The story of how a modern author becomes highly commodifiable celebrity brand, reaches its apogee not in the contemporary age of social media fame (wanghong), but rather three-quarters of a century earlier – with Republican China's best-known and best-selling author Zhang Henshui. To be sure, Zhang was not the first Chinese writer to make a living by his words, or to find himself marketed as a brand name, or who enjoyed a penchant for self-invention. Yet Zhang in effect was the first multi-media author 'event', a fortuitous conjunction of novel forms of mass media technologies, a burgeoning news culture and fascination with celebrity. In his multiple roles as savvy newshound, an everyman tour guide with average tastes but with seismographic sensitivity to changing sensibilities, he became the first transmedial author avant la lettre, especially with the 1930 serial publication of Fate in Tears and Laughter.
The focus of this discussion on Zhang centers in particular on the parasocial relationships that his readers projected onto him – he was their dear and intimate friend. I am fascinated by the ways in which the invention of his persona seemed to be part of a larger media ecology and process often wholly out of the author's control, manufactured out of a web of modern technologies of celebrity: tabloid presses, reprinted fan correspondence, counterfeit selves generated by forged publications and faked memoirs – a harbinger of 21st century mediated intimacies.
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