The Hanging on Union Square

by H.T. Tsiang, Hua Hsu (Introduction), Floyd Cheung (Afterword)

In Depression-era New York, Mr Nut is an oblivious American everyman, who wants to strike it rich. Over the course of a single night he meets a cast of strange characters - disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women and pesky authors - all of whom eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations to become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive and suffused with revolutionary fervour, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Literature, China, 20th Century, School

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Poet, playwright, and novelist. Hsi Tseng Tsiang (H. T. Tsiang) was born in China in 1899 and came to America as a child. He was involved with the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, and self-published a number of books which he would hawk at downtown political meetings. Tsiang also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.

Reviews

[Caroline]

Not what I expected. I thought it would be another tale of an immigrant from China in the first half of the twentieth century. That is the background of the author.

But no. This is a radical, experimental novel using absurdity, Socialist Realism, disconnected episodic prose interrupted with poetry, and other techniques to raise consciousness and promote revolution. But it is also a hilarious, emotional, carefully crafted work that challenges and delights a reader. The protagonist is an Everyman, evolving from accepting to critical to revolutionist as he encounters embodied representatives of capitalist, sexual, and criminal predators on the working class and unemployed New Yorkers of the 1930s. The setting is the milieu of tenements, cafeterias, movie theaters, risqué clubs, and Communist organizing events in New York City, all around Union Square. And lots of sidewalks, where the unemployed and hungry walk endlessly.

Tsiang was born in 1899 in rural China, educated at Southeastern University on scholarship, and was a rabble-rouser from day one. He worked for the Kuomintang, but emigrated to the US after Liao Zhongkai (leader of the leftist branch in the split that occurred after Sun Yat-Sen died) was assassinated. He was able to skirt the Chinese Exclusion act by enrolling at Stanford University. Tsiang continued to promote Chinese leftist politics in California as well. Under threat again, he went to New York City and enrolled at Columbia. He continued his efforts, although in more literary modes. First came poetry, then novels he had to self-publish as they found no press that thought they were viable. Later he moved back to California and worked in theater and film as an actor. To his last day he was a radical. The afterward cites friendships with Langston Hughes, Rockwell Kent, and other leftist writers and thinkers.

There is a very good afterword by Floyd Cheung that describes how Tsiang’s work reflects a variety of stylistic choices. The novel is a sort of mash-up of Socialist Realism, the Collective Novel, agit-prop theater, epic, and ‘the principle of nalai zhuyi, or strategic appropriation from other writers, formulated by the influential Chinese author and literary theorist Lu Xun.’ Cheung makes it clear that what seems like the protagonist’s simplicity (and was taken as the author’s naive writing at the time) was in fact a conscious decision that is critical to the humor and the theme.

The style is such a perfect match for an ever-moving and changing, ruthless New York that it made me think of Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California. They are totally different in style, but just as Tsiang’s jerky kaleidoscope of different colored stylistic snippets suits his big-city story, so Norris’s lyric naturalism suited his tale of injustice about the farmers against the railroad in central California in early 1900. Naturalism seems so suited to the forces of nature and the iron beast racing across country. There is no nature (other than cold and snow) in the city, and no production. Just politicians and business conniving and workers inching toward awareness, with stress and hunger chopping up their perceptions. Perfect match of subject and style.

Well worth a look.

Reading a Century Project 1935

[Chris Molnar · Rating 4 out of 5]

H.T. Tsiang's 1935 novel, originally rejected by every publisher and printed by the author himself, has finally gotten the Penguin Classic treatment, an astounding reversal of fortune for a seminal Asian-American work unlike anything you've ever read. Written almost allegorically, it slips the bounds of that genre with a provocative, complex approach to politics, class and race that is just as relevant and hilarious today. The riots, desperation, evictions, demeaning gigwork, misplaced capitalist pride, socialist organizing and police infiltration in Tsiang's Union Square are eerily similar to our Union Square today.

What makes this book so durable is the way it refuses to be pigeonholed - young authors take note. You cannot say that Tsiang is for or against communism, or writing a comedy or a drama, and not in a wishy-washy way. Rather, he is deeply, playfully and imaginatively thinking about the world as he sees it, looking at his characters with stern, unbiased affection, and allowing the world its irreducible contradictions. The cast may have silly names and appear to be taking roles in a didactic sermon, but as you read you discover that the sermon has no answers, and the final denouement is so profound and gut-wrenching that it dissolves any attempt at reduction.

