The Hanging on Union Square Read online

  Acclaim for H. T. Tsiang and The Hanging on Union Square

  “I finished H. T. Tsiang’s masterpiece a few hours ago, and I’m still not sure where I am and what day this is. My mind has been picked apart and reassembled. I need a drink.”

  —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

  “[Tsiang] was radiant, boisterous, unforgettable.”

  —The New Yorker

  “This is a voice to which the white world . . . will have to listen more and more as time passes.”

  —Upton Sinclair

  “Tsiang’s writings are quintessentially of the intermingled (and dangerous) public street culture of downtown Manhattan creative life. He carried the mantle, unknowingly, of Wong Chin Foo—who five decades earlier challenged Denis Kearney to a duel with Irish potatoes at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. And we, the Mr. Nut faction of the Asian American movement, carry on Tsiang’s spirit!”

  —John Kuo Wei Tchen, author of New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882

  “An artist of distinction, H. T. Tsiang created a genre unto itself in 1935 with The Hanging on Union Square. Its republication after seventy-five years rescues—from an outlaw existence—a strangely and beautifully evocative satiric allegory.”

  —Alan Wald, author of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

  “[The Hanging on Union Square] is original in form without being labored; and it’s remarkable for its whimsical insights into various strata of society and for its flashing counterpoint of almost savage sensuality and delicate pity. Throughout, it is alive and evocative. Mr. Tsiang’s fanciful and often fantastic visions . . . convey more truth than a shelf of reportorial novels.”

  —Waldo Frank

  “[The Hanging on Union Square] felt like slipping into another person’s hallucination.”

  —Hua Hsu, from the Introduction

  “[A] masterwork.”

  —Floyd Cheung, from the Afterword

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE HANGING ON UNION SQUARE

  H. T. TSIANG (1899–1971) was born in China and emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-seven. He studied at Stanford and Columbia, and while living in New York he wrote poetry and op-eds, acted in local theater productions, and washed dishes in a Greenwich Village nightclub. Faced with countless rejections from publishers, he self-published three novels, hawking them at downtown political meetings. He also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose, and in 1943 he staged a theatrical adaptation of The Hanging on Union Square in Los Angeles that counted Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, and Rita Hayworth among its audience members during its five-year run. He died in Los Angeles.

  FLOYD CHEUNG is a professor of English and American studies at Smith College. Coeditor and contributor to Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian Literature, he has worked on the recovery of H. T. Tsiang, Sadakichi Hartmann, Kathleen Tamagawa, John Okada, Munio Makuuchi, and others.

  HUA HSU is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in the United States of America by H. T. Tsiang 1935

  Edition with an introduction by Hua Hsu and an afterword and notes by Floyd Cheung published by Kaya Press 2013

  Published in Penguin Books 2019

  Afterword and notes copyright © 2013 by Floyd Cheung

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Introduction, afterword, and notes published by arrangement with Kaya Press

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Tsiang, H. T., 1899–1971, author. | Cheung, Floyd, 1969– editor, writer of afterword, writer of added commentary. | Hsu, Hua, 1977– writer of introduction.

  Title: The hanging on Union Square : an American epic / H.T. Tsiang ; edited with an afterword and notes by Floyd Cheung ; introduction by Hua Hsu.

  Description: [New York, New York] : Penguin Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007510 (print) | LCCN 2019011040 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525505808 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134022 (paperback) |

  Subjects: LCSH: Union Square (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3539.S53 (ebook) | LCC PS3539.S53 H36 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007510

  Cover images: (clockwise from top left) (line drawing) promotional material for China Marches On, published 1938, courtesy of Floyd Cheung; (newspaper clipping) Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspaper; (illustration) Sarah Gonzales; (caricature) ad in the Los Angeles Times, 1944; (buildings) SuperStock / Alamy; (crowd photo) Everett Collection / Alamy; (crowd drawing) Qian Binghe 錢病鶴 (1879–1944), Melon Theater, Minquan huabao 民權畫報 (The Popular Rights Illustrated), 1912.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Acclaim for H. T. Tsiang and The Hanging on Union Square

