H T Tsiang with actress Joanna Moore in a 1960s TV program

The Original is an immersive walking tour through Greenwich Village with Michael Salgarolo following the strange, hilarious life of Chinese American author H T Tsiang. Alternatively ignored and ridiculed in his own time, Tsiang is now known as a visionary forebearer of modern Asian American literature. His two major novels, The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and And China Has Hands (1937) challenged mainstream representations of Chinese Americans and presented a deeply unhinged satire of the American Dream. The Original explores how the cafeterias, hand laundries, and radical arts scene of the Depression-era West Village inspired Tsiang’s writing and made him an “original.”