by H. T. Tsiang
“Since time is money, I now present our hero, a Forgotten Man, a Little Man, an Average Man! Dr. Nut. And finally I commend you to the Father of every family in Heaven and on Earth. God bless you all.”
* * *
—
“Mr. System is a Shylock13—a Jew!”
“May be or may not be a Jew: Mr. System—it must be you!”
* * *
—
“Bravo! Bravo! Hurray! Hurray!” shouted Society.
“We want Dr. Nut!” yelled Society.
“Speech! Speech! Speech!” was heard from all sides.
* * *
—
Overalls are coming!
Unite! Fight!
* * *
—
“All right, but let him say only a few words,” said Mr. Wiseguy to Mr. System. “Our people like action.”
* * *
—
Nut now spoke:
“I am a Forgotten Man, a Little Man, an Average Man, a Worker, a Nut.
“‘Be good and starve is the order of the day!
“Prey on others or become a prey!’
“I was a Nut. But I am a Nut no more.
“I, a Forgotten Man, a Little Man, an Average Man, a Worker—will this time—double-cross you, Mr. System—the Exploiter, the War-maker, the Man-killer.
“Here is your neck. This is your rope.”
* * *
—
Nut turned his gun.
Nut double-crossed Mr. System.
THE END
Afterword
“The Trouble Maker.” So signed off H. T. Tsiang—writer, actor, and agitator—in a letter to artist-activist Rockwell Kent on January 15, 1941. By this point in Tsiang’s career, such a moniker was more than justified.1 Born in rural China, he had vigorously advocated against Japanese imperialism; fled into exile in the U.S. after breaking with his political party; founded a newspaper to promote a leftist agenda; led protests in California; spent time in jail for disturbing the peace; escaped to New York City; published five books, all of which, in one way or another, advocated for world revolution after the Soviet model; and was at that very moment sitting in a cell at the Ellis Island detention center awaiting possible deportation, ostensibly for overstaying his student visa, but perhaps also for promoting anarchy.2
Throughout this whirlwind of political and creative activity, Tsiang always continued to write, sometimes using toilet paper when no other material was available. During just the time he was at Ellis Island, he wrote letters to politicians, appeals for help from organizations like the ACLU, a series of narrative poems, and many shorter works. (Two of his most memorable lines from this period—“Statue, turn your ass! / Let us pass!”—were addressed to the Statue of Liberty in reference to that icon’s literal and figurative stance toward Ellis Island detainees.3)
Tsiang had lofty ambitions for his writings; he believed they could lay bare truths about social conditions that would inspire readers to change them. Although he may never have met James Baldwin, who also spent time in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, he would undoubtedly have agreed with Baldwin’s view that “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”4 As the protagonist in Tsiang’s first novel, China Red, declares: “With our paper bullets, we shall change the direction of the wind” (90).
Among his many paper bullets, Tsiang singled out The Hanging on Union Square as worthy of sharing with Rockwell Kent, whom he fondly dubbed “My dear Mr. Hell-Raiser.” In Kent, Tsiang discovered a sympathetic reader who understood the subtlety of his work like few others. Kent was known not only as an accomplished painter and printmaker (his illustrations for Moby-Dick contributed to the popularity of the book’s re-issue) but also as a socialist and lecturer on topics such as “art for the people.”5 Although the two had never met in person, Kent generously agreed to review Tsiang’s case and writings. He wrote encouragingly to Tsiang:
It is no reflection upon the serious nature of your political thought and the serious underlying intention of “The Hanging on Union Square” to say that in reading it aloud, as we are doing, we are in constant laughter. You have delightful humor and every bit of it is sharply pointed. Beyond this, we find your work very moving.6
Two weeks later, when Kent and his wife finished reading the novel, they agreed that “it held us absorbed and moved until the very end. It is an extraordinary book.”7
Other contemporary reviewers who caught the humor of Tsiang’s book often presumed it to be the result of simplicity rather than political guile. Eda Lou Walton, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, found Tsiang’s novel “amusing” but assumed that “the Chinese author is naïve, not desperate and hard-boiled. When he talks of flop-houses, of street life, of perversions, he does so with true Chinese reticence. Because the reader knows perfectly just what is going on, the author’s euphemisms become terribly funny.”8 Kenneth White came closer to the mark in his review for the New Republic, explaining that “the brutal gaiety of the book, the intentionally naïve humor, gain it more effectiveness than might be found in a dozen soggy novels about the same situations.”9 Tsiang confided to Kent that he had intentionally lightened his tone “so as to keep many Liberal Minded and serious persons with us,” but Tsiang’s wild mash up of methods and moods confused both Walton and White.10 “What is any critic to do with a man who so completely mixes up Chinese symbols and American slang, fantasy and complete seriousness?” asks Walton in her review. Meanwhile, White questioned whether The Hanging on Union Square was “more a cartoon than a novel.”
