This mood comes across when he writes on Diamanda Galás’s album All the Way: “The past isn’t an escape from the present.” It appears on the edges of an essay on Trump’s presidency: “We rise to meet circumstances that we may never have foreseen. Sometimes it feels like Hsu is piecing together something else, something bigger and just beyond the page – his criticism not a detour but rather the only way through. Hopefully you can take something out of this and see beyond me.” “I’m always trying to bring a kind of humility into the work where I’m like, I don’t actually know the answers. Drawing such constellations, he makes clear that he, too, is simply another node. Du Bois elsewhere, he swerves between George Michael’s death and Maggie Lee’s film Mommy and the International Community Radio Taipei. He explains his approach: “There was a moment when I realised that I could not come up with disruptive theories for how the world should be … My ability is more one where I can connect different conversations, or connect different worlds.” And so he does, connecting Paul Beatty with Kendrick Lamar with W. E. B.

Refusing the hatchet, The New Yorker critic prefers a more careful mode. 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.Hua Hsu approaches criticism with a refreshing tenderness. 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.

Floating Chinaman by Hua Hsu