Hsi Tseng Tsiang

Hsi Tseng Tsiang (Chinese: 蔣希曾; pinyin: Jiǎng Xīzēng; Wade–Giles: Chiang Hsi-tseng; 1899–1971) was a Chinese-American left-wing writer of novels, poetry, and plays.

He was captivated with the proletarian movements and created literature works associated with the miserable life of the early Chinese Americans and the struggle of working-class in the United States.

Two years later, in his third novel And China has hands (1937), Tsiang concentrated on urban in the United States and pointed out “the diversity of its workforce and connectedness to developments in the Far East” (Cheung, 2011, p. 64).

“And China Has Hands represents the remaining material traces that we have of an intellect and intelligence that was unlike any other in Chinese American history—not in its experiences or its abilities, but in its refusal to shift, change, or compromise to fit someone else’s view of what someone such as Tsiang should think or how he should be.” (Cheung, 2017).

In addition to his writing career, to make a living, he also went to Hollywood and played many characters in different films, such as The Purple Heart (1944), Tokyo Rose (1946), State Department: File 649 (1949), and Oceans Eleven (1960).

In 1966, he played town laundry owner “Ching Fa”, killed by rowdy cowboys on the TV Western Series Gunsmoke in “Gunfighter, RIP” (S12E6).

The novel is satirical, quasi-experimental style, as described in Kaya Press website, it “explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York — an era of union busting and food lines — in an ambitious style that combines humor-laced allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non sequiturs, and slogans.”[5] Also, it's worth mentioning that each chapter of the novel comprises a single hour of the day that “Mr.

His name, in Chinese, can be ironically translated into “ten thousand fortunes.” While in reality, he experienced a difficult life as other American immigration did, went from one misadventure to another, and ended with considerably more trouble.

During his life in New York, Wan-Lee “falls in love with Pearl Chang, a biracial Chinese and African American woman who wanders into his life.” (Kaya Press, 2016)[6] Eventually, his experiences inevitably teach him race and class consciousness, and also, reflect the situation of immigrants to the U.S. during the Great Depression seeking for home belongings.