June 1941. 104. Tsiang to Kent, 5 ...

China Red
China Has Hand 1937


Poet, playwright, and novelist. Hsi Tseng Tsiang (H. T. Tsiang) was born in China in 1899 and came to America as a child. He was involved with the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, and self-published a number of books which he would hawk at downtown political meetings. Tsiang also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.

H. T. Tsiang | - Kaya Press 重出版 H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971)的2本小說

The Hanging on Union Square - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanging_on_Union_Square

The Hanging on Union Square: An American Epic is a 1935 novel by Chinese American author H.T. Tsiang. The first edition of The Hanging on Union Square ...




https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=skq6CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA257&lpg=PA257&




NONFICTIONReconsidering the Work of a Chinese Immigrant Writer of the 1930s
By VIET THANH NGUYEN

In "A Floating Chinaman," Hua Hsu revisits a Chinese immigrant writer who could not surmount ethnocentrism and racism.

By VIET THANH NGUYENJULY 22, 2016

H. T. Tsiang CreditKaya Press

A FLOATING CHINAMAN
Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific
By Hua Hsu
276 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.


For critics and scholars, the greatest rewards are to be gained in bestowing attention on authors whose stock is already high. Why, then, should a writer look toward one of the forgotten? And how to select someone to elevate? This is the task that Hua Hsu, an associate professor of English at Vassar, sets for himself in his smart new book, “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.” His chosen subject is the mostly unknown H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971), a Chinese immigrant who “created some of the most ambitious and, at times, bizarrely self-aware works of modern American literature.”


As Hsu makes painfully, comically evident, Tsiang was condemned mostly to self-publication. This “sad sack” peddled his books from a suitcase and wrote furiously to anyone who would help his literary cause. Decades after his death, his work at last found an audience through the edgy Kaya Press, which recently ­released his 1935 novel “The Hanging on Union Square” and is bringing out his 1937 novel “And China Has Hands.” But during his lifetime Tsiang suffered the incompatible indignities of being spied on by the F.B.I. while being rejected or dismissed by progressive writers like Theodore ­Dreiser. And in a situation verging on slapstick, a desperate Tsiang finally found his work recommended to an important publisher, Richard Walsh, who happened to be married to Pearl Buck. Unfortunately, in Tsiang’s novel “China Red,” he had “likened Buck’s work as America’s favorite China expert to prostitution,” and had also attacked Buck’s husband. Walsh rejected Tsiang’s books.



Hsu uses Tsiang’s misadventures to illustrate the “trans-Pacific imagination” that has united, and divided, China and the United States. On the American side, one way of understanding China was as a nation of “400 million customers,” as the journalist Carl Crow put it in a 1937 book of that title. This rather shallow perception persists today, with the number growing to over a billion customers. Perhaps if he had been a more talented novelist, Tsiang could have breached the great wall of ethnocentrism and racism from whose parapets Crow could also write books titled “The Chinese Are Like That” and “I Speak for the Chinese.” More likely, the only way Tsiang could have been heard would have been to transform himself into an accommodating interpreter of Chinese culture, like the popular Lin Yutang. Instead, Tsiang’s leftist political beliefs contributed to his confinement to Ellis Island and near ­deportation.


Tsiang was indeed the “floating Chinaman” of Hsu’s evocative title — a title, Hsu tells us, borrowed from an unpublished and perhaps unwritten Tsiang novel. Written or not, that novel could have had no more fitting conclusion than what actually happened to Tsiang. In his life’s final strange chapter, of which I wanted to hear much more, he eventually becomes a “very minor Hollywood celebrity” acting in movies like “The Keys of the Kingdom” and television shows like “I Spy,” where he often played the stereotypical Chinaman. Failure? Maybe. But whose failure? Hsu points the finger and jabs it to make sure no one misunderstands: Tsiang’s tragedy was to be a native-born China expert residing in a country where Americans considered the tens of thousands of Chinese living among them to be no more than laundrymen.


Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, “The Sympathizer,” won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He is also the author of “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” and the co-editor of “Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field.”Tweet