Han Suyin’s Cold War fictions: Life-writing, intimacy, and decolonization

ABSTRACT

This article asks how the distinctive use of life-writing and focus on inter-ethnic intimacy in Han Suyin’s popular middlebrow romance fictions A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and The Mountain is Young (1958) constitute a critique of decolonization and align with her radical politics as a spokesperson for Bandung-era non-alignment. The author suggests that in these two major fictions of the Cold War era Han reprises what Christina Klein identifies as a familiar “Cold War Orientalist” trope of inter-ethnic love but repurposes it so that the genre’s characteristic objectifying treatment of (largely passive) Asian women desired by western men is reversed. In the process Han’s tactical re-imagining of inter-ethnic romance provides a vehicle for political satire, feminist self-realization, and figuring of new postcolonial/decolonial identities and subject positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Han Suyin
• life-writing
• Cold War
• intimacy
• Hong Kong
• Nepal

In the final volume of her historical autobiography, My House Has Two Doors, Han Suyin (Han [1980] 1982) recounts a meeting with the Indian premier Jawaharlal Nehru on her visit to Delhi in 1956. By the time of their encounter Han was already a bestselling author with a commitment to forms of “Third World” internationalist non-alignment and she tended to cultivate friendships with political leaders and cultural figures as part of her public role. In Delhi, her acquaintance with the British High Commissioner Malcolm McDonald facilitated the meeting with Nehru:

To the British High Commission came the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in admirable pure white with a rose in his hand, looking with a pout on his lips and moving eyes both moody poet and disgruntled lover, and yet with a prick of asperity somewhere. He started immediately talking about A Many-Splendoured Thing, which Lady Mountbatten had given him to read. “I think great loves should be kept private” said he [ ... ]. “In that case literature would be much impoverished”, I replied. For about three seconds Nehru stopped twiddling the rose he held between his fingers. As a result of this brief passage of arms, our relations, though amiable and friendly, would always harbour a twinge of strain. (Han [1980] 1982, 126)

This beguiling anecdote is my starting point because it brings into close conjunction some of the themes of emotion, intimacy, and the politics of decolonization that will be my focus in this article. Nehru’s affair with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last Viceroy of colonial India, is now widely acknowledged, and, given the inter-ethnic romance of A Many-Splendoured Thing (Han [1952] 1959), the detail of the gift of the novel from Lady Mountbatten, and Nehru’s sense of necessary discretion in matters of love, are certainly historically persuasive. Later in the 1950s, Han would meet Nehru again during a period of worsening Sino-Indian relations, but it is in this account of their first meeting, with its passing evaluation of literary love, that Han brings together the elements of intimacy and public history that would become such important combined aspects of her middlebrow fictions of the 1950s and 1960s.

The particulars of Han’s remarkable career as physician, novelist, historian, public intellectual, and international spokesperson for China, especially Maoist China, are readily gleaned from other sources – including the introduction to this Special Issue – and I mention only details that are relevant to this article. Han Suyin (the pen name of Rosalie Matilda Kwanghu Chou, also known as Elizabeth Chou) was born in 1916 or 1917 to a Chinese father and Belgian Flemish mother and grew up in China, studying in Beijing and then in Belgium before returning to China where she experienced the retreat of the provisional government to Chongqing during the second Sino-Japanese war. After studying medicine in London during World War II, she worked as a physician in Hong Kong and then Singapore and Johor in the 1950s and 1960s. In this period, she wrote A Many-Splendoured Thing (Han [1952] 1959) and The Mountain is Young (Han [1958] 1973), and also became an international public figure as a commentator for western anglophone and francophone readers on China and Asian affairs more generally. As is well known, Han married three times, first to a Chinese Kuomintang officer and diplomatic attaché, Tang Pao-Huang, who was killed in the Chinese civil war; secondly, after a short-lived love affair with the Australian journalist Ian Morrison in the early 1950s, she married a British Special Branch police officer, Leon Comber, in Malaya; and lastly, after divorcing Comber, Han married Vincent Ratnaswamy, a South Indian army colonel. They later separated but remained married.

