155+2+1 pp. 1 Illustration. (12mo), original pictorial wrappers. First Edition. With a later still photograph of Tsiang, playing a Mandarin magistrate in the 1945 film “China Sky”.
Rare first edition of the first novel by an American-born Chinese, as well as the first Asian American radical fiction.
All but forgotten until a recent literary resurrection, the eccentric Tsiang was a New York Greenwich village denizen when he began writing. The theme of his first novel was contemporary politics in war-torn China, as seen from the perspective of an unabashedly left-wing. Chinese American. Tsiang notes that some portions of the book appeared earlier in the New Masses and Communist Daily Worker, and the Prologue is a tribute to Lenin.
This was Tsiang’s second book and first novel, preceded by his 1929 Poems of the Chinese Revolution It was followed by his novels The Hanging on Union Square (1935), And China Has Hands (1937) and a 1938 play, China Marches On. He then gave up writing and turned instead to Hollywood, playing in 20 movies and another 20 TV series from 1943 to 1966.
