of a grain store worker and a maid—both of
whom died young—Tsiang grew up in impover-
ished circumstances. A gifted student, Tsiang se-
cured an education by winning scholarships to the
Tongzhou Teachers’ School in Jiangsu and South-
eastern University in Nanjing, where he received
a B.A. in political economy in 1925. Interested in
revolutionary movements taking place not only in
China but also in other parts of the world, Tsiang
learned to read English-language newspapers by
age 16. After graduating from college, he worked
briefly for the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), but
his radical politics soon drew the ire of his party,
which became increasingly conservative after the
death of its leader, Sun Yat-sen, in 1925.
Fearful of persecution, Tsiang fled to the United
States in 1926, enrolling at Stanford University in
order to qualify for a student exemption to the
Chinese Exclusion Acts. In California, he began his
career as a writer who sought to inform American
readers about Chinese politics and convince them
to support a Chinese workers’ revolution, which he
envisioned as part of a worldwide revolution that
included leftist movements in the United States.
To this end, Tsiang founded and wrote for the bi-
lingual periodical Chinese Guide in America. Re-
peatedly threatened by the Kuomintang-friendly
Chinese-American community in California,
Tsiang moved to New York in 1927.
While at Columbia University, Tsiang blossomed
as a creative writer. Encouraged by his professors,
Tsiang published poems about Chinese politics
and Chinese-American workers in Communist pe-
riodicals such as Daily Worker and New Masses. In
1929 he self-published Poems of the Chinese Revo-
lution, which met with some acclaim especially
within leftist circles. Although Tsiang continued
to write poems, even while detained at Ellis Island
for possible deportation, he concentrated next on
composing novels. The epistolary novel, China Red
(1931), traces the effect of 1920s-era political up-
heavals on two lovers: a woman who bears witness
in China and a man who experiences a political
awakening while studying abroad in America. The
collective novel, Hanging on Union Square (1935),
follows several characters in Depression-era Man-
hattan, a class-stratified hell in which many suffer
and a privileged few engage in despicable extrava-
gance. The proletarian novel And China Has Hands
(1937) dramatizes the awakening of a laundryman
and an aspiring actress from their dream of bour-
geois success to an awareness of racism in America,
as well as imperialism abroad.
In 1938 Tsiang turned to the stage, composing
and acting in China Marches On, a play about a
Chinese regiment’s heroic defense of a tactically
significant warehouse during the Japanese inva-
sion of Shanghai in 1937. As is typical of Tsiang’s
style, he combined Chinese materials with forms
that he encountered in the United States. China
Marches On adapts the story of Hua Mulan—the
legendary woman warrior who disguised herself
as a man—by imagining her as one of the sol-
diers in this regiment. Tsiang couched this story,
however, in the genre of the Living Newspaper, an
experimental, documentary-like form of theatri-
cal presentation developed by the Federal Theatre
Project between 1935 and 1939. Tsiang continued
to make a living in the world of drama, acting in
films such as Behind the Rising Sun (1943) and
Ocean’s Eleven (1960). He also continued to write
but never published anything else. He died in Los
Angeles in 1971.
Contemporary reviewers consistently expressed
amusement at Tsiang’s quirky and apparently naãve
characters, and they sometimes remarked conde-
scendingly upon Tsiang’s occasionally nonstandard
word choice and syntax. Few caught Tsiang’s sense
of humor or understood his use of irony. In fact,
Tsiang drew upon a wide range of literary sources,
from the folktales of China to the plays of Wil-
liam Shakespeare to the rhythms of street protest
in America. Hence, his talent for experimentation
and combining literary forms equaled his commit-
ment to radical political change.Bibliography
Cheung, Floyd. “Tsiang’s ‘Chinaman, Laundryman. ”
Explicator 61, no. 4 (2003): 226–229.
———, ed. The Complete Works of H. T. Tsiang. New
York: Ironweed Press, 2005.
Lee, Julia H. “The Capitalist and Imperialist Critique
in H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands.” In Recov-
ered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian290 Tsiang, H. T. (Jiang Xizeng)