Han’s marital history is relevant here because autobiography and forms of life-writing are central to her creative method. This detail may give us pause when we consider the enduring literary-critical resistance to an over-reliance on the author as the arbiter of textual meaning – something that has informed literary studies from the New Critical suspicion of “intentional fallacy”, to the authorial death gleefully celebrated by the theoretical schools of the “cultural turn”. Moreover, feminist critics have often censured a reductive tendency to equate writer and text in assessments of women authors, pointing out that such readings essentialize women’s writing as somehow inherently more physiological and subjectively anchored than men’s fiction. These might all be good reasons to pass over the autobiographical elements of Han’s novels, but such a strategy would equally risk missing the intrinsic, highly political possibilities of Han’s decolonizing co-option of a fictionalized biographical mode. Indeed, the integral place of lived experience in Han Suyin’s fiction forces us to consider authorial detail (especially in contrast to the parallel text of her multi-volume autobiography). In this process a crucial detail of Han’s development of an autobiographically inflected fiction must be underlined: namely, that it involves not a fictionalizing of the individual biographized subject (Han herself) but, instead, re-imagines intimate, relational episodes in her life as the basis for fiction. It is the politics of this dynamic that I will explore further here.

Before continuing, it is necessary to step back and see Han’s literary experiments in the light of existing assessments of autobiographical fiction in postcolonial studies. As Bart Moore-Gilbert (2009) has noted, even though the precursors of a “postcolonial” element in English autobiographical fiction can be found in slave narratives of the 18th century, initial studies of auto/biography effaced non-European instances of autobiography: lacunae that are exemplified in George Gusdorf’s emphasis on autobiography as a western expression (see Olney 1980; Pascal 1960), which betrays a similar ethnocentrism. In Moore-Gilbert’s (2009) view, this bias continued into the 1980s in works by Philippe Lejune (1989) and Paul de Man (1986, xxi). It was, arguably, only with the advent of literary studies of “Commonwealth biography” by MacDermott and EACLALS Conference (1984), and later research by other critics working from a feminist standpoint, such as Smith and Watson (2001, 5), that the ethnocentric canonization of a certain form of the romantic autobiography was challenged, and a call made for the use of the more expansive “life-writing” as a preferred critical category. The cultural broadening of autobiography studies continued in the work of Philip Holden (2008) which explored a tradition of biographies and political writings of postcolonial leaders.¹ In addition, Javed Majeed (2016) has shown how biographical writing inflected the more technical drafting of constitutional documents in new republics such as India. (More generally, the narrated life and its rich potential for allegory and national metonymy influenced one of the presiding fictional genres of “postcolonial” or global anglophone literature, the Bildungsroman.)

This article examines two of Han Suyin’s novels that exemplify her creative blending of life-writing and fiction. My interest in these works stems from their highly original combination of fictional narrative with settings, plot lines, and characters drawn directly from her (autobiographically presented) life. In this respect, Han Suyin’s work is remarkably prescient, not only anticipating what I have identified elsewhere as a generic tendency to fictionalize the suffering self in Chinese women’s testimony-narratives (Tickell 2019), but also looking ahead to recent forms of creative non-fiction (notably writing by the diasporic Chinese author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo). A conceptual term that approaches this kind of work is autofiction: denoting a type of writing that fictionalizes and dramatizes the self without the justifications or empirical assumptions that usually attach to autobiography.² The wider implications of Han’s autofiction can only be hinted at here, but, as Hywel Dix (2018) has noted about anglophone autofiction, the genre often entails a project of “self-exploration and self-experimentation” by the author, and is also a way of “situating the self in a new context” following some traumatic event – what Arnaud Genon calls a “founding fault”, the faille fondatrice of autofiction (quoted in Dix 2018, 4). Neither of Han’s fictions discussed here could be said to stage actual post-traumatic self-narrations, although the death of the character Mark Elliott in A Many-Splendoured Thing represents a traumatic conclusion to the central love affair, but both novels are invested in the drama of self-transformation through romantic love and both represent a pointed aesthetic response to the radically new contexts of a decolonizing Cold War world order.

Framing popular culture and Cold War integration

The global commercial success of Han Suyin’s novels of the 1950s can be read as both a reflection and shaping mediation of the tastes and interests of her “middlebrow” readers in North America, Europe, and the emerging British Commonwealth. In contrast to what might be expected of the escalating global tensions and domestic conservatism of the Cold War, this period witnessed a new post-war metropolitan interest in Asia, and narratives of “interracial” romance, usually portraying Asian women as objectified figures of desire, became a popular component of US and UK fiction and cinema.