More than eighty years after the book appeared on the streets of New York City, hand sold by Tsiang himself, these questions still remain. With its idiosyncratic mix of narrative, poetic, and dramatic conventions; American, Chinese, and Soviet models; and humor and seriousness, The Hanging on Union Square is an audacious, sui generis satire—the literary equivalent of outsider art, but one with deeply political intentions. What are we to make of such a work? What is any critic to do?
TSIANG’S JOURNEY FROM CHINA TO UNION SQUARE
Although it is never a good idea to conflate an author with one of his fictional creations, Tsiang himself was not averse to identifying himself with Mr. Nut, the main hero and chief Trouble Maker of The Hanging on Union Square. In a scathing letter to FDR’s secretary, Stephen Early, written on May 30, 1941, just six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Tsiang berates the administration for selling weapons to Japan: “You Americans sold Japanese irons and build up Japanese battleships but now feel sorry and try to catch up. Too late.”11 Tsiang then warns Early not to underestimate him:
[T]he one who thinks that I may [be] worth no more than a Nut to the Chinese people is a jackass. A Nut cannot and dare not write you this letter. Ah, so I am dangerous and I am the one that must be deported, even use the punch delivered below the belt. . . . I present my own rope: to intern me! Well, well, that’s Nut talking! Nuts to you.
The story of how Tsiang came to think of himself as someone with Nut-like qualities begins in China. Tsiang was born in 1899 to poor, working-class parents in Qi’an, a village in the district of Nantong, Jiangsu Province. His father, a grain-store worker, and his mother, a maid, both died young. According to his sister, Songzhen, Tsiang was such an excellent student that he was able to earn scholarships to the Tongzhou Teachers’ School in Jiangsu and Southeastern University in Nanjing, where he learned English and studied political economics.12
Tsiang seems to have been a rabble-rouser from an early age. During school breaks, he advocated against ancestral worship and foot binding as antiquated and unjust practices; and when the Chinese governmen
t agreed to Japan’s humiliating Twenty-One Demands (including ceding control of lands and other resources), Tsiang organized a protest movement in his hometown.
Like other reform-minded Chinese, Tsiang found an inspirational leader in Sun Yat-sen, known as the father of the Chinese independence movement. In particular, he approved of Sun’s willingness to work with communists in both the Soviet Union and China.13 After graduating from Southeastern University, Tsiang took a position as one of Sun’s secretaries in the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party. After Sun’s death, however, the party split between two opposing groups: one led by Liao Zhongkai that was interested in cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party against the common foe of Japan; and one that veered towards a more conservative, anti-communist agenda, spearheaded by Chiang Kai-shek. Tsiang threw in his lot with Liao and his faction. In fact, Tsiang was accompanying Liao to a KMT Executive Committee meeting on August 30, 1925 when the latter was assassinated. Believing that he, too, faced the “executioner’s axe” for his leftist allegiance, Tsiang attempted to flee to the Soviet Union. When that plan proved impractical, he left for the United States instead.14
In 1926, Tsiang enrolled at Stanford University. This allowed him to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented “Chinese laborers” from entering the country but gave an exemption for students. While based in California, Tsiang founded a bilingual periodical, the Chinese Guide in America, which sought to inform a broader audience about the political situation in China and the need for worldwide revolution.
