DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Hua Hsu to the store to discuss and sign, A Floating Chinaman, on Sunday, October 16th at 3:00pm. Joining him in conversation will be hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang.
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. 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.
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. 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.
A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. 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 received his PhD from the History of American Civilization program at Harvard University. He is an associate professor of English & Director of American Studies at Vassar College. Hsu is currently on the editorial board of the New Literary History of America and his scholarly interests include transpacific literary history, American intellectual history, cultural studies, and arts criticism. He is an occasional contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate and The Wire.
And lucky Jeff gets to ask questions.
Come early, stay for the mind-blowing.