“Hua Hsu gives us a playful, colorful, formidable book, overflowing with archival research and without a single dull moment. A Floating Chinaman is destined to become required reading.” ― Liz Raiss, The Fader “This tome documenting the race between historians competing for the title of America’s foremost expert on China is an absorbing read that transcends the stuffy corridors of academia. Americans were eager for a white woman to tell them about the rural China of yesteryear they were not so ready for a prickly Chinese immigrant to spell out the limitations of their own political system.” ― Jamie Fisher, Times Literary Supplement His incomprehensibility staked out the boundaries of the possible. “Hsu frames Tsiang’s marginal status as a deliberate act of rebellion. “ smart new book.” ― Viet Thanh Nguyen, New York Times Book Review Tsiang’s eclectic writings and unusual life provide a great deal of grist for Hsu.Hsu writes in a graceful manner about Tsiang and the people he considered rivals.Tsiang comes across as a fascinating and sometimes maddening figure.” ― Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Wall Street Journal
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. 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.Ī Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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