Unpublished Counterpublics: H. T. Tsiang’s Ellis Island Poems

Abstract

Abstract The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent’s papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang’s time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang’s unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion.Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the “crooked path” into US cultural memory.