Alas, some Californians were less than sympathetic to Tsiang’s political beliefs. In 1927, a mob attacked him as he was distributing leaflets critical of the Chinese government. On February 26, 1928, police raided the Los Angeles headquarters of the leftist wing of the KMT and arrested “H. T. Tsiang, said to be the leader of the radicals” prior to a demonstration that he had been planning against a leader of the conservative wing of the party who was visiting from China.15 After his release, Tsiang relocated to New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University and sought new opportunities to enact social change. Tsiang’s Columbia transcript tells us that he took classes from 1928 until 1930. While there, Tsiang received special encouragement from Professors Mark Van Doren and Ashley Thorndike.16 In his new East Coast milieu, Tsiang also made the acquaintance of leftist writers such as Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, and Parker Tyler.
Given the intellectual environment at the time, it’s not surprising that the focus of Tsiang’s political work shifted from journalism and organizing to poetry. According to literary critic Cary Nelson, writing poetry had, by the 1920s and 1930s, become “a credible form of revolutionary action” in the U.S.17 Tsiang began publishing poems about the political situation in China and the working conditions of Chinese Americans in the U.S., several of which appeared in 1928 in the Daily Worker and New Masses. He went on to self-publish his first book, Poems of the Chinese Revolution, in 1929. This initial effort was followed by four other books: three novels—China Red (1931), The Hanging on Union Square (1935), and And China Has Hands (1937)—as well as one play, China Marches On (1938).
While Tsiang may have been idiosyncratic in many ways, he certainly developed his style in the context of like-minded writers. Historians inform us that the cafeterias in the Union Square neighborhood were “well-known sites for both queer and leftist gatherings.”18 By 1931, Tsiang had moved from Columbia University to an area near Union Station and had become an active participant in leftist writing communities.19 Sam Bluefarb, who frequented the Life Cafeteria on nearby Sheridan Square, describes it as “a popular hangout for artists, writers, bohemians, and a mixed bag of cranks and eccentrics,” where the “coffee-drinking, the smoking, the talk would drone on into the small hours of morning.” Bluefarb observes that Tsiang was a “recognizable character who frequented the cafeteria.” According to this account at least, Tsiang would work quietly in a corner writing and revising The Hanging on Union Square, which Bluefarb reports, “was popular with many of us at the time.”20 Eventually, however, Tsiang seems to have annoyed others with his persistent attempts to promote his agenda and his work. A New Masses editorial published on August 27, 1935 describes how Tsiang “made himself a familiar, and now unwelcome figure, at radical gatherings where he sells his books.”21
Tsiang’s cafeteria perch and presence at leftist gatherings and on the streets between Columbia University, Broadway, and Greenwich Village would have given him ample opportunity to witness the impact that the Great Depression had on his fellow New Yorkers. Likewise, his stint as a dishwasher at the Howdy Club in Greenwich Village—a place known for its risqué burlesque performances—might very well have supplied him with inspiration for Miss Digger’s memorable stage appearance, in addition to giving him personal experience with the conditions of a manual laborer living on the edge of subsistence.22 Whatever his source material may have been, it’s clear that Tsiang hoped to find a broad audience for The Hanging on Union Square; in 1941, he spoke with an editor at Random House, claiming that among all of his works, Hanging is “The Best Horse that you can bet on.”23
Interestingly, in spite of the fact that H. T. Tsiang played Mr. Nut in dramatic adaptations of The Hanging on Union Square24—and despite his clear and deep involvement with issues of race and specifically China in his previous works—the novel never marks Mr. Nut as Chinese or even Chinese American. The plight of immigrant Chinese workers in New York had been the subject of Tsiang’s early poem, “Chinaman, Laundryman”—and later his novel And China Has Hands—but Hanging employs as its protagonist a racially unspecified (though easily read as white) Everyman figure. At the beginning of The Hanging on Union Square, Mr. Nut finds himself trapped by his inability to pay his cafeteria bill: “A ten-cent check. A nickel in my pocket—I’m in Hell.” That quandary, more than race or background, marks out the parameters of Mr. Nut’s existence; like many others during the Depression, Mr. Nut has recently lost his job and is struggling to survive. We never learn what his former occupation might have been. All we know is that he once harbored middle-class aspirations.
