A FLOATING CHINAMAN

Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific

By Hua Hsu

276 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.

For critics and scholars, the greatest rewards are to be gained in bestowing attention on authors whose stock is already high. Why, then, should a writer look toward one of the forgotten? And how to select someone to elevate? This is the task that Hua Hsu, an associate professor of English at Vassar, sets for himself in his smart new book, “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.” His chosen subject is the mostly unknown H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971), a Chinese immigrant who “created some of the most ambitious and, at times, bizarrely self-aware works of modern American literature.”

As Hsu makes painfully, comically evident, Tsiang was condemned mostly to self-publication. This “sad sack” peddled his books from a suitcase and wrote furiously to anyone who would help his literary cause. Decades after his death, his work at last found an audience through the edgy Kaya Press, which recently ­released his 1935 novel “The Hanging on Union Square” and is bringing out his 1937 novel “And China Has Hands.” But during his lifetime Tsiang suffered the incompatible indignities of being spied on by the F.B.I. while being rejected or dismissed by progressive writers like Theodore ­Dreiser. And in a situation verging on slapstick, a desperate Tsiang finally found his work recommended to an important publisher, Richard Walsh, who happened to be married to Pearl Buck. Unfortunately, in Tsiang’s novel “China Red,” he had “likened Buck’s work as America’s favorite China expert to prostitution,” and had also attacked Buck’s husband. Walsh rejected Tsiang’s books.