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by HUA HSU

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Epigraph

  THE HANGING ON UNION SQUARE

  Act I

  I. He Was Grouching

  II. Once in a Communist Cafeteria

  III. With a Temperament of This Sort

  IV. “No Russian! No Jew!”

  V. Thinking of Mr. Wiseguy

  VI. If Miss Digger Came

  VII. “Worse Than a Capitalist!”

  VIII. With One Glass of Water

  IX. A Feeling of Not Enough

  X. Out in a No-Way-Out Way

  Act II

  XI. He Was Poetizing

  XII. Before the Arrival of an Ambulance

  XIII. A Willow in a Windy Spring

  XIV. Artist and Uniform

  XV. Sadistic or Capitalistic

  XVI. “I Wouldn’t Get Mad at You”

  XVII. Miss Digger Became Miss Picker

  VIII. A Saint Takes a Commission

  XIX. He Suddenly Lost His Bureaucratic Air

  XX. “You! You! You!”

  XXI. He Was Satirizing

  Act III

  XXII. Roaring and Roaring as It Went By

  XXIII. He Felt That . . .

  XXIV. It Was Only Because . . .

  XXV. What Now? and How!

  XXVI. Which Tastes Better?

  XXVII. “Time Is Money”

  XXVIII. He Looked Like a Man

  XXIX. Lucky, However

  XXX. A Monkey Ran Away from the Zoo

  XXXI. He Was Philosophizing

  Act IV

  XXXII. A Man Walked on His Hands

  XXXIII. Untie the Tie

  XXXIV. It and She

  XXXV. “Masses Are Asses!”

  XXXVI. “What an Inspiration!”

  XXXVII. Size and Direction

  XXXVIII. “Strike
Me Pink!”

  XXXIX. “You Can Call Me Bastard!”

  XL. The Hanging on Union Square

  Afterword by FLOYD CHEUNG

  Appendix

  Notes

  Introduction

  Thanks but No Thanks but Thanks

  Writers deal with rejection in different ways. Some shred or delete their rejection letters instantly, lest material evidence of onetime failure remain; others bury them deep in drawers or file them away in obscure corners of their hard drive, revisiting them only in the light of later glory. It might be an occasion for fellowship on one of those websites devoted to sharing and laughing at the way work has been declined through the ages. The wild few fire back angry ripostes or desperate clarifications. You would be surprised by all the folders full of such postcards and notes that remain in the university archives of writers whom history records as world-conquerors.

  The point is that few people enjoy being told that what they’ve written is too strange or unsuitable for publication or, worse yet, beyond salvage, thanks for the inquiry and kindly lose this address. And nobody excerpts these rejection letters on the back covers and inner pages of their books, where blurbs customarily go.

  I became fascinated with the Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang when I found a first edition of The Hanging on Union Square, which he self-published in 1935. It felt like slipping into another person’s hallucination. The front cover was mysteriously confrontational and free of any useful information such as a title or author’s name. Instead, three blocks of text which resembled a madman’s conversation with himself—“YES the cover of a book is more of a book than the book is a book,” “I say—NO,” “SO.” This last word then stretched itself out and colonized the entire back cover. Opening the book and browsing its first few pages, I was ambushed by more signs of Tsiang’s unusual, stubborn mind: a page of tepid, bemused half-praise from the likes of Granville Hicks, Carl van Doren, and Louis Adamic, followed by another page excerpting rejection notices he had received from various publishers. I sought out other Tsiang novels. There was China Red, self-published in 1931, with its crude, hand-drawn art and back-cover blurbs doubting its “popular appeal.” He finally found a proper publisher for 1937’s And China Has Hands, but the dust jacket reprints a letter from Tsiang in which he offers some input on the dust jacket’s layout. These works didn’t fit into any available categories of immigrant writing or proletarian art. But then his biography didn’t follow the paths taken by most twentieth-century Chinese Americans either.

  Tsiang was born “in a small hut” near Shanghai in 1899 and died decades later in Hollywood, a local oddball and occasional movie actor known around town for the R-rated, one-man, one-hour adaptation of Hamlet he performed every Friday night for a dozen years. He worked for a brief spell as Sun Yat-sen’s secretary before fractures within the Kuomintang—as well as his own outspokenness about the party’s shifting ideologies—forced him to emigrate to the United States in 1926. He spent time in California’s Bay Area and then New York City, living the itinerant life of a graduate student. Encouraged by some of his professors at Columbia and the New School to channel his left-leaning politics into creative forms, he began writing and publishing poetry in the late 1920s. He eventually moved to fiction.

  Collectively, Tsiang’s works do not seem to comprise a coherent oeuvre. They suggest a promiscuous attitude toward standards of form and genre. No existing literary approaches suited Tsiang’s spectacularly expansive vision of how the world should be, and this might explain why he ranged so freely from sentimental, epistolary novels to militantly leftist poetry, plays, and music, to bitterly ironic, experimental novels. He enjoyed very little success, even within the hospitable climate of New York’s interwar proletarian arts scene.

  * * *

  —

  Not that Tsiang felt chastened. Anyone who picks up a pen possesses a healthier than average ego, and despite a steady stream of baffled rejection letters, he continued to believe that he had something important to share. These frustrations only refined his critical instincts. His works came to express a frustration with New York’s proletarian dogma, which, despite an inherent hope for global solidarity, privileged the American urban experience. Tsiang’s other natural audience—those interested in China—ignored him as well, opting instead for the more palatable visions of Pearl Buck (whom he would frequently mock in his novels) and the professionalized establishment of China-watchers.