Because of all this, the questions still linger today, and are just as if not more urgent. How we can we help the neediest? What are they to do? Are the pleasures our capitalist society affords inherently twisted? Do they corrupt any attempt to transcend or destroy them? Is there another option? Is the idea of another option moot? These things will stick with you during and after your travel with this gimlet-eyed genius, and I sincerely hope he will influence a new generation of writers to pen novels that have this kind of bone-deep lucid originality and experimental fuck-all.

[Shelley Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deserves to be more well-known. It's a story set in the Depression, focusing on a guy sitting in a restaurant who gets a bill for 10 cents, but he's lost a nickel and only has 5 cents. So he sits there all day long trying to find his lost nickel and trying to borrow a nickel from someone else in the restaurant. The story develops from there involving all the people he meets while he's seeking the extra 5 cents to pay his bill....

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After every publishing house he tried rejected this book, HT Tsiang self-published it and excerpted their rejections as blurbs. Absolute madman.

Idk what i was expecting, but it sure wasn't this. Big "Lucky Jim" and "Miss Lonelyhearts" vibes, but take the wackiness up to 11 and make the terrifyingly-real scenes way more discomforting.

[alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confederacy of Dunces for communists.

[helia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hsi Tseng Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square interweaves genres and styles in a genial collage that lays bare the social and economic processes that lead to false consciousness. All the while bawdy humour, rife with transparent innuendos, creates a working-class realism. The novel blends epic theatre, satire and socialist realism. Each ‘act’ is preceded by an agitprop verse that spectacularises suffering in depression era America and forefronts the communist vision of international class struggle. The reader follows Mr. Nut’s bildung from a worker with aspirations of upwards social mobility and bourgeois assimilation, to a series of financial mishaps that render him homeless yet ultimately class conscious. Mr Nut is the proletariat ‘everyman’; he frequents communist cafés, is tongue-tied when someone is trying to sell to him and exhaustively perambulates New York city with much to say about the paradoxes of the dominant narrative.

The revolutionary dialectics do not forgo a joyous read. Characters are named according to their univocal trait. They caricature themselves to express disapprobation at the landlord class or feign stupidity to the monopoly capitalists attempting to exploit them. Stubborn, a young member of the communist party, effaces her femininity to procure the respect of the political circle she operates in. She informs her male counterparts of her sexual neutrality through stubbornness, and it is only through exceeding her quota of recruitments and outperforming her peers, that she is able to survive within the milieu. Amongst other characterological dramas that play out in the novel, individual psychology is represented as a product of the macro-cultural economy. Economic depression is linked to mental depression. Somatic advertising is littered around the metropolis:

“Try my pill – New Deal!
Hello,
Everybody:
How do you feel?” (95)

This contends with the post-Freudian drive to psychopathologise the masses and influence customer behaviour based on targeting repressed drives. The micropolitics of desire have been taken up by Anti-Oedipus which configures desire as inextricably linked to mechanisms and cycles of production. The Hanging on Union Square appears to prefigure criticisms of late capitalism today:

“It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticising mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”
(Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 31)

The depersonalisation of the mental realm of the characters -all flat and under- developed- reflects Tsiang’s own alienation. Tsiang was able to stay under the radar of McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s despite his revolutionary romanticism. Persistently hounded by immigration charges and pursuing a career in Hollywood -playing prescriptive racist stereotypes on screen- potentially devalued his influence as a radical in the white American gaze. Contemporaneous reductive sinophobic readings of his work would seem to indicate as much. His deceptively simple syntax, staccato-like dancing subject and ribaldry was interpreted by the New York Herald Tribune as “naïve, not desperate and hardboiled” in 1935. Tsiang was intimately aware of the identity white hegemony imbibed on him as a Chinese worker. However, the association with the proletariat was one he championed in his art, identifying himself with Mr. Nut. The epigraph:

“What is said
Says
And says more
Than what is said” SAYS I,

questions appearances as the parameter of self and begs a historical materialist reading of identity politics.

The queer radicalism in The Hanging on Union Square , a corollary of working-class subcultures, reveals the giant fraud perpetuated by heteronormative capitalist culture. It seems to me a mockery of liberalism, which purports to allow everyone into the fold of wealth. Tsiang anticipates the politics of performance and consumerism through gender performativity. The paratextual performance of the novel as political mobilisation, and the documenting of proletariat ascension through fiction, disrupts the stylistic flow much like it does the endless concentric circles of capitalist definition.

