The Hanging on Union Square, Paperback

A subversively comic, genre-bending satire of bourgeois life by an essential Chinese American voice

A Penguin Classic

It's Depression-era New York, and Mr. Nut, an oblivious American everyman, wants to strike it rich, even if at the moment he's unemployed, with no job prospects in sight. Over the course of a single night, in a narrative that unfolds hour by hour, he meets a cast of strange characters--disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women, pesky authors--who eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations for upward mobility and become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive, and suffused with revolutionary fervor, and culminating in a dramatic face-off against capitalist power in the figure of the greedy businessman Mr. System, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality. More than eighty years after it was self-published, having been rejected by dozens of baffled publishers, it has become a classic of Asian American literature--a satirical send-up of class politics and capitalism and a shout of populist rage that still resonates today.

Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with these four Penguin Classics:

America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (9780143134039)
East Goes West by Younghill Kang (9780143134305)
The Hanging on Union Square by H. T. Tsiang (9780143134022)
No-No Boy by John Okada (9780143134015)

About the Author:

H. T. Tsiang (1899-1971) was born in China and emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-seven. He studied at Stanford and Columbia, and while living in New York he wrote poetry and op-eds, acted in local theater productions, and washed dishes in a Greenwich Village nightclub. Faced with countless rejections from publishers, he self-published three novels, hawking them at downtown political meetings. He also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose, and in 1943 he staged a theatrical adaptation of The Hanging on Union Square in Los Angeles that counted Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, and Rita Hayworth among its audience members during its five-year run. He died in Los Angeles.

Floyd Cheung (editor, afterword, notes) is a professor of English and American studies at Smith College.

Hua Hsu (introduction) is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.