the third volume of Hen Su by Jo O'Bricn Bertrand Russell has said that he learnt more sbout Chins from reading the first volume, "The Crippled Tree", than from living there » yesr. How do we learn a national history, especially one as intric*te ms that of Chins, without years of study? One of the ways is to find a Hon Suyin = someone with a thorough knowledge of her own country, who can so sensitively exploin how this history moulded her personal life, She was born in 1916, the child of a mrriage between a women of the Belgian middle class, and a Chinese who, by tradition, should have been destined for a classical education, but beceuse of the decision of the Chinese government of the time to train more scientists, was sent to Belrium to become a railway engineer The marriage was scorned by both families and races, It did not have its own strengths or serenities to compensate for this social ostraeism. Msrguerite Denis wis taken back to Ghina by Cou Yentung. Much of Han Suyin's material for the first two volumes comes from the records made by her father of his life. Excerpts from his diary are included in the first book, and Chou Yentung tells us what kind of a China he took his European wife to: "Because of childhood happiness 1 wronged my wife, for when I met her and told her of China, it was of this China, the China seen on Delft porcelain, a China of palaces and bridges, of satins and gardens, of mountains and rivers wildly beesustiful, of obedient servants and benevolent kinsmen, which I deseribed to her. I was only describing my prosperous, secure family. I thought it China, "But the Chine that Marguerite had to try to live in was "Misery, desolation everywhere. The streets of Chungking were noisamo with people in rags, Everywhere we wont, like flies the beggars followed, running unger our feet, exhibiting their sores, Marguerite screamed ss a women thrust a fetid, stinking bag of pus under her eyes; it wos 2 ehild, feceless, the nose nd eyes gone into one running, putrid sore, The houses crumbled, children ren -fter rats to eat them." As a child of the civil servant class, Chow Yentung hed besn taurht the Chinese classics; he had not been taught to motice, let alone consider, the mass of his own people. Just as they rode on the shoulders of the ecrolics in their sedan chairs, so as a class they rode 2bove the peasonts, the dignified, unsesing ones, bringing death wherever they went. "When our cheir besrers lifted us on to their shoulders and trotted to the hills in the summer, they had to stop and smke every four hours, otherwise they could not crrry us. All esrcund us we spread 2 lavish death; too mch work, too little to sat, and opium." Spring in the hills would be recorded by the young scholar Chou in poetry "a twinkle of butterflies, in sudden gale, pelted above the young bean fields, and we went home to find silken words about this spring episode," Delicate words, Sensitive momory. As Han Suyin sys, her father's writing is like a "landscape painted by a Taoist artist on 2 temple wall." Her own words are Eurasian; sometimes delicate, always vigorous. Her childhood Was tumltuous = a raging mother, trapped in poverty and loneliness, and a silent father, the victim of being Chinese in China at a time when the only thing that counted was to be European, a member of the supreme "white" class, gun runners, opium vendors, missionary clique. Thoroughly she explains the cataclysmic history of China, for years domin-ted by British, German, French, Belgien and American interests. And the private family life she links so cleverly and rightly to the public life - the state of China which dictated the difficulties under which she was to grow up, a Eurasian, part of neither race, living in poverty, surrounded by squalor we can not even comprehend (in Peking 10,000 people would die of exposure in one winter week) and always Mama shouting at Popa "I will go back. I don't want anything to do with this vermin, these yellow vermin of yours." In the young child Han Suyin "a fragmentation of the total self occurred,..cthers born like her in two worlds, who chose not to accept this splitting, fragmentation of mm-lithic
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identity into several selves, found themselves leter unable to face the controdic-
tions latent in their wn beings. Consistency left them crippled for the world's
incoherence." Because of this frapmentation of self she is now able to relate
East and West, their present and their future, Belonging to both and neither she
understands how they have been linked in the past through exploitatien of East by
West, and can wonder whether they will ever be reconcilable,
Throughout her teens she rejected her Chineseness, tried to become totally Euro-
pean, By 20 this position was reversed, She had begun studying in Belgium , and
China was at war, this times with the threat coming from Japan. She now had an
overwhelming need to be Chinese. She travelled back to China in 1936 for no other
reason than to be with her country in its desperation, On board ship she met Tang
Paohuang, her future husband, and so began the "Birdless Summer". "The fundamental
ambivalence of our relationship, its extremes of vehamence and hatred, passion and
love and cruelty, its obsessional force, hobbled me for a long time," For nine
years she bowed to Fao's concept of what is woman in an effort to be reborn "Chinese",
Of the aristocratic, military class, educated at Sandhurst, Pao was also returning
to China in her time of need, to serve with Chiang Kai Shek's elite corps, As a
class they had been "negated" for years - their role as overlords, masters of the
Chinese people had been taken over by the whites, They retaliated with extreme
"Chineseness" - the Confuscian Ancestral Virtues, reverence for elders, Chastity
and Obedience of Women, and the notion of woman as property, Pao lectured Han
Suyin - to help China her role mst be that of becoming the virtuous Chinese
woman; so he beat her, tore up her books, and, most crippling of all negated her
capacity for useful work with the Ancient Virtue "A woman of talent is not a vir-
tuous woman." All the time that she longed to do something to help China her hus-
band refused her permission to work, Instead she mst spend her youthful energy
in helping him to climb the hierarchy of Chiang's farcical army - an army which
almost never fought, was officered by profiteers, and in which "Mein Kampf" was
prescribed reading, Chiangs policy was "prevarication, compromise and concession
towards Japan; hope of aid from the Western powers; maintainance of the ruling
groups in their immediate moneyed interests and civil war to "eradicate Communism",
Meanwhile the Communists were resisting the Japanese invasion, by December 1938
having six anti-Japanese bases, A guerilla band called the Pearl River detachment
was formed from the Red Army. They started off with only eight guns which worked,
were joined by students, labourers, and overseas Chinese from Hongkang, and by the
end of 1939 had liberated an area of 200,000 people, "From 1939-45 the conclusive
test of strength between the two ideas, the two perspectives, (Chiang's and the
Commnists) was played out, And the great power of a people's war was proved,
where the people, mobilised, educated, become politically conscious, accomplish
miracles of fighting by their own volition, where they are "water for the guerrilla
fish", where every man woman and child is a combatant."
