Exploring identity, authenticity, and nostalgia as concepts and as feelings, this is an absolute stunner. On the shaky formation of the self, it is unself-conscious on the incredible youthful desire to make oneself known, it is knowing. After Ken’s death, Hsu “became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward.” In every luminously rereadable, every-way-wending sentence, that writing astonishes. Truer than true, becoming a biography of friendship writ large and in specifics, Stay True brings in history, philosophy, art, and science as Hsu spirals through the story of himself as the Californian son of Taiwanese immigrants, as the zine-making teenager who didn’t yet know that he would be a writer, as the college student who defined himself by what he hated-and, before they became best friends, he hated Ken.
The title of this memoir, Hsu’s ( A Floating Chinaman, 2016) second book, comes from the way Ken signed his letters back then-a cheeky sign-off the author can no longer remember the cheek of-and, as titles go, it couldn’t be more apt. 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.When he was a student at Berkeley in the 1990s, New Yorker writer and Vassar professor Hsu lost his friend Ken to a senseless act of violence. 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. New Yorker contributor and AAWW Board Member Hua Hsus new book A Floating Chinaman (Harvard University Press 2016) explores how Twentieth Century American. 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.
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