Hsi Tseng Tsiang

Hsi Tseng Tsiang (; 1899–1971), also known as H.T. Tsiang, was a Chinese-American actor and writer of novels, poetry, and plays. Tsiang created works associated with the life of early 20th-Century Chinese Americans and the working class in the United States.

He was one of the first Chinese-American left-wing writers who utilized his works to promote social changes. His most well-known novels include: And China Has Hands, China Red and The Hanging on Union Square. In later life, he became a film actor, appearing in 23 movies and multiple television series.1966.

Early Life in China

Tsiang was born in the Chinese province of Jiangsu in 1899. He was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his relatives. He eventually finished high school and was admitted to Southeast University. Tsiang came of age during the 1911 Revolution, witnessing the assassination of Liao Zhongkai. Experiencing the 1911 Revolution and its aftermath, he became a leftist. For a time, Tsiang worked within the KMT as an aide to Sun Yat-Sen's secretary.

Early Life in the United States After Sun Yat-sen's 1925 death and Chiang Kai-shek’s subsequent rise to power, Tsiang’s communist leanings disagreed with the Kuomintang's increasingly conservative politics, leading to Tsiang fleeing to the United States to avoid potential consequences. He continued his higher education at Stanford University, where he would pursue graduate studies in economics, history and literature. From 1926-27, Tsiang edited Shao Nian Zhongguo (The Young China), a pro-Kuomintang newspaper based in San Francisco. Tsiang was removed from Shao Nian Zhongguo's staff when he began to openly criticize Chiang Kai-shek. Tsiang then became the Chinese editor of the bilingual publication “The Chinese Guide to America.” Other like-minded people in San Francisco's Chinatown, like Benjamin Fee, were critical of Tsiang, calling him “personally erratic, financially irresponsible and politically dubious.” In 1927 Tsiang was expelled from Stanford for his political activities and subsequently moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Writing career

In 1929, Tsiang self-published Poems of the Chinese Revolution, a collection of poems focusing on the so-called ongoing struggle for communism and arguing for a broader “world-revolution.” Several of the poems were previously published in Daily Worker and New Masses.

In an introduction to the book's second edition, Upton Sinclair wrote:

"This is a voice to which the white world, the so-called civilized 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. The exploited races of the world are awakening and demanding the rights of human beings. Here is a young Chinese student whom the American authorities sought to deport and deliver to the executioner's axe at home. What he has written is not perfect poetry, but it is the perfect voice of Young China, protesting against the lot of the under-dog."

Two of Tsiang's poems from Poems of the Chinese Revolution, Chinaman, Laundryman and Sacco Vanzetti were subsequently adapted into songs by Ruth Crawford Seeger. Tsiang's final novel, And China Has Hands was published in 1937.

Tsiang's last published work was the 1938 play China Marches On. He later trained as an actor with the German director and producer of political theatre Erwin Piscator, while attending The New School for Social Research. his exploration of the legacies of Tsiang and Pearl S. Buck, whose works Tsiang frequently criticized,

After his move to Los Angeles, Tsiang maintained his stage acting career, supported by his earnings as a film actor, self-producing productions of The Hanging on Union Square, as a one-act play in verse, along with his Canton Rickshaw Girl, another one-act play. This production was presented annually from 1943 to 1948 at the Rainbow Etienne Studio in Hollywood. Tsiang, in a note to Rockwell Kent enclosing a laudatory Daily People's World review of the premiere of the show's fifth season, noted that major actors and directors such as Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincent Price, Lewis Milestone, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz had attended the show. Tsiang also took The Hanging on Union Square and China Marches On to San Francisco for performances at the California Labor School.

However, Tsiang's political views resulted in his being de facto blacklisted from movies and television from 1951 until 1960. During this time, Tsiang returned to the stage full-time, performing at various points in a one-man production of Hamlet, which he performed for twelve years every Friday evening in Hollywood, and at the La Jolla Playhouse in its 1952 production of Remains to Be Seen, as well as at the Pasadena Playhouse, hotels, colleges, private homes, and coffee houses in Southern California. Because of his accent, which audiences found amusing, Tsiang eventually wrote and performed a one-man adaptation of Hamlet set at a nudist colony entitled Wedding in a Nudist Colony. He eventually incorporated scenes from Othello, Julius Caesar, and readings from Poems of the Chinese Revolution into his one-man show.

With the end of the Hollywood blacklist in the late 1950s, Tsiang returned to film and television work, typically playing the role of a Chinese cook, waiter, or houseboy, in films such as Let's Make Love, Ocean's 11 and The Swinger, and television series including Gunsmoke, I Spy, My Three Sons, and Hawaiian Eye.

Final years and death Tsiang suffered a stroke in 1965, from which he never fully recovered. He retired from acting, as he was no longer able to memorize lines, retreating to a solitary life in a modest Chinatown apartment, where he had lived since permanently moving to Los Angeles. He died after "a long illness" at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles on July 16, 1971.