Hsi Tseng Tsiang

Hsi Tseng Tsiang (Chinese: 蔣希曾; pinyin: Jiǎng Xīzēng; Wade–Giles: Chiang Hsi-tseng; 1899–1971), also known as H.T. Tsiang, was a Chinese-American actor and writer of novels, poetry, and plays. Tsiang created works associated with the life of early 20th-Century Chinese Americans and the struggle of the working class in the United States. In his works, he created eccentric but radical figures, bold and self-deprecating images as instruments to serve his vision of a proletarian revolution.

Tsiang was recognized as an innovator who managed to melt the essences of literature in the Eastern and Western worlds.^[1] He was also the first left-wing writer who utilized his works to promote social changes and his political awareness from the perspective of a Chinese American.^[2] His most noted novels included And China Has Hands, China Red, and The Hanging on Union Square.^[3] In later life, he became a film actor, appearing in 23 movies and multiple television series between 1943 and 1966.^[4]

Tsiang was born in the Chinese province of Jiangsu in 1899. He was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his relatives. Despite the hardship, he finished high school and was admitted to Southeast University. Tsiang came of age during the 1911 Revolution, witnessing the assassination of Liao Zhongkai. Experiencing the failure of the 1911 Revolution and its aftermath, he became a leftist. For a time, Tsiang worked within the KMT as an aide to Sun Yat-Sen's secretary.^[1]

After Sun's 1925 death and Chiang Kai-shek’s subsequent rise to power, Tsiang’s communist leanings clashed with the KMT's increasingly conservative politics, leading to Tsiang fleeing to the United States to avoid arrest and potential execution. Due to provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924, entered the United States on July 3, 1926^[5] as a student, continuing his higher education at Stanford University, where he would pursue graduate studies in economics, history and literature. From 1926-27, Tsiang edited Shao Nian Zhongguo (The Young China), a pro-KMT newspaper based in San Francisco. Tsiang was purged from Shao Nian Zhongguo's staff when he began to openly criticize Chiang Kai-shek. Tsiang then became the Chinese editor of the bilingual publication “The Chinese Guide to America.” Other communists in San Francisco's Chinatown, like Benjamin Fee, were critical of Tsiang, calling him “personally erratic, financially irresponsible and politically dubious.”^[5] In 1927 Tsiang was expelled from Stanford for his political activities and subsequently moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.^[6]

In 1929, Tsiang self-published Poems of the Chinese Revolution, a collection of poems focusing on the ongoing struggle for communism and arguing for a broader “world-revolution.” Several of the poems were previously published in Daily Worker and New Masses.^[7]

In an introduction to the book's second edition, Upton Sinclair wrote:

"This is a voice to which the white world, the so-called civilized world, will have to listen more and more as time passes. I do not mean to this particular young Chinese poet, but to the movement which he voices. The exploited races of the world are awakening and demanding the rights of human beings. Here is a young Chinese student whom the American authorities sought to deport and deliver to the executioner's axe at home. What he has written is not perfect poetry, but it is the perfect voice of Young China, protesting against the lot of the under-dog."

Two of Tsiang's poems from Poems of the Chinese Revolution, Chinaman, Laundryman and Sacco Vanzetti were subsequently adapted into songs by Ruth Crawford Seeger.^[5]

In 1931, Tsiang released his first novel China Red, an epistolary romance in which a pair of Chinese lovers, Chi and Sheng, separated by political ideology and the Pacific, slowly drifted apart. China Red was considered "offbeat and sarcastic, critical of overeducated Chinese élites and clueless Americans alike."^[3]

Tsiang's next novel, The Hanging on Union Square: An American Epic was released in 1935. Like Tsiang's other works, The Hanging on Union Square was self-published, with Tsiang selling the books by hand in Greenwich Village. His approach to self-promotion caught the attention of The New Yorker, which featured Tsiang in a June 1935 article.^[8]

The Hanging on Union Square mainly concerns about a man called "Mr. Nut", who sits in a cafeteria and listens to the problems of the people around him. Though being unemployed, he feels the situation is temporary and dreams of striking it rich. The novel's satirical, quasi-experimental style, “explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York — an era of union busting and food lines — in an ambitious style that combines humor-laced allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non sequiturs, and slogans.” Each chapter of the novel comprises a single hour of the day that “Mr. Nut” sits in the cafeteria. The novel reflects Tsiang's writing style as the combination of “poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature.”^[9]