Nut’s private homoerotic stay with an old man is proto-romantic in the sense that the latter only wishes to hold him. Nut’s sense of obloquy is pronounced, and he disdains the gesture despite the obvious harmlessness. Ratsky’s sexual sadism – proceeded by his partnership with Mr. System and the hanging spectacle on Union Square- is lauded by the masses due to the projected monetary profit. Bourgeouis realism placed emphasis on the nuclear family and heterosexuality as the foundation and value-system of middle-class growth. The illogic of US capitalism, based on a libidinal economy and power fantasies, is exposed in Tsiang’s staging of the burlesque subcultures that made up proletariat life.

The public self is ritualised daily humiliation. The aesthetics of Tsiang’s novel has much to do with the historical processes of abstraction from social exchange and the private self. The rejection of ‘high’ stylisms, characterised by opacity and less so by comedy, has led to its dismissal in the study of modernisms. However, this novel is far from radical pamphlet politics and displays an extraordinary prescience in predicting the advent of consumer capitalism and its progeny. Tsiang’s political knowledge, and his marginalisation as a first-generation immigrant, has produced an astute analysis of the inconsistencies in the rhetoric of authoritative governance.

[isaac · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Disco Elysium, chances are you'll like this

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

As it is written in the introduction to this book, reading this is like stepping inside someone else's hallucination. It is very odd, and I still can't quite figure out what it is that I read.

[sabine · Rating 2 out of 5]

the hanging on union square was on my tbr because i loved hua hsu's stay true and he wrote the introduction to hanging. alas, h.t. tsiang proves that i am not the only bad writer who happens to be chinese american. good to have some representation, i guess.

the book is highly readable but cartoonish, mesmerizing only in its repetition. i understand that tsiang wants to make a point, but he sacrifices literary integrity on the altar of political messaging. not going to write a full three paragraphs for this one.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel (174 pages of text) aligns with the satirical work of George Schuyler's 1931 Black No More; it plays broadly but bitterly as a critique of class and limitations of social movement on American bodies. The last fifteen pages are especially biting, offering the connective tissue to texts as varied as John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, or Ann Petry's The Street.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is truly no other book like this.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite strange but in a cool way

[Derrick Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled across this at The Last Bookstore and immediately got pulled in. It’s a mix of the absurd and experimental that is extremely readable and easy to follow. Scorsese’s After Hours for the radical left. Also the funniest thing I’ve read in awhile. Highly recommend!

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

More accurately 3.5/5 stars.

A bizarre melange of style and form The Hanging On Union Square is indebted primarily to socialist realism/revolutionary romanticism and agitprop drama (both contemporary to Tsiang in New York where he was living as a leftist agitator and student). I'm not sure I'd call the novel a success -- it is, however, at the very least an interesting mess of a book. The plot meanders in fits and starts, the characters are (unsurprisingly) fairly one-dimensional with names like "Mr. Nut," "Mr. System," and "Miss Digger" that clue you in to what their deal is pretty quickly. The main character "Mr. Nut" is a fairly typical everyman character and Tsiang works hard to make him as broad as possible. Whereas his previous books (especially China Has Hands) were focused on racial identification as well as class issues, here Tsiang largely drops the former in favor of the latter. Though its possible to read "Mr. Nut" as a version of the author himself, its probably much easier to read him as generically "American" and, by extension, presumably white. Tsiang's message about class and capitalism is at the forefront of the novel and its possible he wished to avoid turning away any potentially sympathetic working class readers.

The mix of humor and grotesque imagery and scenes makes for a novel that reads as more "modern" than its 1935 publishing date. A weird book -- its hardly a surprise that Tsiang had to self-publish his books. Nevertheless a partial triumph of sorts for a book its author ambitiously subtitles: "An American Epic."

[Lori T. Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Tsiang takes us on a surrealist’s journey in the LES during the Great Depression Era. We follow Mr. Nut, an everyday schmo just trying to make his way up in the world, but not quite catching a break. He is not a smart man, but he has his honor and his pride, which don’t always work in his favor. He is relatable, as are all of Tsiang’s symbolic characters—Ms. Digger, who only goes for rich men, Stubborn, who cannot keep a job because she doesn’t dig deep enough, Mr. Wiseguy, the opportunist always trying to get over, and Mr. System, the greedy businessman whom Mr Nut once wanted to embody, but isn’t so sure about anymore.