British writers like Richard Mason fostered the new imaginary in works like The Wind Cannot Read (Mason 1946) and The World of Suzie Wong (Mason 1958), the latter novel being successfully adapted as a Hollywood film in 1962 starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. The cross-cultural encounters of Allied service personnel in Asia and the Pacific during World War II were re-imagined in noir films like Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo and in Bates’s (1947) war story The Purple Plain, another novel adapted for cinema in 1954. The 1949 stage musical South Pacific which was adapted very successfully for film in 1958 – based on James A. Michener’s (1947) book Tales of the South Pacific – also revisited the war in the Pacific to imagine cross-cultural, inter-ethnic romance, and the later Korean War generated further cinematic reflections on intercultural desire and attachment in another Michener adaptation from 1957, Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando. More lasting works, such as Graham Greene’s (1955) novel The Quiet American, presented inter-ethnic personal relations as a darker analogue of Cold War tensions, and further varied forms of American–Asian encounter were dramatized in musicals like The King and I from 1951, filmed five years later with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr, and the 1961 movie The Flower Drum Song, notably set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, starring Nancy Kwan and adapted from Lee’s (1957) bestselling novel.

This mid-century emphasis on inter-ethnicity as a component of romance fiction was not without precedent, and distant precursors occur in the genre of the so-called “National Romance” that dominated Latin American literary production in the late 19th century. In her pioneering research on this genre, Doris Sommer (1991) describes how the “national romance” functioned to “reconcile diverse national populations with each other and with the goals of new national governments and their accompanying civil societies” (12) and Emily Davis (2007) points out that “the motif of lovers struggling to come together across barriers, whether of race, class, or religion, provided a ‘narrative formula’ of the National Romance”. See also Davis (2013). Later forms of “Colonial Romance”, notably in fictions about late colonial India or Malaya, present us with a similarly politicized sets of relations, but more often in plots that defend colonial racial and cultural legitimacy and warn against interracial attachments. In turn, Mari Yoshihara’s (2003) research has shown how white women in the 19th and early 20th centuries found new forms of self-expression in their creative and appropriative engagements with Chinese and Japanese culture.

However, the characteristic Cold War cultural projections of the 1950s and 1960s involved a politics that framed difference, decolonization, and bilateral international relations in distinctively new ways. As Christina Klein (2003) argues in her pathbreaking Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961, in this period, US novels, musicals, and films balanced the defensive tendency of America’s global imaginary of “containment”, which supported a crusade against communism and was directed inwardly towards subversives within the nation, against one of “integration” which “represented the Cold War as an opportunity for Americans to forge intellectual and emotional bonds with the people of Asia” (18). There were apparently pressing practical reasons for developing such bonds, as political theorists Lederer and Burdick (1958) would emphasize in their bestselling cautionary political satire The Ugly American (another work adapted for film – in 1963 – starring the now typecast American in Asia, Marlon Brando): Soviet foreign policy in Southeast Asia had allegedly been so successful because its officials were culturally sympathetic, learned local languages, and were more effective communicators with local peoples, while US functionaries remained aloof, exhibiting a neocolonial cultural arrogance when dealing with the citizens of Asia’s decolonizing republics.

In Klein’s reading these integrationist political dynamics in fiction and film of the period translated into distinctively middlebrow forms and operated within a sentimental novelistic mode that had a long affective history in English literature. Moreover, because the end of World War II was seen as the (then) threshold of a new world order, marked formally by the emergence of intergovernmental bodies such as the United Nations (UN) and legally by acts such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this new Cold War global imaginary tended to repudiate racism and race theory as the discredited legacy of older European empires and the abhorrent creed of America’s former Nazi enemies (Klein 2003, 8, 9). In the USA the contemporaneous Civil Rights struggle may also have played a part in fostering a new liberal awareness of the need to overcome racial prejudice. In its new guise and embodied in Kennedy-era organizations like Walter Reuther’s Peace Corps (founded in 1961), the Cold War US response to global cultural difference was broadly co-operative and sympathetic. Both the US and the now rapidly waning world power, Britain, also took steps to secure political influence through programmatic cultural means: the former through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s co-option of particular writers and publishers (Saunders 1999); the latter, arguably less directly, through the cultural agendas of the BBC and metropolitan publishing, and their newly responsive relation throughout the post-war decades to African and Asian authors (Kalliney 2013).

