A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific

Abstract

A literary scholar whose cultural commentary appears often in the pages of the New Yorker, Hua Hsu draws his title from an outline of a novel that was never written by an author who self-published most of his books. Presently, H. T. Tsiang (1899–1971) is enjoying something of a renaissance with recent reprints of two of his novels, And China Has Hands (1937; 2016) and The Hanging on Union Square (1935; 2013), and now Hsu's study. Hsu deploys skillful writing and wry analysis to explore the personal and professional woes of the thwarted author and would-be China expert Tsiang, who was, like his writings, contrarian, experimental, and politically barbed. Well-known enough to feature in a New Yorker “The Talk of the Town” article (1935) and publish poems in the Daily Worker and New Masses, Tsiang otherwise received scores of rejections for his “proletarian” fiction throughout the 1930s. These repeated failures occurred amid a flourishing of middlebrow American interest in China. Long-standing U.S. missionary and business investments; China's seemingly growing proximity as led by Chiang Kai-shek and his Christian, U.S.-educated wife; and the looming war with Japan fanned the flames of transpacific fascination, channeled through authoritative American voices such as the prolific and internationally acclaimed Pearl S. Buck, the Time-Life publishing empire of Henry Luce, and business-oriented best sellers such as Carl Crow's 400 Million Customers (1937). Tsiang's inability to publish in this environment through established venues provides Hsu a platform to explore the nature of authority, publishing market institutions and exclusions, and the powerful yet blinkered fascination of Americans for China and Chinese.