The novel is driven by story. It supposes how man decides to survive his class. Tsiang’s writing style is simple but earnest, like Mr. Nut himself. There is a bit of political poetry reminiscent of Chinese propaganda. However, the lack of literary form is not a distraction, as it could be to some. It is a freedom to address a message—that Capitalism is the root of evil in man. —That it causes men and women to lose their morals in their desperation to escape.
—That Communism just might be the solution to this whole mess. A thought-provoking read into the mind of a Chinese-American activist of the 30’s. Highly recommend.

[Jeffrey Dinsmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange but fascinating glimpse into an era in American history that feels suspiciously similar to our own. H.T. Tsiang was a Chinese-American poet and troublemaker who was active during the Great Depression. He self-published this book and printed the rejection letters on the inside cover. It's an absurd, funny, at-times chilling romp through the communist movement in 1930s New York -- which, from this book at least, seemed like a surprisingly strong movement. Imagine in 15 years Darryl Issa starts blacklisting actors who sympathized with Occupy New York and you'll have a pretty good frame of the times. As a novel, it had its problems, but as an encapsulation of an era and a point-of-view that I've never seen represented, it was a worthwhile read. I'll split the difference and give it 3 stars.

[Eric Slepak · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing The Hanging on Union Square, it's easy to see why publishers would have been reticent to take a chance on this book in 1935: it's a bold novel, even by today's standards. H.T. Tsiang's socialist (Communist? Leftist? Whatever, labels are dumb) allegory centering around protagonist Nut's travels around Union Square no doubt has renewed significance in the post-Occupy world--a timing which makes Kaya's publication of the novel far from coincidental. But more than topical plot, Hanging's allure lies in Tsiang's playful wordsmithing and experimentation with form (poetry! philosophical waxing! non-sequiturs!). Even if you don't care for the destination, the journey on which Tsiang takes you is darn enjoyable--and lamentably short.

[Rajiv Chopra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am going to go out and say it: this book is a wild romp. It is set in the Depression and traces the story of Mr Nut over the course of one day.
An unemployed man, he changes during the course of this day. The story will challenge you in many ways - it is a commentary on politics and the state of the times. I cannot make any comment on the subtle statements on any Chinese references, however, it is a satire on life. It is not your usual book, with a neat flow. The poems in the book once read carefully, will challenge you as well.

There is a cast of characters that will stay with you.

Go on, check it out!

H.T. Tsiang self-published this book, and I am not surprised that many traditional publishers rejected it. Despite that, it has been in print for 80 years

More power to him

[Jade Wootton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was awesome. One of the best fictional texts on class struggle I’ve ever encountered, due in large part to its meticulously constructed simplicity. As Irish poet and literary scholar Kenneth White wrote in his review for “The New Republic,” “the brutal gaiety of the book, the intentionally naive humor, gain it more effectiveness than might be found in a dozen soggy novels about the same situations.”

For more of my thoughts on this text, check out this essay I wrote, available on my Substack, which you can find here:

https://jadewootton.substack.com/p/re...

♥️

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty delightful, absurdist romp through what must then have felt like late-capitalist New York, in the 1930s, but which feels immediately recognizable to me, as a contemporary reader and critic of capital.

[Alistair Bartonn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a sequence of dreams & nightmares. A truly weird, forthrightly earnest piece of radical literature (indicated by having characters named Stubborn, Wiseguy, and Mr. System). More of an "experience" than maybe any other book I've read.

[Sue Whitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

set in (and written in) the 30's, recounting the dire consequences of poverty

[Jessica (JT) Thelen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun political romp!

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has incredible energy, and has the fragmentation that we associate with both modernism and with the contemporary. It also seems to me to be an American version of Petersburg by Andrei Bely.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know quite what to make of this book but it feels wildly modern to the degree I kept checking the copyright to see the original pub date

[rach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy fuck

[tara bomp · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If I can’t straighten out a professor-back, how am I going to straighten out this crooked world?”

“That is great. Sounds heroic. Oh, gee!” commented Miss Digger jokingly.

“I’m sorry. I meant how are we going to straighten out this crooked world,” added Stubborn apologetically.

“That’s right! We . . . the people . . .” Mr. Wiseguy interrupted with his Oxford and Harvard accent.

“No, I mean we, the WORKERS, are going to straighten out this crooked world,” said Stubborn scientifically.

“Don’t you see I am a Socialist. Here is the New Leader, our paper.”

“No, I would not read that yellow sheet,” replied Stubborn, revolutionarily.