Tsiang's final novel, And China Has Hands was published in 1937. The story is set in 1930's New York defined as much by chance encounters as by economic inequalities and corruption. Combining the pointed, political brevity of Gertrude Stein with his very own characteristic humor, Tsiang shows the world of 1930s New York through the eyes of Wan–Lee Wong, a newly arrived, nearly penniless Chinese immigrant everyman. Written with a poignant simplicity that mirrors Wong's own alienation in a foreign land, this intimate portrait of coming to race and class consciousness, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, illuminates the challenges endured by generations of Chinese who tried to assimilate into an alien culture, pining in utter obscurity for their homeland.^[10]

Tsiang’s last published work was the 1938 play China Marches On. Like all of Tsiang’s works, China Marches On is influenced by his politics and combines thematic and formal elements from both Chinese and American literary traditions. Nearly forty years before Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior and sixty years before the Walt Disney film, Tsiang adapted the Hua Mulan legend for his play. In Tsiang’s version of the tale, Mulan is separated from her parents as an infant during the Japanese invasion of Shandong in 1914, and later leads a suicide squad to resist the Japanese during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. In China Marches On, Tsiang combines a Chinese legend with the Defense of Sihang Warehouse during the final days of the Battle of Shanghai. In Tsiang’s version, Mulan, the regiment's only female member, makes speeches to inspire her comrades as well as interlopers from the Japanese and American armies advocating and gender-equality and class solidarity, "to “Fight till death, / Every one!” Interestingly, these interlopers turn out to be her foster brothers, one adopted by her mother, who had gone to Japan as a war-prize, and the other adopted by her father, who had escaped to the United States. At the besieged warehouse, with disaster looming, Mulan conflates the vocabulary of military attack with that of labor demonstration, reaching out to her brothers—one Japanese, the other American— and saying, “Hold together, hold tight, / Shake!— / And strike!” All three prioritize resistance before their own lives and happiness; all three die in a blaze of sacrifice."^[1]

At around the time China Marches On was published, Tsiang became ill for a period of time, and as a result, he was forced to withdraw from Columbia University, where he continued his studies. After recovering his health, Tsiang enrolled in early 1940 in the theatre department of The New School for Social Research. As a result of his student visa lapsing, Tsiang was detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, and incarcerated at Ellis Island from November 1940 to July 1941. A campaign commenced for Tsiang's release involving the American Civil Liberties Union, American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born, and leftist intellectuals including Rockwell Kent and Ira Gollobin. During his incarceration, Tsiang continued writing poetry on toilet paper, and later, on a typewriter.^[5]

Tsiang then pursued a private bill for immigration relief from Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who was allied with leftist causes. After Marcantonio was unable to accommodate the request, Tsiang then turned to Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, who introduced on June 5, 1941 HR 4962. As long as this bill was under consideration, Tsiang could stay in the United States; however, as shipping to Asia had been vastly curtailed due to the Pacific War, it was unlikely that Tsiang would have ever been deported to China.^[5] Tsiang's immigration status was temporarily solidified upon the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act.

Tsiang started his acting career in a 1930 Theatre Guild production of Sergei Tretyakov's Roar, China!, Broadway's first play with a majority Asian cast.^{[11] [12]} He later trained as an actor with the German director and producer of political theatre Erwin Piscator, while attending The New School for Social Research.^[1]

Tsiang would, by the late 1930's, begin to transition away from his writing career to stage acting, mostly in low-budget solo performances. "In 1939, he could be found at eight o’clock every Monday night, standing at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue in New York, inveigling passersby to attend his play. He charged employed customers ten cents and let in the unemployed for free. According to a New York Times reporter, Tsiang acted 'as his own stage manager, electrician, and master of ceremonies. Nor is he too proud to turn on the electric fan in the surprisingly crowded room or to bustle busily about, moving chairs and setting up stage props. . . . Later he steps into the play in sundry small parts, as a Chinese general or wearing a mask to represent Death (“Playwright”)." Tsiang performed in versions of China Marches On from 1939 until 1944 in New York and Los Angeles. At times, the play enjoyed relatively lavish production values when sponsored, for instance, by the United Chinese Relief Fund; however, at other times, Tsiang was forced, due to lack of funds, to produce his play without props or costumes.^[1]

