Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman by Da Zheng

Reviewed by: Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman by Da Zheng Susan Chan Egan (bio) Da Zheng. Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman. Foreword by Frances Wood. Epilogue by Deh-I Hsiung and Yimin Foo. Vancouver, Madison, Teaneck, and Wroxton: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020. xxv, 327 pp. Hardcover $120.00, isbn 978-1683931065. Hsiung Shih-I was hailed as the “Chinese Shakespeare” by The New York Times in 1935, on his arrival to launch his play Lady Precious Stream on Broadway after its spectacular run in London. But his star faded quickly from the literary firmament, and he spent the rest of his life trying to recreate the magic until death overtook him in 1991. There has been a recent surge of interest in Hsiung, starting with the 2010 publication of his reminiscences, Bashi huiyi (Reflection at Age Eighty), gathered in one volume by the literary historian Chen Zishan. Masters’ and doctoral theses probing the reasons for the play’s success ensued. Diana Yeh’s The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong University Press, 2014) attempts to situate the Hsiung family in England’s cultural terrain. This book is the first coherent account of Hsiung’s life and works. It is, as well, an important piece of theater history, and a saga of Chinese intellectuals caught unwittingly in the maelstrom of East–West relations. In his Introduction, Zheng Da states that the idea for the biography came from Hsiung’s daughter Deh-I, whom he had interviewed for his book on Chiang Yee (Rutgers, 2010). Deh-I promised him free access to the family papers. The work turned into a ten-year project, during which Zheng plowed through Hsiung’s writings (listed in the appendix), hunted down news reports and interviewed people on three continents. Zheng takes a nonjudgmental stance toward his subject. Aside from supplying some historical background, he relies largely on Hsiung’s own narratives unless there is evidence to the contrary. Although annoying at times, Hsiung’s habitual name-dropping shows us how his path intersected with some of the leading figures of his time, and his self-dramatization helps preserve the complexity of the events being recounted. Still, reading the book, the reader often yearns for a more critical point of view. Luckily, Zheng’s primary interlocutor, Deh-I, an Oxford-bred mathematician, does not appear to share the common Chinese reticence over tension and conflicts. The story that emerges is a nuanced one. That said, one wonders if it is necessary to devote the entirety of chapter 1 to Hsiung’s paternal family lore. As chapter 2 tells us, after his spendthrift father died when Hsiung was only three, he was raised singlehanded by his unusually learned mother, who supported herself and her children by running a private school out of the family study. She later taught at Nanchang’s first modern school for girls. Already a showoff, Hsiung, the smallest child in his class, would often let others underestimate him until an opportunity arose for him to dazzle them. [End Page 221] Chapter 3 traces Hsiung’s superb command of the English language back to the night classes he took at the local YMCA. He was among eight students from Jiangxi province chosen in 1914 to attend Tsinghua College in preparation for advanced education in the United States. But he was forced to quit the program when his mother died, whereupon he worked as a bookstore apprentice, boarding with an aunt who despised him. Thanks to financial help from Tsai Jinxiang—the principal of the school where his mother and then his sister taught—Hsiung was able to return to Beijing as an English major at the tuition-free Peking Higher Normal College. While still in college, he translated the Autobiography of his hero Benjamin Franklin who, like him, was once a poor apprentice. He also worked part-time at a theater that showed Hollywood films and staged Peking operas, which fed his life-long passion for the theater. Hsiung’s life between 1927 and 1932 is the subject of chapter 4. He married his benefactor’s daughter Tsai Daimei (“Dymia”) and taught in Nanchang before moving to...

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