The book is about the circulation of ideas about China but it is also a book about writers, rivalries, and the acquisition of authority. On the margins-in Chinatowns, on college campuses, in the failed avant-gardism of Tsiang-a different conversation about the possibilities of a transpacific future was taking place. At this time the United States 'rediscovered' China, and the book traces its causes and cues in a variety of sites: the comfortable, middlebrow literature of Pearl Buck, Alice Tisdale Hobart and Lin Yutang the journalism of Carl Crow and Henry Luce exuberant reports from oil executives proclaiming a new era in global trade. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels in the 1930s, a time when China was recast as a rich, unexplored mystery to the American public. The title is taken from a lost manuscript by H.T. Book excerpt: 'A Floating Chinaman is, in the broadest sense, a book about who gets to speak for China. This book was released on with total page 287 pages. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.Book Synopsis A Floating Chinaman by : Hua Hsuĭownload or read book A Floating Chinaman written by Hua Hsu and published by Harvard University Press. Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is also the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2016).

He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Hua serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. In this interview, Hua and I talk about his story in Stay True, including his unbelievably non-stereotypical parents, his dive into college music, and his attempt with Ken to put together an homage for the Berry Gordy-produced martial arts film, the Last Dragon. Stay True: A Memoir, Hua Hsu (Doubleday, September 2022) It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identity that Japanese American kids can seem like aliens to other Asians, untroubled, largely oblivious to feeling like outsiders.īut Ken is killed in a robbery gone wrong, forcing Hua to grapple with the death of his friend. He builds a close friendship with another Asian-American student, Ken, very different from Hua, about which he writes in the book:Īll the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. S tay True, the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where he tries to become a writer–and becomes a bit of a music snob.

A floating chinaman