Why did Tsiang turn from writing about Chinese politics in his 1929 Poems of the Chinese Revolution and his 1931 novel, China Red, to this 1935 novel featuring an ethnically unmarked protagonist navigating Depression-era Manhattan? What did this change of setting and subject matter mean for Tsiang as a writer? What is the significance of Union Square as the site of the novel’s climax? Alas, Tsiang left no known papers or descendants to suggest definitive answers.
Perhaps it is enough to say simply that Tsiang wrote what he knew in 1935, as he had in his earlier books.25 Alternatively, Tsiang may have had more strategic reasons for his choice of subject matter. While Mr. Nut finds himself trapped in a monetary predicament, H. T. Tsiang may have felt trapped by his identity as a “young Chinese poet.” No less a personage than Upton Sinclair once wrote of Tsiang that “This is a voice to which the white 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.”
Although his racialized and national identities might very well have been his entrée to the New York leftist community, perhaps Tsiang, like many other ethnic American authors, felt burdened by this expectation to represent. Or perhaps he believed that readers had difficulty generalizing from his specific examples. He clearly makes the case in “Chinaman, Laundryman” that all workers of the world, regardless of race, need to unite, but perhaps his readers had difficulty reading beyond their expectations—especially since the argument appears in a book entitled Poems of the Chinese Revolution.26 In writing The Hanging on Union Square, then, Tsiang may have been attempting to escape the confines of his audience’s expectations and his own narrowly defined identity.
Locating the main action of the novel in and around Union Square, rather than China or Chinatown, might likewise signal Tsiang’s desire to participate in a broad
er political and historical conversation. Situated at the junction of Broadway and Fourth Avenue, Union Square, named for the union of these two major thoroughfares (though the streets themselves once had different names), came to serve as a rallying point for all kinds of civic demonstrations in New York City. After the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter, initiating the Civil War, huge crowds gathered at the foot of George Washington’s statue there to rally for national unity. The first official Labor Day parade took place there. And throughout the early twentieth century, advocates for both patriotism and protest made Union Square their stage, whether to celebrate the Declaration of Independence or to protest the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Smaller gatherings and individual soap-box orators also made use of Union Square.27 This was a place from which one could address not only New York, but the whole of the United States, and perhaps even the world—and Tsiang claimed it in his 1935 novel.
REVOLUTIONIZING THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY
To say that The Hanging on Union Square does not operate stylistically in the realm of conventional realism might seem like something of an understatement, despite the fact that Tsiang sets his novel in what is recognizably New York in the 1930s. Like other contemporary leftist writers of his day, Tsiang believed that realistic fiction reinforced a capitalist view of the world, one that seemed to suggest that individuals primarily determined their fate in the context of a free market.
In the author’s note appended to the end of Waldo Frank’s foreword to the book, Tsiang explains that, in writing Hanging, he “employed the method of ‘Socialistic Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism.’” Socialist Realism, described by Russian writer and theorist Maxim Gorky as an antidote to “bourgeois realism,” was originally theorized as a way for literature to help shape the ideological foundations of the Soviet state.28 But while different writers interpreted Gorky’s ideas in varying ways, most understood “the socialist-realist perception of the world not as something already formed and petrified but in terms of progress and development.”29 Tsiang, too, represents reality as dynamic in Hanging. Depression-era New York includes groups relating to one another in tension and flux: some are trying to “save” capitalism, others are merely surviving, still others are preying upon those trying to survive. And a few are working towards revolution. Hence, his novel not only represents everyday reality, but also offers a critical and unsettled view of it.