H. T. Tsiang on the set of “Kraft Mystery Theatre.” Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

In the nineteen-thirties, “The Good Earth,” by Pearl S. Buck, was inescapable. The tale of a noble Chinese farmer and his struggles against famine, political upheaval, and personal temptation, the book was an immediate success upon publication, in 1931. Buck was born in West Virginia, but she was raised in rural China, the daughter of American missionaries, and she resisted the sense of Christian superiority many within her circle felt toward the “heathen” Chinese. “When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings,” she later recalled. Her sympathetic backstory gave “The Good Earth” a rare kind of authority: it was billed as an authentic tale of a distant, windswept China, but its author was a white American, and it told the kind of story that Americans grappling with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl wanted to hear—of hard work, perseverance, and triumph in the face of natural disaster and corruption.

At the time, China, for most Americans, was a wondrous abstraction, an inscrutable assemblage of four hundred million future Christians, consumers, or citizens, depending on your game. Promise on this scale required experts and explainers; it required prophets. “The Good Earth,” and its Academy Award-winning 1937 film adaptation, established Buck as one of America’s most prominent voices on all things Chinese, an informal position she would hold for decades. She nurtured her authority within this world with care, becoming an outspoken advocate for China’s poor and producing a remarkably steady output of novels and reportage. She also used her fame to promote the work of others, through her publisher, the John Day Company, which began prioritizing books about Asia after Buck’s pathbreaking success.

To anoint an expert is also to draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge. Inevitably, there are stories that get erased, perspectives that are overlooked, possibilities that are made to seem crazy or impossible. The same year that “The Good Earth” was released, a New York-based writer from China named H. T. Tsiang self-published an epistolary romance called “China Red,” in which Chi and Sheng, a pair of Chinese lovers separated by political ideology and the Pacific, slowly drift apart. In contrast to Buck’s sentimental hit, “China Red” was offbeat and sarcastic, critical of overeducated Chinese élites and clueless Americans alike. Publishers weren’t interested; the back cover of the paperback features a series of lukewarm and dismissive lines from the letters they sent him.

By the time he wrote his next novel, in 1935, Tsiang had begun hawking his self-published books by hand in Greenwich Village. His eccentric approach to self-promotion caught the attention of Rion Bercovici, a writer for The New Yorker, who wrote a Talk of the Town story about Tsiang for the magazine. While writing his new book, the piece explained, Tsiang had lived in a New Jersey “chop-suey palace” owned by a friend, who provided Tsiang with everything he needed: “a typewriter, an occasional dish of chow mein, and plenty of Chinese brandy.” Occasionally, Chinese friends proud of Tsiang’s literary ambition would chip in fifteen or twenty dollars to help with costs, and he remained hopeful that a career as a writer was in the offing. His second book was titled “The Hanging on Union Square: An American Epic,” and it recounted a hellish night in the life of Mr. Nut, an oblivious American dreamer wandering the streets of Depression-ravaged Manhattan. When Tsiang pressed a copy of it into Bercovici’s hands, he bragged that his next novel, “Shanghai-New York-Moscow,” would be about a coolie: “Somewhat like ‘The Good Earth,’ but much better.”

But for the next few years Tsiang became fixated on the idea that Buck and her powerful friends were the gatekeepers preventing him from joining the newly vibrant—and profitable—conversation on the future of China and the United States. He lobbed literary spitballs from afar, hoping to catch someone’s attention. When that didn’t work, he took his free-form approach to art, politics, and identity to more hostile extremes, having characters in his novels attack his rivals for him. At times, Tsiang seemed, like his fictional creation, a mere “nut,” alone in the streets. But the American epic of his own life would become far stranger than anything he dreamed up in his novels, taking him from the streets of New York to an Ellis Island detention hall, to Hollywood, and, finally, to a file buried deep in the archives of the F.B.I. He was not one of the mellow, temperate Chinese from Buck’s novels. Rather, he was a combative and independent thinker, one who imagined a future where he might float free of the categories that restrained him. And he tried to write that future into existence.

Tsiang didn’t come to the United States to become a writer. He was born in 1899, in a small village in the Kiangsu province of China, not far from where “The Good Earth” is set. His father died when Tsiang was nine, and his mother died four years later. He earned a scholarship to a teacher’s school, and then another to Southeast University, in Nanjing, where he took courses on political economy and acquired a relatively decent grasp of English. After graduating, in 1925, he took a post as aide to the secretary of Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader who had overthrown the Qing Dynasty, in 1911, and established the Republic of China in its place.

The twists and turns of Tsiang’s life reflected the challenges facing modern China. From afar, the solution may have seemed as simple as China breaking from its insular past—but for those within the government, like Tsiang, the logistics of regime change meant a perpetual state of anxiety. After Sun’s death, and the subsequent assassination of the Kuomintang party leader Liao Zhongkai, fears arose of an effort to purge the government of leftist sympathizers. Following an unsuccessful bid to emigrate to the Soviet Union, in 1926, Tsiang fled to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University. He continued toeing the Party line, editing and writing anti-Communist editorials for a Bay Area newspaper produced for Chinese immigrants. But he grew frustrated with the paper’s conservatism. (Or maybe, as Bercovici guessed in The New Yorker, he simply realized that “being anti-Communist didn’t pay.”) He then helped found an independent weekly called the Chinese Guide in America, which was critical of the Chinese government. Tsiang formally broke from the ruling Kuomintang Party in 1927, and he organized rallies along the West Coast targeting the Party’s increasingly conservative leadership. Eventually, an angry mob of Party loyalists in the Bay Area beat up Tsiang and the staff of his weekly, spelling the end for the Chinese Guide.

Tsiang moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia University, taking courses in law, economics, and history. He became fascinated with the proletarian art movement, and began writing poetry about the Chinese revolution and its relationship to the working-class struggle in American cities, which he published, in English, in the Daily Worker and the New Masses. He wrote op-eds, gave speeches on China’s conservatism, and acted in local theatre productions. At night, he washed dishes in a Greenwich Village night club. His interest in returning to China faded. He wanted to make a life for himself in America.