The outlandishness of Han Suyin with particular reference to My House Has Two Doors

ABSTRACT

In 1956, Han Suyin made the first of many annual visits to the new republic of China. Despite her deep support for its achievements, she understood she would always be out of place were she to try and fit in with the post-Revolution state. The cost of conformity would be the erosion of her distinctive sense of identity, split as it was on account of her mixed lineage with its ambivalences and contradictions. It would mean the denial of her aspirations as a writer to speak to difference and beauty’s binding links with the outlandish. James Olney has argued that the “I” in autobiography “half discovers, half creates itself”. This article explores Han Suyin’s textual work and her self-fashioning, focusing upon My House Has Two Doors first published in 1980 as the fourth volume in the series China: Autobiography, History.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiography
• history
• self-making
• proteanism
• voice
• outlandishness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Han Suyin departed Britain with her daughter in late December 1948, arriving in Hong Kong on January 5, 1949. The move was made to be near “the New China the Revolution would bring forth” (Han [1980] 1982, 9–13). In 1952, after her marriage to Leon Comber, she left Hong Kong to reside in Johore, Malaya. Her first visit to the Republic took place in 1956. By 1965, she was persona non grata with the Singapore authorities. Banned together with her partner, Vincent Ruthnaswamy, from entering Malaysia and Singapore, she moved back to Hong Kong. An important reason for this was that “to write about China, I could not profitably live in Malaya” (480–485).

2. Now Johor Baru. The spelling of place names and Chinese names in this article follows Han Suyin’s text. Hence “Mao Tsetung” and not present-day “Mao Zedong”; “Chou Enlai”, not “Zhou Enlai”; “Tan Laksai”, not “Tan Lark Sye”.

3. See Destination Chungking (Han 1942), A Many-Splendoured Thing (Han [1952] 1954), and And the Rain My Drink (Han [1956] 2010). I count Destination Chungking as a novel here, but its precise genre is uncertain and it might also be described as a form of life-writing. A fourth novel, The Mountain Is Young, was published in 1958. A Many-Splendoured Thing was in its 13th impression in 1956. The film adaptation, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, was released in 1955 (King 1955).

4. See The Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 1952; TIME magazine, December 8, 1952; Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, The Sunday Times, August 10, 1952.

5. However, as her subtitle makes clear, Nalbantian’s main focus is the autobiographical fiction of high modernists. Likewise, Milena Marinkova (2011) points to Michael Ondaatje’s “generic transgressions” (66) in his memoir, Running in the Family.

6. The “Postcolonial” as a disciplinary field was to come into its own in the 1990s. Earlier, the works referred to here would have been seen as part of “Commonwealth Literature” or “New Literatures”.

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Shirley Chew

Shirley Chew is emeritus professor of commonwealth and postcolonial literatures at the University of Leeds, and, having relocated back to Singapore in 2011, is currently a professor at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (2001–). Her published work includes essays on Rudyard Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Olive Senior, Anita Desai, Wole Soyinka, and Boey Kim Cheng; and the co-edited volumes Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (2000), Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001), and A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature (2009).