![]() Buck’s novel of the yeoman farmer Wang Lung sold a million and a half copies in its first year. Tsiang’s singular misfortune was to have published China Red in the same year that Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth appeared. ![]() He then sold it out of a suitcase on street corners or at leftist gatherings. But publishers politely and repeatedly rejected his first novel, China Red forcing Tsiang to publish it himself in 1931. So in 1929 Tsiang published Poems of the Chinese Revolution, eight of which had previously been published in the Daily Worker and New Masses. Inspired by leftist writing in New Masses and the Daily Worker, Tsiang was eager to contribute to this conversation on global revolution. Tsiang and invites us to consider, “how authority accrues, particularly authority on a remote and fairly obscure subject.” Tsiang, a young bureaucrat left his native China to study in the United States in 1926 and there found fellow travelers swept up by the same revolutionary fervor taking place back home. Hsu examines the many-faceted contradictions of the radical politics and publishing of 1930s America through the misadventures of writer H. ![]() ![]() Literary studies are rarely as amusing, engaging or important as Hua Hsu’s A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacificīy Hua Hsu (2016, Harvard University Press) 276 pages with notes and index ![]()
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