For Klein, such evidence of the new integrationist cultural and political inflection in the US attitude to decolonizing Asia muddies and transforms the starker binaries of Edward Said’s (1978) famous model of self-consolidating east–west relations, elaborated in his landmark work Orientalism into a form of affiliative bond:

[Cold War] texts narrated the knitting of ties between the United States and noncommunist Asia and were infused with a structure of feeling that privileged precisely the values of interdependence, sympathy, and hybridity. These narratives and structures of feeling, far from undermining the global assertion of U.S. power, often supported it. The distinctive form of Orientalism that middlebrow Americans produced and consumed during the early Cold War period must be seen, then, as working through a logic of affiliation as well as through one of difference. (Klein 2003, 12)

My aim, in making this digression into the cultural politics of Cold War “orientalist” culture, with its call for affective bonds of understanding between west and east, is to draw attention to the general significance of representations of attachment and cross-cultural intimacy in popular anglophone literature of the period. In addition to the autobiographical elements of her work this politicized sense of affiliation has a direct critical bearing on Han Suyin’s writing of the 1950s in her fascination for emotional attachments across social or ethno-cultural divides.

Han Suyin’s intimate internationalism

The two fictions by Han Suyin under discussion, A Many-Splendoured Thing and The Mountain is Young, involve inter-ethnic relationships in South/East Asian settings and in the process reprise and, I will argue, force us to revise Klein’s Cold War orientalist formula outlined above. In both I will suggest that modes of “intimacy”, outlined in more detail below, foster a discourse of affective cosmopolitanism – what Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007) calls “a cosmopolitanism which tempers a respect for difference with [ ... an intimate] respect for actual human beings” (113) – preparing the way for new public relations and expressions of solidarity in an unfolding “decolonial” history.

Psychologists studying identity-development and human relationships define intimacy as a feeling of love or close mutual trust, or as the disclosure of a private self, especially in instances of care, personal vulnerability, and/or physical or sexual attraction (see Bowlby 1988; Erikson 1993; Prager 1995). Intimacy in these contexts is intrinsic to the growth of individual personality and the ability to form lasting attachments (see also Erikson 1980). In her work on the social and economic contexts of romantic love and intimacy in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Eva Illouz (1997) has shown how the emergence of consumer capitalism shaped the collective understanding of heterosexual intimacy through film and advertising, presenting it, paradoxically, as a component of public consumer culture:

[M]odern definitions of love rendered it a public interaction at the same time that they suffused its inner experience with privateness. By relocating the [courting] couple to the public realm of consumption, the new dating system restructured the boundaries between private and public spaces, by creating “islands of privacy” in the midst of the public realm. And these islands were consolidated by new technologies of leisure. (56)

For Illouz, such findings challenge the idea that the private sphere was always associated with emotion, suggesting instead that the notion was concurrent with the birth of consumerist modernity. “Throughout the twentieth century”, she suggests, “middle class men and women [focused] intensely on their emotions” (3). More pointedly, Illouz contends that contemporary neo-liberal society has seen a much greater management and commodification of private relational lives, and, in turn, a migration of a discourse of emotion and “feelings” into the public sphere of work and citizenship (3). See also Illouz (2007).

In recent years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) and gender studies scholars have further questioned the dominant paradigms of intimacy as belonging inherently to the private sphere. Complementing studies like Illouz’s (1997, 2007) (and rehearsing a movement similar to that just mapped in auto/biography studies), critics such as Ann Laura Stoler (2001), Lauren Berlant (1998), and Nayan Shah (2011) have challenged reductive assumptions about the normative (implicitly white heterosexual, marital, and nuclear-familial) script of intimacy. For these critics, suggests Ara Wilson (2016), intimacy functions as a rubric to illuminate broader operations and exclusions of political economy, labour, or governmentality (4).

While keeping in mind the qualifying sense of the intercultural range of Cold War intimacies mapped by Klein above, the foregoing notes alert us to how intimacy can present an affective politics of relations, including international relations, as they are imagined in Han’s fiction. I want to suggest that the combination of Han’s contextual sense of metropolitan reader-expectation, autobiographical technique, and her creative preoccupation with forms of intimacy lead her to use her own cosmopolitan history of personal relationships to imagine new practices of international solidarity and communication. We can see here a distant anticipation of the politics of “cosmopolitanism” theorized by critics like Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Anthony Kwame Appiah, as “an effort to describe [ ... ] a name for the genuine striving towards common norms and mutual translatability” (Robbins and Cheah 1998, 12–13). Yet it is distinctively in the sphere of emotion and in the experience of shared intimacy, as a form of humanist connection, that Han finds her mid-century version of this “cosmopolitical” ethics.

