Following what I have elsewhere called “a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific” in American studies,Footnote ¹ Richard Jean So's work, Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network, develops the notion of a transpacific community as part of the American intellectual history and in light of a cultural network of US–China exchanges. It not only retrieves a forgotten chapter of American modernism informed and reshaped by transpacific movements and exchanges during the interwar period from the 1920s to the 1940s, but it also articulates its aesthetic, cultural, political, and technological implications against various historical backgrounds and across the fields of American studies, East Asian studies, Asian American studies, and media studies.

In selecting two Euro-American novelists and activists, two Chinese novelists, and one African American musician, So balances between aesthetics and politics, literature and arts, culture and technology, and foregrounds a politically progressive coalition of the transpacific, which fought against political persecution and institutional racism on both sides of the Pacific, and which the Cold War American state tended to forget and downplay. He begins by narrating the story of how American left-wing journalist and novelist Agnes Smedley and associates started a political campaign in North America to save the life of the Chinese left-wing novelist and activist Ding Ling, who had been thrown into jail by the Chinese Nationalist government in the 1920s. Through her transpacific advocacy and employment of the telegraph as medium to capture the political momentum, Smedley saved the life of Ding through her joint efforts with the Chinese activists and expanded the American Cultural Front into a genuine transpacific cultural front in the process.

In interpreting the Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck and her novel The Good Earth (1931), So moves beyond the critical models of postcolonial and Asian American studies, which reductively labeled her an orientalist, and argues that Buck and Smedley jointly transformed American perceptions of China and the Chinese in North America in the 1930s and the 1940s. Rather than resorting to a Eurocentric view of China, Buck takes the classic Chinese novel The Water Margin seriously and cultivates the notion of “natural democracy” from the novel's egalitarian social thinking vis-à-vis “Jeffersonian democracy” (44). Writing in “the Chinese idiom” but the English language, Buck's The Good Earth became a best seller of the transpacific from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, and generated a transpacific reading public, which would be willing to see the US and China through each other's eyes, particularly the mystified Chinese peasant class (74). So concludes that, because of Buck's cultural and political clout, she and her husband would successfully testify at the Congressional hearings and helped repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This transpacific community, So argues further, extends to encompass collaboration in fine arts and music between African American musician Paul Robeson and his Chinese counterpart, Liu Liangmo. From 1941 to 1943, Robeson not only performed the famous Chinese song Chee Lai!, which had voiced the Chinese determined resistance to Japan's ruthless aggression and massacre, but also articulated his profound empathy with the suffering Chinese, which So calls “pentatonic democracy” (83). Such a vision of democracy was echoed by the leaders at the Bandung Conference in 1955, but was removed from the records of the American civil rights movement, which So interprets as its investment in the American Cold War ideology.

So devotes two chapters to the Chinese novelists Lin Yu-tang and Lao She. In calling Lin the Republican Chinaman and defining his work in terms of typographic ethnic modernism, So explains why the once popular Chinese author of the transpacific has been forgotten by both US and Chinese literary historians and critics. Writing about literature and aesthetics in an apolitical fashion, Lin represents a modernist disposition and sensibility, which So interprets as “U.S. ethnic modernism” (122). So further describes Lin's work on a Chinatown family as an invention of Chinese America and attributes its success to an incipient form of the model-minority myth. Similarly, in his discussion of Lao She in terms of global propaganda and world literature, So analyzes why the novelist became another popular Chinese novelist in the US and how young intellectuals such as John Fairbank deployed State Department funds to facilitate productive transpacific cultural exchanges in the mid-1940s.

So critically reflects upon the significance of this group in terms of network and community and suggests that the harmonious and generative relations manifested between the US and China should define the future of the transpacific. His work exemplifies the paradigm shift.