“That is the trouble with you Communists. You’re so fanatic!” said Mr. Wiseguy.

This is a fascinating communist propaganda novel (with play elements?) from 1935 written by an exile from China in NYC that's also often very funny. It's good to read anyway as a novel but your enjoyment will be much higher if you're interested in the communist and history element. There's some gentle poking fun at the communist milleu (the groups of people insistent you donate For The Cause, the incredibly insistent and pushy paper seller, the educated people who slot themselves in as bureaucrats and don't do the work) that's very recognisable today, but it's obviously always done with love.

The characters are all archetypes: Mr Nut starts out as very similar to the IWW's Mr Block, believing that even while he's poor, soon he'll be a success story, before having a Damascene conversion and joining the side of the communists. Mr System is the landlord, the boss, the capitalist class in general. Mr Wiseguy a chancer, not wealthy but willing to do anything and scam his fellows to get thrown a dime by the capitalists. Miss Digger is probably the dodgiest portrayal, although it's not too bad - she's a courtesan/sex worker who refuses to show solidarity with other workers in the hopes that by sucking up to rich men she can earn a living in some way or another. Mr Ratsky is a gangster (he identifies himself as Al Capone on his introduction). Stubborn is the struggling communist, a hard party worker who struggles along looking after her ill family, committed to the struggle, in some ways *the* hero of the novel.

There's a lot of very funny parts here - the ending section of it (cw for hanging/suicide talk - there's also a suicide 2/3 of the way through) is absurd and hilarious and yet feels not far off what actually happens, A Modest Proposal for Depression-era America. The section where a boy tries to sell Mr Nut the communist newspaper for kids is very funny. There's lots of it scattered throughout the book and I laughed out loud quite a bit, especially the first third. There's also some serious talk about the horror of living in poverty in the era - lots of talk of suicide, people selling sex, evictions of dying people, doing anything for their next meal. And also surprisingly a couple of gay encounters - none consummated, but it's played off as fine, just Mr Nut not understanding the signs (he's often pretty naive).

Overall I really enjoyed my time with this book. There's some minor issues but it's a fascinating and funny look at a particular moment in history with a rousing, absurd, inspiring communist conclusion.

[Jack Lyell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hanging on Union Square invented the commie manic pixie dream girl like 80 years ahead of its time tankies come get your tea.

A weird one. Like genuinely, just,, so much is going on here,
In many ways ahead of its time but honestly in many others glued right to it. There are certain points of this book that do not age well at all and it's honestly one that I think works much better with reflection and a group of people who are willing to look over it with you. Interested to see how my personal book group is going to address it. The prose in the beginning with Mr. Nut's "songs" will be off-putting to some but if anything I'd find the cardboard (deliberately) characters more aggravating. Especially the one-off characters. You get into the third situation where Mr. Nut has unintentionally ended up either prostituting for someone or someone thinks he will pay them for prostitution and you want everyone to Keep It In Their Pants. There are FOUR Fs.

Will not be elaborating on that.

Similar to Ms. Lonelyhearts, this is one of those worlds where pretty much everyone is terrible or aggrieved in such a way as to be knocked over the head with their own victimhood and you just kinda sit in the corner and hyperventilate while the satire slaps you like a dead fish. Repeatedly. Hopefully your face can take a beating.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Self-published in 1935 by Chinese émigré and literary trickster Tsiang, whose wildly original novels withered in the shadow of Pearl Buck’s more commercially palatable Orientalism, this raucous proletarian satire is delightfully disarming. Thumbing his nose at the earnest social realism fashionable among leftist authors of the day, Tsiang (1899–1971) relates the progress of his bourgeois everyman Mr. Nut toward class-consciousness in a bracing, declarative style with an antic irreverence all its own. Questioning his allegiance to Mr. System’s pitiless capitalism, the down-at-heels Nut mulls the gangsterism of Mr. Wiseguy and the revolutionary zeal of Miss Stubborn, before conceiving the bold piece of suicidal agitprop referenced in the title. Redolent of the creative and political ferment of Depression-era New York, this transgressive mashup of Karl and Groucho Marx resurrects a marginalized Asian American provocateur far fresher and more entertaining than most of his contemporaries. A revelation.

[Vinay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proletarian literature, much similar to '1984' except it was set up in an depression-era American society. As you read, the characters, the dialogues, the satires all make sense. I have this feeling the author ought to have given more detailed conversations, this long short story makes a classic novella, not a novel!