In a lecture at Berkeley in 1965, just a year after the US government signed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution justifying increased military operations in Vietnam, Han Suyin suggested, somewhat unexpectedly, that it was exactly this kind of emotional connection that was lacking in US foreign interventions in Southeast Asia:

Many experts in your country, in America, are spending much time, money and ability, in studying what they call the problems of the world. It seems to me that sometimes their marvellous ability; their great attention [and] devotion to research techniques are biased because the premises on which they stand may sometimes not be fully comprehended emotionally. [ ... ] It takes more than brain to understand the human being; it also takes a heart and an emotion – and I’m not speaking sentimentally. I am speaking of the full human being, who, after all, lives not by brain alone, but also by the emotion he engenders [and] by the emotions and aspirations which fashion history. (Han 1965, n.p.)

In the final sentence quoted above, Han performs an intriguing rhetorical transition: from a sense of the common emotional capacity of all “fully” human beings to the more abstract sense of an emotional aspiration to become a postcolonial historical subject: to “fashion history”. Like her anecdotal meeting with Nehru, it is emotion, articulated, I will argue, as a mode of affective intimacy, which becomes the bridge between the personal and the political in her fiction.

Dissident intimacy: A Many-Splendoured Thing

A Many-Splendoured Thing sets up the recurring scenario in Han Suyin’s writing of an unusual or “dissident” intimacy. Featuring a protagonist called Han Suyin, the novel deviates very little in its plot from Han’s autobiographical account of her time in Hong Kong in My House Has Two Doors (Han [1980] 1982): the character of “Dr Han” is a mixed-race physician, and her lover, Mark Elliott, is a married British journalist. What connects them, and sustains their tabooed intimacy, is an extensive shared experience of China and Southeast Asia, and a mutual sense of being outsiders. The love affair between Han and Ian Morrison, upon which the novel is based, was regarded as scandalous and Han was ostracized by the Hong Kong community and then the colonial community in Singapore, where she moved after publication of the book with her new husband, Leon Comber: “Locally the uproar over A Many-Splendoured Thing was fearful, although it only affected the British. But then they had so little to talk about! [ ... ] [A] reputation as a loose nymphomaniac was now established for me” (Han [1980] 1982, 89). This aside gives us a sense of the colonial attitude to the possibility of interracial love and intimacy – as something unthinkable and repressed – and shows that in colonial Hong Kong at least the new Cold War orientalism had yet to be displaced by a more established colonial view of racial miscegenation and desire. The other salient aspect of Han’s style that becomes recognizable here is a “native informancy” that gives the novel a digressive, explanatory quality: teaching the international reader about contemporary Hong Kong and China, principally in the middle sections in which Dr Han returns to visit her family and her younger sister in Chungking.

Han’s protagonists, “Dr Han” and Mark Elliott, thus represent a radical intimacy that mingles across the “immiscible” layers of class and race that still structure society in Hong Kong. As an elite mixed-race professional with a diplomatic background and ties to Britain, Dr Han is able to transcend some of these barriers alone, but only to the extent that she becomes the unwilling reporting recipient of the prejudices that still prevail in British colonial society. Against these prejudices, the affair with Mark is a symbol and solace: something that is a “talisman” in a world governed by “stupid people saying trivial, cruel and stupid things around a dinner table” (Han [1952] 1959, 71). It is also an experience in which the disparaging “colonial” response to Dr Han’s racial hybridity is countered by a striking positive valuation of hybridity (anticipating much later postcolonial theorizing) not as a loss or dilution but as an enabling sense of multiplicity. During a trip to Macau, Dr Han confronts Mark about his racial views.

“Even you” I said bitterly, “have a prejudice against the mixed bloods”. “Dear one, it is not so”, he replied with some warmth [ ... ] “you want to be Chinese, and you have trained yourself to have both East and West. You have a dual mind, and I envy you the way you become so many different worlds, so many different beings. There is more richness in your life [ ... ] than you know. Much more than we poor one-world people possess”. “But it is awful to be two people all the time. It’s schizophrenia”, I replied. “How I wish I were you!” he said. (86)

Beyond this easily missed literary theorizing of a form of cultural hybridity and an ethic of affirmative cosmopolitanism, the novel’s other main feature is its emotional landscape. As changeable as the precipitous landscapes of Hong Kong and the new territories, the emotional tone of Han’s affair with Mark is one of alternate confinement and escape: from the stultifying cocktail parties and crowded expatriate lodging-houses of Hong Kong where Dr Han is the refractor of the colonial values described above, into the clandestine meetings and night-time swimming excursions that carry a sensuous, liberating potential. The dramatic historical and political situation of Hong Kong as a nodal space of Cold War politics at the threshold of the mid-century, and the “interzone” for refugees fleeing the communist takeover on the mainland, also lends the narrated affair a particular kind of intense intimacy.³