After his release from Ellis Island, Tsiang resumed studies at The New School for Social Research, performing in Piscator's student production of War and Peace, as well as adapting The Hanging on Union Square for the stage.^[7]

By 1943, Tsiang had permanently moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film acting career. His early film credits included Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Keys of the Kingdom, Betrayal from the East, China Sky, China's Little Devils, and Tokyo Rose, in roles ranging from a magistrate in China Sky to a Japanese spy in Betrayal from the East.

After the end of World War II and the rise of McCarthyism, Tsiang found himself again at odds with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with Tsiang being incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island for a brief period.^[6] Hua Hsu, in writing "A Floating Chinaman,"^[13] his exploration of the legacies of Tsiang and Pearl S. Buck, whose works Tsiang frequently criticized,^[7] examined the FBI surveillance reports on Tsiang’s activities, noting that some observers found Tsiang to be a mild-mannered individual who was relatively harmless, albeit very progressive in his politics.

Tsiang again relied on well-connected friends to advocate for him. Lewis Milestone, who had directed H.T. Tsiang in The Purple Heart, wrote to Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, urging her to sponsor a private bill on Tsiang's behalf. Rep. Douglas, who had been an actress and who was married to Academy Award winning actor Melvyn Douglas, was sympathetic to Tsiang’s plight. Milestone cited his relationship to Tsiang:

I am the first director who ventured to use Orientals in playing major Oriental parts in a picture. There are very few Chinese actors in the country. Mr. Tsiang is one of the very few who had made the grade…During the war period, the alien (Tsiang) took part in the production of films which were of great service as morale builders, both on the field and on the home front.

On May 6, 1946, Douglas sponsored a private bill, H.R. 6310, which was introduced in Congress on May 3, 1946, which solidified Tsiang's immigration status.^[5] However, Tsiang remained under threat of deportation until at least 1956.^[14][15]

After his move to Los Angeles, Tsiang maintained his stage acting career,^[16] supported by his earnings as a film actor, self-producing productions of The Hanging on Union Square, as a one-act play in verse, along with his Canton Rickshaw Girl, another one-act play. This production was presented annually from 1943 to 1948 at the Rainbow Etienne Studio in Hollywood. Tsiang, in a note to Rockwell Kent enclosing a laudatory Daily People's World review of the premiere of the show’s fifth season, noted that major actors and directors such as Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincent Price, Lewis Milestone, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz had attended the show. Tsiang also took The Hanging on Union Square and China Marches On to San Francisco for performances at the California Labor School.^[5]

However, Tsiang's political views resulted in his being de facto blacklisted from movies and television from 1951 until 1960.^[4] During this time, Tsiang returned to the stage full-time, performing at various points in a one-man production of Hamlet, which he performed for twelve years every Friday evening in Hollywood, and at the La Jolla Playhouse in its 1952 production of Remains to Be Seen, as well as at the Pasadena Playhouse, hotels, colleges, private homes, and coffee houses in Southern California.^[5][6] Because of his accent, which audiences found amusing, Tsiang eventually wrote and performed a one-man adaptation of Hamlet set at a nudist colony entitled Wedding in a Nudist Colony. He eventually incorporated scenes from Othello, Julius Caesar, and readings from Poems of the Chinese Revolution into his one-man show.^[6]

With the end of the Hollywood blacklist in the late 1950's, Tsiang returned to film and television work, typically playing the role of a Chinese cook, waiter, or houseboy, in films such as Let's Make Love, Ocean's 11 and The Swinger, and television series including Gunsmoke, I Spy, My Three Sons, and Hawaiian Eye.^[4]

Tsiang suffered a stroke in 1965, from which he never fully recovered. He retired from acting, as he was no longer able to memorize lines, retreating to a solitary life in a modest Chinatown apartment, where he had lived since permanently moving to Los Angeles. He died after "a long illness" at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles on July 16, 1971.^[6]