Unpublished Counterpublics: H. T. Tsiang's Ellis Island Poems.

This article focuses on the proletarian Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang’s poetry composed during his detention at Ellis Island from 1940 to 1941, exploring how these works reflect his precarious immigration status and contribute to early Chinese American literary counterpublics. Tsiang, detained multiple times under the restrictive Johnson-Reed Act and Chinese Exclusion policies, sent poems and correspondence to the painter and author Rockwell Kent, with whom he developed a complex, reciprocal relationship. His poems critique US immigration practices and articulate shared experiences of exclusion among Chinese migrants and Jewish refugees, while his inventive use of mediums—such as a poem written on toilet paper—demonstrates his engagement with the materiality of writing under confinement. Despite Kent’s efforts to secure Tsiang a mainstream publisher, Tsiang’s work remained largely self-published or unpublished, embodying a proletarian literary circulation outside conventional US publishing institutions. The article situates Tsiang’s Ellis Island poetry alongside earlier Chinese immigrant poetry carved on Angel Island, framing both as part of a broader cultural resistance to exclusionary immigration regimes.