More surprisingly in a novel which partly reprises the Cold War orientalist trope of the objectified Asian woman desired by the European male hero, the narrative gaze, because it is largely taken up by Dr Han’s first-person perspective, tends to reverse the trope, objectifying and “orientalizing” Mark’s gazed-upon youthful body:

When Mark came out of the bathroom in his brief red bathing trunks [ ... ] I had to look away [ ... ] slim-hipped and waisted, the body of a young man, not thick chested and only a little fine blond hair in the armpits, otherwise smooth-skinned as any Chinese would be [ ... ]. I knew exactly, looking at him, what the poets of my country [ ... ] meant when they spoke so vividly about the melting within the belly that is emotion. (Han [1980] 1982, 74)

Mark, while coming from a conventionally British colonial milieu, is the antithesis of the overbearing, Kiplingesque colonial fictional hero. Throughout the novel he is described as possessing a strength that comes from “gentleness” and cosmopolitan sympathy: “He is so English, yet he will not offend you”, explains Dr Han to her Chinese family. “He is different. He has no fierceness, and he is not afraid and therefore not arrogant” (130). At the level of the overarching plot structure, a comparable reversal of the Cold War orientalist formula takes place, as eventually it is Dr Han who prevails and lives on to make a life, with the memory of the affair presented as a “wonderful dream” (334).

What is seldom noticed in contemporary critical readings is that the novel was a direct product of bereavement: Han learned of her lover Ian Morrison’s death in Korea, where he was covering the war, from a chanced-upon newspaper headline and then started receiving his delayed letters – an experience that made his death seem even less believable: “how could he be dead when that most vital paper reality, his writing, the words that were his, were there under my hand” (Han [1980] 1982, 50). (Letters from Mark are included in the final sections of the novel too.) As a response to the shock of grief and perhaps also an attempt to perpetuate the trace of a written textual intimacy, Han started writing A Many-Splendoured Thing in the weeks following Morrison’s death. Conforming to the model of an intimate affective politics outlined earlier, the process of this posthumous writing occurs reflexively at the conclusion of the novel, countermanding the seemingly more decorous process of the official biography; something suggested by one of Mark’s journalist friends, David, who wants to write a book of his life: “[David] thought it a very bad idea that I should write a book: ‘It would be [ ... ] sacrilege’” (332). In this subtle paratextual reflection we encounter the generic novelty and therefore seeming impropriety of Han’s project (to write inter-ethnic romance).

Reflecting on the commercial success of A Many-Splendoured Thing, the novel’s subject matter – a fraught, unexpected intimacy tragically curtailed by a death in wartime, followed by an attempt to grieve – must certainly have seemed highly relevant and familiar to readers in Europe and North America whose memories of similar personal tragedies during World War II would still, in 1952, have been relatively fresh. We should also consider the possibility here that Han’s debut novel can be read on two or more levels and that it is effectively double-coded: rehearsing the inter-ethnic romance tropes of an integrationist Cold War orientalism, while textually “embedding” a more radical internationalist message.

Intimacy and decolonization: The Mountain is Young

In Han’s expansive third novel, The Mountain is Young (Han [1958] 1973), written after her more experimental Malayan “Emergency” novel … and the Rain my Drink (1956), the connection between intimacy and a decolonial politics is even clearer (perhaps sharpened by Han’s close experience of the Emergency in the previous years). The Mountain is Young tells the story of Anne Ford, a published writer who is living in Calcutta, unhappily married to a retired colonial civil servant, John, and who at the start of the narrative takes up a teaching post at a girls’ school in Kathmandu. Soon after arriving in Nepal, Anne falls in love with Unni Menon,⁴ a charismatic South Indian engineer who is overseeing a dam-building project in a remote mountain valley. One of Han’s most accomplished novels, The Mountain is Young is certainly her most memorable evocation of place: Nepal at the time of King Mahendra’s coronation in May 1956, to which Han had been invited in real life, and where she met her third husband, Vincent Ratnaswamy. The Himalayan landscape and the Valley of Kathmandu give Han the opportunity to place her protagonists in a South Asian Cold War context which is even more densely international than the Hong Kong of A Many-Splendoured Thing, allowing her a range of satirical comments on aid, diplomacy, tourism, and the regional politics of “development”. The novel’s plot follows Anne’s gradual liberation through the experience of her love for Unni, and her transcendent creative self-awakening in the mountains.

