Han Suyin and error: Decolonization, knowledge, and literary subjectivity

ABSTRACT

This article examines Han Suyin’s fictionalized autobiographies from the 1950s as meditations on the relationship between cognitive error and the global politics of decolonization. Drawing on anti-colonial theories of knowledge, especially those proposed by Mao Zedong, this article develops an account of error as a rhetorical and theoretical problematic in the context of global decolonization. The author argues that error is a recurrent theme in Han Suyin’s work as she navigated the tensions between her subject position and her political commitments during the period when she moved from Hong Kong to Southeast Asia. In A Many-Splendoured Thing, Han reveals the tension between her political commitments and the fragmented nature of geopolitical knowledge. In And the Rain My Drink, she depicts the operations and consequences of error by adopting a more experimental narrative form that registers the psychological damage inflicted by colonial rule during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60).

KEYWORDS:

• Han Suyin
• error
• decolonization
• China
• fiction
• autobiography

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Cui Feng and the organizers of “Literature, Culture and Translation: The International Symposium on Han Suyin” held at Nanyang Technological University for inviting me to present an early version of this article. My gratitude to Alex Tickell for his generous feedback and to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing’s peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Malayan Emergency refers to the period between 1948 and 1960 when British colonial authorities were engaged in an armed conflict with the Malayan National Liberation Army, which was created by the Malayan Communist Party as part of its struggle for independence.

2. This same phrase played a key role in the post-Mao era when, in 1978, a widely read editorial by Hu Fuming titled “Practice is the Sole Criterion of Truth”, published in Guangming Daily, emphasized Mao’s insistence on social practice to argue against the “Leftist” excesses of the Cultural Revolution, thereby paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

3. Hau (2000) argues that Mao’s conception of the masses was underdeveloped because it posits the categories of “worker, peasant, soldier” as sociological givens rather than something to be developed through a pedagogical programme. By falling back into a classist position, Mao actually prevents the kind of self-critical approach he advocates in “On Practice”. Hau comments that “[t]he necessity of accounting for error is tarred by the fear of committing error, which politics putatively absorbs and neutralizes” (141).

4. For a similar discussion of the moral/ethical dimensions of knowledge production, see “On Practice” (Mao [1937] 1967, 59).

5. The significance of her giving this speech at Nanyang University, which was founded as an alternative to the colonial educational establishment by local Chinese, is notable.

6. For a longer discussion of her thinking on localization, see Zhang (2016, 137–138).

7. For example, Han wrote the foreword to the English-language An Anthology of Modern Malaysian Chinese Stories (Ly and Comber 1967).

8. Han discusses these novels in her later memoir My House Has Two Doors (Han 1980), which confirms that characters and events in the earlier texts were closely based on real people and events. Unlike her novels, My House Has Two Doors adopts a matter-of-fact tone to recount main events in the author’s life between 1949 and 1965.

9. In her life, these traits, which would otherwise be cause for ostracization and even persecution, were actually instrumental in providing access to revolutionary leaders and activities in China despite distancing her from those very movements. In an interview with Canadian journalist Jack Webster, Han (1985) recalls that she decided to “pass” as Chinese as a young girl in reaction to the racist assumption that she would want to pass as European. This anecdote (a) confirms the performative dimension of Han’s identity (as well as contrarian aspects of her personality), and (b) attributes her decision to a nascent anti-colonial politics that took precedence over any ethnic claim based on descent. My thanks to Alex Tickell for reminding me of this interview. For an in-depth discussion of Han’s mixed-race figuration, see Attewell (2016).

10. In A Many-Splendoured Thing, Han is also critical of the communist-aligned press both in Hong Kong and on the mainland, whose attempts to propagandize the war involved misrepresenting facts to elicit “fiery resentment” towards “white man interference upon Asiatic soil” (Han [1952] 1954, 322).

11. In a reading of And the Rain My Drink, Fiona Lee (2014) argues that Ah Mei’s dual status as a translator and traitor symbolizes the fraught ways in which Chinese were incorporated into the postcolonial Malayan nation. This split carries over to Han herself and functions as a strategy for surviving both empire and the postcolonial nation as well as a symptom of the violence inflicted by both imperialism and the Cold War.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges the research support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012). His current research focuses on racial capitalism and Chinese Canadian writing and Chinese diasporic literary thought during the Cold War. He recently co-edited a special issue of Journal of Intercultural Studies on cosmopolitan futures (2019). He is currently associate editor of American Quarterly.