But humiliated, beaten, bound up by the whirlwing of Pao's xenophobia, the bride
Han Suyin could only half sense the reality of the political situation. At times
Pao and his fellow officers bemoaned the chaos in which they were involved but
"their sudden flashes of consciousness were quickly extinguished in the egotistical
pursuit of their careers...One could occasionally detect in their talk a sneaking
respect, an envious fear of the "red Bandits" who encouraged slave girls to rebel
against their masters, did not insist on chastity, and incited the peasant women
to stand up and denounce their husband's misdeeds. "Little girls of eight were
sold into brothels and that was as it should be, and Pao would talk of virtue,
integrity, the duty of obedience, discipline saving the country, while the conscripts
walked by us on the roads, a. stinking swaying mob of men, gaunt with hunger, roped
like beasts, while three out of four of the Chinese soldiers that died, died of
hunger and disease because the officers pocketed the money for their food."
v Desperately trying to find the reality of the situation, ignorant of, and half fearing Comminism; intuitively revolted by the motives. and actions of the Chiang army; unbalanced by relentless criticism from the husband for her “unchineseness"; torn by alternate searching for, and rejection of the Confuscian concept of womanhood, what reality did Han Suyin find to keep her sane through this "birdless summer"? It was the reality of the coolie, the sureness that the future of China did not rest on her shoulders, on Pao's or on anyone else's, but on that of "the coolies, man labour, carrying, pulling, tugging, carrying the war and the festering corruption of their masters on their backs, their flesh wasted, their muscles and eyes bulging with life-devouring animal labour,..And yet in spite of this, what vastness, what sense of power from the grey and teeming life which laboured, laboured." When at last she was allowed by Pao to train as a midwife, she was to recognise another reality. A girl child would be born and be rejected by the mother: she dars not show it her husband, he would be angry; it mist be suffocated, strangled, pushed into a water bottle, or just abandoned, it was a girl, worthless, The collective wrong born by woman under Confuscianism made them a subjected mass like the coolies - but in their collective strength lay their future. "The very ideogram for "woman" denoted subjection, the bar across, horizontal burden of her heavy breasts, the protruberant hips and the crossed bow legs, not quite quadrijedal, but almost, Since then I have often thought that in today's China, with the Cultural Revolution which compels all to weigh in the light of reason our secret clingings to primeval devices of subjection, the first thing that should be done is to eradicate totally, to change totally, some of those odious ideograms which are exact pictures of two millenia of feudal oligarchy, four millenia of woman's inferiority." Han Suyin triumphs in her sense of history. The Chinese have always had this historical sense = that is, an understanding that what happens on a large scale. influences private life: "passive or active, all participated in the history of their country. Hence the Revolution has made no break in the loom of chronicle, there is no chasm between past and present as some Europeans imagine. The Communist Party claims itself heir and descendant of the Taiping; the Teiping themselves were an immense peasant uprising successive to so many others which occurred sporadically through the centuries, Always there is a progenitor, and the shuttle goes back and forth weaving the centuries into a wholeness, The pattern changes but it is one loom, one fabric, one uninterrupted thread: the history of a people. Like the Great River, it moves on though the landscape changes." (The Crippled Tree) The history of China is her history, so its complexities, its contradietions, are an integral part of her thought and words. In the first two volumes her lancuage is so vital - it has absorbed everything from the rhythms of the labour of the poor, to the delicateness of genteel family life. In "Birdless Summer" it is flatter, less rhythmic and colourful. As a "Confuscian" women she had had her receptivenss to atmospheres dulled, She was enacting out the history of so many women; trying to understand. her world by "looking" through another person, trying to relate herself to the historical process through a man. It was like putting on someone else's spectacles and wondering why their "vision" did not accord with yours, But truly in "Birdless Summer" has explored the fundamental problem already recognised by the Chinese, that of why we (both men and women) cling to subjection. She is not uncritical of the Cultural Revolution. In its extremes she recognises a self-righteousness which is so reminiscient of the old Confuscian moralising. She shrinks from it. But she also knows that it is considering a most fundamental relationship between ourselves and our history - why we accept situations which are not beneficial to us. "The Cultural Revolution compels all to weigh in the light of reason our secret clingings to primeval devices of subjection." That is a-thing for all of us to ponder,