‘Try Something Different. Something Really Chinese’

The Happy Hsiungs recovers the lost histories of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain, who sought to represent China and Chineseness to the rest of the world. Shih-I shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first-ever Chinese stage director to work in the West End and on Broadway. Dymia was the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English in the 1950s. Through exhaustive research and fieldwork among surviving family members and friends, Diana Yeh traces the Hsiungs’ lives from their childhood in Qing dynasty China and youth amid the radical May 4th era to Britain and the USA, where they became highly celebrated figures, rubbing shoulders with George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Lin Yu Tang, Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson among others. Though fêted as ‘The Happy Hsiungs’, their lives ultimately highlight a bitter struggle in attempts to become modern.