Here “private” intimacy becomes a form of international allegory in Anne’s frustrations with her needy, manipulative British husband who embodies a staid conformity and moral hypocrisy redolent of the British Raj, and her attraction to a capable and appealing Indian engineer who is the agent of a highly technocratic modernity. The detail of Unni’s dam-building is appropriate for a time that saw massive developmental schemes such as dams and power stations become the showpiece infrastructures of postcolonial development and renewal. At the same time, like Lederer and Burdick’s aforementioned political satire of the same year, the novel recognizes the underlying global political implications of Cold War infrastructural aid projects as an aspect of “soft power”.

At one of their first meetings, Unni elaborates, in a highly gendered metaphor (one which again co-opts a figure of relational intimacy), on the connections between aid and Cold War global politics:

Nepal is like a woman with many suitors now, only too eager to please her with gifts. Fear makes us generous [ ... ] Nepal is a backward, underdeveloped country, and all underdeveloped areas are potential exploitation for communism; and so the idea is to plunge in and do something before the other side does it.

Does it work?

Not always. For various reasons, chiefly because Aid, as it is called, is often not suited in style and scope to the country for which it is aimed. Our friends the Americans are the worst offenders in that respect. (Han [1958] 1973, 114)

This pointed assessment, voiced by Unni, is notable for its uncritical acceptance of a “developmental” paradigm in which European modernity, especially technological, infrastructural modernity, becomes the temporal future to which time-lagged “backward” countries like Nepal must aspire. With some qualification Han herself endorsed such a view,⁵ mainly because her experiences in pre-communist China and her professional awareness of the benefits of western medicine and public health convinced her that the defining predicament of 1950s and 1960s Asia was the speed with which largely rural non-industrial societies would need to be modernized. Her 1958 novel thus plays on the disjunction between the “pre-modern” society of traditional Nepal and its encounter with the outside world, presented as a jarring encounter with the 20th century. However, at the same time, Han notices the resistance to aid generated amongst the Nepalese, who fear that it is a pretext for annexing the country and “turning it into an American airbase, or an Indian colony” (175), just as she remarks on the cultural and social singularities that risk being lost in the rush to modernize.

The Mountain is Young is also attuned to the appropriative cultural politics of “area studies” as a new Cold War discipline inherited from the older power politics of colonial rule. Accordingly, a number of the less sympathetic European characters who appear in the text, such as Anne’s pompous and narrow-minded husband John, or the French photographer Mariette Valport, assume the role of “expert” on Nepal, as either guides, press intermediaries, or self-appointed specialists. Similarly, the new post-war organizations of the UN and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which ushered in significant optimistic internationalism and aimed to foster cultural dialogue (even as the Cold War escalated), are gently mocked in the figure of Leo Biefield, a “UNO Goodwill ambassador” whose main occupation in the novel is sleeping with as many women (internationally) as possible.

These embedded political commentaries and satirical portrayals aside, it is, again, a highly symbolic inter-ethnic intimacy in the main love affair between Anne and Unni that is significant. Like the distinctive modulation of Mark in A Many-Splendoured Thing into a new version of the Cold War integrationist hero, with his background in China and his unusual cross-cultural sympathies, Anne is presented as having a distinctive, personal connection with China through her childhood in Shanghai (where, it is hinted, she was possibly the result of a mixed-race relationship). More clearly, the novel’s plot, in which Anne makes the scandalous choice to leave her British husband for a dark-skinned South Indian man, gleefully flouts all the racial proscriptions of colonial fiction, with its horror of European women involved with, or abducted by, “native” men. Indeed, in The Mountain is Young it is Unni who takes on the authoritative, confident qualities of the rational, capable, colonial hero and John who in turn is made to look neurotic, childlike, and diminished in comparison.

