C. T. Hsia, Who Brought Chinese Literature to the West, Dies at 92
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
JAN. 9, 2014
C.T. Hsia
C. T. Hsia, a scholar who helped introduce modern Chinese literature to the West in the 1960s, providing close analysis and the first English translations of writers who are now widely recognized, died on Dec. 29 in Manhattan, where he taught at Columbia University for three decades. He was 92.
His wife, Della, confirmed the death.
Dr. Hsia (pronounced shah) arrived in the United States in 1947 with a plan to study English literature and then return to China to teach it. By 1951 he had earned his doctorate at Yale, writing his thesis on the realist poet George Crabbe.
But while Dr. Hsia was studying in the United States, Mao Zedong was settling into power in China and purging the country of dissent and Western influences. Dr. Hsia decided to stay in America.
Unable to find a job teaching English, he joined a Korean War propaganda project, overseen by Johns Hopkins University, to help write a manual on China. The research took him deep into a topic he had largely ignored as an ambitious undergraduate in Shanghai: Chinese literature. In 1961 he produced his seminal work, “A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957.”
In 662 pages, the book offered extended English translations of novels that he then discussed using close textual analysis.
“It’s a singular work,” said Wei Shang, who teaches premodern Chinese literature at Columbia. “He was the first to write the literary history so that other scholars have something to rely on. Although they may disagree with him, they cannot ignore him.”
To his critics, Dr. Hsia was improperly using Western standards to judge works produced in an ancient Asian nation. And the new canon of Chinese literature he sought to create, they said, was limited by his political biases. Why, they asked, was he so dismissive of the leftists who supported the rise of Communism? Why did he pay so little attention to Lu Xun, considered by many the father of modern Chinese literature and much admired by Mao? Why so much praise for Eileen Chang, a largely nonpolitical and relatively low-profile writer at the time?
“He ignores the fact that new China is not just an unfortunate accident but the reckoning of history,” A. C. Scott, a China scholar working at Columbia, wrote in The New York Times in 1961, though he called the book “a helpful guide.”
But the book was undeniably influential. Dr. Hsia had essentially helped create a new academic field. He was hired to teach at Columbia that same year.
Dr. Hsia, colorful and contentious, did not back down from critics. He argued that Chinese writers suffered from an “obsession with China” and that they did not embrace universal human concerns that transcend China’s borders.
Ms. Chang, who wrote “The Rice-Sprout Song,” “Naked Earth” and other novels, was dismissed by some as a pulpy romance novelist. (She died in 1995.) Dr. Hsia admired her partly because she focused on themes of everyday life without taking political stands.
“That was truly a radical judgment by any standard, and yet the next 40 years saw Eileen Chang rise to the highest highs,” said David Der-wei Wang, a professor of Chinese literature at Harvard whom Dr. Hsia mentored. “Everybody loves Eileen Chang nowadays.”
Hsia Chih-tsing was born on Jan. 11, 1921, in what was then a modest section of Shanghai. His father, Ta-tung, was a banker before the Communist takeover in 1949. Dr. Hsia and his older brother, Tsi-an, both became interested in English literature when they were teenagers. Dr. Hsia graduated from Hujiang University in 1942 and taught at Peking University before receiving a grant to study at Yale.
In addition to his wife, the former Della Wang, whom he married in 1969, his survivors include two daughters, Joyce McClain and Natalie Hsia; a son, Ming; a sister, Yuying Xia; and four grandchildren.
After “A History of Modern Chinese Fiction,” Mr. Hsia went on to write other influential books, including, in 1968, “The Classic Chinese Novel.” He also wrote essays about Chinese poems, plays and prose from beyond the modern area that was his specialty.
Much of his work was banned in China for decades. A heavily abridged version of his first book was published in mainland China in the mid-1990s.
In later years, Dr. Hsia made a point of recognizing some impressive leftist writers whose work, he said, he had been unfamiliar with when he wrote his 1961 book. Yet he never warmed to Lu Xun.
“Even in his final years,” Dr. Wang said, “he still said, ‘What a waste of talent.’ ”
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