  * * *

  —

  If anything, these frustrations animated Tsiang and pushed him toward increasingly experimental ends. His characters descended into ever more desperate, absurd situations that seemed to reflect his own sense of alienation. In particular, he became obsessed with what a book was, not simply as pages housing content—ideas, characters, plot, etc.—but as an object entering into a marketplace as well. By the time Tsiang published The Hanging on Union Square in 1935, he seemed resigned to the reality that no publisher, regardless of political orientation, would accept his work, which could go from whimsical and trippy to vengeful and brutish in a matter of paragraphs. It seemed that publishers and editors couldn’t tell whether his style was banal or experimental—the word that keeps showing up in their letters is “interesting.”

  From the first page, Hanging is desperate to flaunt its convictions. That’s not quite right. It’s more of a performance of desperation, a need to be recognized for having convictions, no matter how basic (in this case, money = evil) they may be. It’s a challenge to the reader: do you care as much as I do?

  Hanging chronicles a day in the life of the lonely, unemployed Mr. Nut. We find him in a workers’ cafeteria, listening to the sad fates of those around him, wondering to himself how he will get by without a steady job. Unlike everyone else, however, Nut has yet to surrender his by-the-bootstraps idealism. He insists that his poverty is only temporary and that he will one day leave this all behind. Aspiration becomes an affliction. His mind swirls with dreams of striking it rich, the mantra overtaking all reason or logic, like Ragged Dick rewritten by Gertrude Stein.

  Perhaps this is what has driven him mad. Over a chilling, misadventure-filled night adrift in the city, he encounters the winners and the losers, the weird and the depraved: screwball book critics, dirty old men, a self-obsessed poet yearning for a connection (“I wish your taste would be like mine—/We could just be sixty-nine”), disgraced millionaires, comically selfless communists, the shadow government playing the rest of us like puppets. Nut even encounters Tsiang himself. The depiction is far from flattering: Tsiang floats through his own novel as an irritating and obnoxious crank trying to convince someone to buy a weathered copy of his previous self-published opus, China Red.

  Suffice it to say that Nut eventually sheds the cynicism he initially feels toward the cause of the “masses.” Yet joining the party rank-and-file doesn’t suit him. His growing sense of abjection seems to have a euphoric, liberating effect on him. Freed from his desire to change his own situation, he aspires instead to change the world. The last few chapters of Hanging, as Nut comes to accept his fate, are hysterical and absurd, yet strangely moving.

  Anyone who self-publishes an “American Epic” is worth investigating, especially when they seem to luxuriate in their own marginality. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate time for a Hanging reprint, as the populist rage of the last few years challenges us to imagine new ways of communicating with the masses. Tsiang’s desire to appoint himself Everyman—to yell and argue and rage on behalf of all downtrodden brothers and sisters—might as well be happening today; the same applies to his ultimate failure. Perhaps Nut’s increasing darkness doesn’t suggest a way forward. But the quality of his desperation—a proxy for Tsiang’s, perhaps—still hold. We live in a time when self-publishing is no longer a last resort, and a contemporary reader will probably be more hospitable to Hanging’s stubborn weirdness than the readers and publishers of Tsiang’s time.
This isn’t to say that we’ve caught up to Tsiang—this would imply that he possessed some coherent vision of the world—just that his manic collision of ideas and feelings seems deeply familiar, as does his dense mix of irony and earnestness, his experimental playfulness and all-at-once frustration that nobody is listening.

  Following the pages of rejections that open Hanging’s first edition, Tsiang offered a brief note addressed directly to the reader. “The writer takes this opportunity of conveying his deep appreciation of the kindness of the various critics and publishers who had read his manuscript,” he writes with a seeming sincerity. But maybe they can just agree to disagree—this is the book he wants to write, even if nobody wants to publish it. “Stubbornly or nuttily,” he explains, he is compelled to advance his vision in its purest, uncut form, outside of the publishing industry that enforces our sense of the mainstream. Failure may be inevitable; perhaps he even courts it. But he is unafraid. After all, “the reaction of the masses can’t be wrong.”

  HUA HSU

  Acknowledgments

  For providing access to archival material, I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions: Doug Capra, Pierre Ferrand, Fred Ho, the Mortimer Rare Book Room of Smith College, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. For providing research assistance, I would like to thank Ariel Endlich-Frazier, Stefanie Grindle, Judy Lei, Elizabeth Mincer, Mara Pagano, Lisa Yvonne Ramos, Pamela Skinner, Sara Studebaker, Amy Teutemacher, and Katarina Yuan. Thanks go also to Sunyoung Lee of Kaya Press for guiding this volume through the publication process; Hua Tsu for writing this volume’s introduction; the Smith College Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for funding portions of my research; my colleagues at Smith College and the Five-College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program for encouraging my work; and Sheri Cheung for being my first and best reader.