In addition, the book broadens our understanding of cultural interactions between China and the West in Hampstead, one of the most vibrant artistic communities in London.
It portrays a dynamic picture of the London-based émigré life during the years that led up to the war and during the conflict that was the catalyst for many of them moving on. This edited volume, with contributions from eleven distinguished scholars, tells a story of a Chinese intellectual community in London that up to now has been largely overlooked. It examines Chiang’s relationship with his circle of friends and colleagues in the English capital, and assesses the work he produced during his sojourn there. This book, Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950, celebrates the life and work of Chiang Yee (1903–1977), a Chinese writer, poet, and painter who made his home in London, England during the 1930s and 1940s. The author considers a range of texts-from best-sellers to self-published paperbacks, travel literature to corporate newsletters, FBI surveillance files to flowery letters from an Ellis Island detention center-and considers the competing notions of a transpacific future that animated the literary imagination as well as some satisfying moments of revenge."-Provided by publisher. These were decades when China represented a new area of inquiry, and the stakes for writers to flex their expertise were at once intellectual, professional, and deeply personal. It is about the creation and refinement of those ideas, as well as the spirit of competition that underlies all critical endeavors. The book is about the circulation of ideas about China but it is also a book about writers, rivalries, and the acquisition of authority.
On the margins-in Chinatowns, on college campuses, in the failed avant-gardism of Tsiang-a different conversation about the possibilities of a transpacific future was taking place.
At this time the United States "rediscovered" China, and the book traces its causes and cues in a variety of sites: the comfortable, middlebrow literature of Pearl Buck, Alice Tisdale Hobart and Lin Yutang the journalism of Carl Crow and Henry Luce exuberant reports from oil executives proclaiming a new era in global trade. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels in the 1930s, a time when China was recast as a rich, unexplored mystery to the American public. The title is taken from a lost manuscript by H.T. "A Floating Chinaman is, in the broadest sense, a book about who gets to speak for China.
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