The novel is also a departure for Han in its incorporation of Hindu mythology. As Aamer Hussein notes in his article in this Special Issue, the protagonists are at once individuals and also analogues of the gods, in a setting in which Han found religion infusing daily life: “where all human doing is subordinate to divine interpretation implicit in all actions [and … ] everything is sacrament” (Han [1958] 1973, 210) and “where the king is and believed to be a incarnation of Vishnu” (211). Accordingly, on the Olympian heights of the Himalayas, Unni is cast as “a modern incarnation” of the “blue god” and seductive flute-player Krishna, and Hilde, the Scandinavian wife of the local hotel owner Vassili, becomes a “Nordic goddess”. Han’s presentation of Unni as Krishna accords with her stylistic choices because in popular understanding of the Ras Lila at Vrindavan, the “divine play at Vrindavan”, described in the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna’s romantic attraction for the gopis, or cow-herding girls, presents one facet of spiritual devotion. While Han’s use of a Hindu mythical subtext anticipates the much later development of this technique in Indian English magical realist fiction of the 1980s, the intention in The Mountain is Young is to amplify the transcendent and/or sacramental force of intimacy as a new humanist connection between cultures.

At a remove of over 60 years it is easy to miss the significance of Han’s simultaneous use of a middlebrow romance structure in combination with comparatively daring interracial themes, yet when we consider that this was the winning formula for her bestselling debut fiction, the publication interest and sales success of The Mountain is Young are more understandable. Han ([1980] 1982, 271) reported that the film rights for the novel had been sold for a large sum to Paramount, and it is intriguing to speculate on possible casting had a film adaptation ever been made. Her autobiographical account of this period in My House Has Two Doors also gives a sense of the response of her readers to the sometimes unusually explicit representation of intimacy in the novel. In fact, the reported reader response was more a reaction to the novel’s striking initial evocations of a falling out of love. Han’s women readers recognized the sense of an easily crossed line between companionate intimacy and the kind of contemptuous marital familiarity that overtakes Han’s protagonist Anne Ford in her antipathy for her manipulative, needy “colonial” husband John.⁶

To conclude and return to the formulae of the integrative Cold War orientalist text as described by Klein – using it once more as our gauge for Han’s development as a writer of Bandung-era decolonization and social and political liberation – we can see that in both the novels discussed here, Han moves away from the well-documented masculinism of 1950s literary culture towards a formulation of international, cosmopolitan intimacy. In keeping with the multifarious subject positions and roles Han took on in a long and varied career, her tactical co-option of the prevailing theme of international interracial affiliation should not, perhaps, be so surprising. More important for our understanding of Han as a pioneering early author writing in the mode of decolonial critique is her ability to use the master-tools of the commercial middlebrow form to start to dismantle the “master’s house” (Lorde [1984] 2017) of Cold War discourses of affiliation, opening new doors and encouraging her readers to imagine new progressive possibilities for “affectively” imagining difference.

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Alex Tickell

Alex Tickell is senior lecturer in English at the Open University (OU), UK, and director of the OU’s Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group. He specializes in the anglophone literary histories of South Asia and Southeast Asia and conjunctions of literature and politics. He is the author of Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature: 1830–1947 (2013). He also researches contemporary South Asian fiction and has published a guide to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007) and recently edited an essay collection, South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (2016). He is currently working on a monograph on fictions of infrastructure and citizenship in the so-called New India and is the editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 10: The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945 (2019).

Notes

1. Looking at the autobiographies of leaders such as M.K. Gandhi and Lee Kuan Yew, Holden (2008) has suggested that this discrete genre of the “national autobiography” generally has two functions: demonstrating through the life story of the national leader the nation’s “entry into modernity” and simultaneously offering an incitement to the production of citizens of the nation state.

2. For an influential early account, see Grell (2014).

3. Han’s use of setting in A Many-Splendoured Thing is reminiscent of the historically overshadowed, emotionally amplified cinematic love stories of the period, such as the classic Casablanca (Curtiz 1942).

4. Notably, the character Unni in The Mountain is Young shares a name with Colonel M.K. Unni Nayar, a South Indian UN delegate who was killed with Ian Morrison in Korea when their jeep ran over a landmine.

5. In other instances in Han’s writing it is the “older” Europe, with its (neo)colonial mores and outdated values which seems to become the belated counterpart to a more modern, confidently internationalist Asia. See Anne Wetherilt’s reading of And The Rain My Drink in this issue.

6. Reportedly, it was this portrayal of a loveless duty-bound marriage to an unappealing husband to which readers responded: “Many women readers wrote to me [about The Mountain is Young]: they felt it solaced their frustration. ‘You’ve described my husband exactly’ was the burden of the letters I received, and one middle aged person stopped me in the street [and said] ‘You’ve described [my husband] to a tee. It’s just like him, even the way he makes love’ ” (Han [1980] 1982, 271).