Half of a Lifelong Friendship
By Susan Blumberg-Kason //
The world knew him as C.T. Hsia, the man who brought Chinese literature–and Eileen Chang–to the West. But to my dad, Avrom Blumberg, he was his old friend, Jonathan.
In 1949, at the age of 21, my dad started graduate school at Yale. He quickly befriended another graduate student named Jonathan Hsia, although they were in different departments–my dad in the chemistry department and Jonathan in the English department. Jonathan wasn’t just any student though: he was the best English student Yale had ever seen.
Jonathan had moved from China in 1947, leaving his teaching job at Peking University to begin a Ph.D program in New Haven. He had left a country in turmoil. World War II had ended a couple of years earlier, but the Chinese civil war had started back up and there was no sign of things settling down anytime soon.
My dad had never lived outside of his Orthodox-turned-secular Jewish home of Albany, New York and its surroundings until he moved to New Haven, so to him, Jonathan seemed extremely worldly. And he was. Born to a Shanghai banker in 1921 and raised in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, Jonathan became interested in English literature as a teenager. He studied at Shanghai College, established by American Baptists, and taught at Peking University for a number of years before heading off to the U.S.
The year they met, Jonathan was twenty-eight to my dad’s twenty-one. My dad averted conflict and confrontation at all costs, but Jonathan was always confident in speaking his mind. The two did share a similar sense of humor, joking around even when a situation called for a more serious response. It was perhaps their way of trying to make themselves and others not worry so much. Despite the differences, they formed a bond.
Jonathan had always planned to return to China and teach after completing his PhD. In the first part of the 20th century, it had become something of a tradition for Chinese intellectuals to study abroad—in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany– and then return to China to teach at the university level. But in May of 1949, news came that would change those plans, and Jonathan’s life.
My dad was with Jonathan when they heard the news that the Chinese civil war was over and the Communists had won. Jonathan froze. He turned to my dad, and told him that any chance of him teaching Western literature in China was all but dashed now. What’s more, he continued, he couldn’t even return to China: he knew that as an intellectual—especially in a field like Western literature—he would not be well-received in New China.
My dad would often talk about the impact of that day, years later, after I was born.
At the time, staying in the US may have seemed like the preferable choice after all the turmoil Shanghai and the rest of China had undergone, but it wasn’t easy for Jonathan, who had graduated in 1951. In 1950s America, even the best English student Yale had ever turned out found it almost impossible to find a job in his field.
No English department in the US would hire him because he was Chinese and spoke English with a slight accent. No matter how well he had done at Yale, universities just couldn’t get past their preconceived idea that only white people—and men at that—could teach in an English department.
So Jonathan found a job with The Johns Hopkins University working on a propaganda project during the Korean War. It was then that he changed his focus: he applied his knowledge and skills in English literature to Chinese literature, educating himself and writing a book on the topic. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957 would catapult him back into American academia and into a faculty position at Columbia University.
The book was the first of its kind: no one else had written a book in English on Chinese fiction. Hsia translated authors that had not previously been available in English and offered original literary criticism and insights, but it didn’t come without some controversy. Jonathan downplayed Lu Xun’s work, which he covered in 27 pages, saving his glowing praise for 43 pages on Eileen Chang, “the best and most important writer in China today”. No one in the US had heard of Eileen Chang then.
Yet even with this book, Columbia would not hire Jonathan to teach English literature, but instead offered him a position to teach Chinese literature. It had been a decade since he had graduated from Yale, so he accepted Columbia’s offer. C.T. Hsia, as he was known professionally, went on to become the most prominent Chinese literary critic not just in the US, but around the world.
As Jonathan’s career blossomed at Columbia, my dad was ending a ten-year job in a lab at the Mellon Institute, before it merged with the Carnegie Institute to become Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1963, my dad moved from Pittsburgh to Chicago to accept a teaching job at DePaul University. He and Jonathan had both married, but by the end of the 1960s, they would both find themselves re-marrying. My dad became a widower after his first wife died from breast cancer and Jonathan would divorce.
In 1968, Jonathan published The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. He would give this book—signed and stamped with his red seal—to my parents for a wedding present when they honeymooned in New York City in early 1969.
The two friends continued to keep in touch throughout the years and a couple months after I moved to Hong Kong in 1994 to start graduate school, my parents visited Jonathan and his wife, Della, in New York. Jonathan wrote on the back of the photo that he sent my parents: “Yale buddies some 40 years after,” and added:
All happy families are alike
because the husbands are Yale PhDs
& the wives are professional women.
My dad passed away at the age of 79 in 2007 and Jonathan two weeks shy of 93 in 2013. My dad always had lots of friends and was the type who could easily gather another person’s life story after just a few minutes after first meeting them. Yet my dad never spoke of any other grad school friend apart from Jonathan. The world would come to know him as C.T. Hsia, “the man who brought Chinese literature to the West,” as his New York Times obituary read. But to my dad, he would always be Jonathan.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old Shanghai (our January 2024 book club pick.). As she was growing up, Susan heard her dad’s stories of his friendship with C.T. Hsia, which helped form her interest in Old Shanghai. Following C.T. Hsia’s interest in Eileen Chang, Susan has reviewed a couple of her novels in the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog (https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/new-life-english-old-eileen-chang-novel/) and Cha: An Asian Literary Review (https://chajournal.blog/2018/11/07/little-reunions/) and has a special tagline in her blog about all things Eileen Chang! (http://www.susanbkason.com/?s=eileen+chang)