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ABSTRACT
In a celebration of Han Suyin’s writing and a personal assessment of her enduring significance, the author Aamer Hussein recalls his friendship with Han and his memories of her final published work, The Sun in Ambush. Hussein’s article reviews Han’s creative range – as author, historian, and public intellectual – and assesses her major fictional achievements. Hussein’s personal recollection also reveals Han’s generous, principled support for fellow Asian and African writers and her mentoring role for Hussein (who collaborated on Han’s 1990 essay collection Tigers and Butterflies). Hussein also assesses the critical attacks on Han and her political sympathies after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. Over 30 years after these events, Han’s rewarding, complex body of work – in its topical engagement with “self-admitted homelessness”, formal literary experimentation, nationalism, globalization, and the puzzle of identity – is now more relevant than ever.
Acknowledgments
Some parts of this article were first published as “A Hundred Years of Han Suyin” in Dawn, January 15, 2017.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Aamer Hussein
Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955. He is the author of eight collections of stories, including This Other Salt (1999), Insomnia (1997), Hermitage (2018), Another Gulmohar Tree: A Novella (2009), and The Cloud Messenger (2011). In 1990, he compiled, edited, and introduced Tigers and Butterflies, a selection of Han Suyin’s non-fictional essays and articles. Also an essayist, he lives and works between London and Pakistan.