Dept. of English - Univ. of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia.
Lloyd Fernando
PICTURE OF THE ARTIST
AS A EURASIAN
WITH the appearance of A Mortal Flower, the second part of Han Suyin's autobio-graphy, the nature of her undertaking and her qualities as a writer appear in a clearer light *. One guesses that the sucessding volumes -- it is said there re to be in all -- will not very much from the pattern already established ; that of interleaving patches of history with the course of her own life. Even now Miss Han's two present volumes constitute probably the only substained literary work in English about East Asia by an East Asian. When the autobiography is completed, its volumes will stand as a body of writing about East Asia by an East Asian. When the autobiography is completed, its volumes will stand as a body of writing about whose literary quality there will stand as a body of writing about whose literary there will be varied opinions, no doubt. Miss Han had tried to be biographer, autobiographer, historian and writer, sometimes all at the same time, and not always successfully. Like herself these volumes are hybrid, contradictory, vigorous, there. The difficulty of appraising her achievement stems largely from her own ceaseless quest for a stance in literary and cultural terms. It is clear by now this stance will chiefly be of the nature of a counterweight to the attitude she apostrophises as "Europocentrism, the universe of man reduced to a small Europe."
It is no longer sufficient to shrug this away as a mistaken assumption resulting from
'oudated' nationalism in resurgent Asia. Asia needs to be allowed the space to breathe, in literarure as much as in politics. In the past five hundred years travellers, mission-aries, military governors, botanists, administrators, sailors, teachers, businessmen and casual residents in Asia have produced a voluminous minor literature upholding -- as often as not, openly -- the vision that the world grew out from Europe; and secure in the conviction that every Asian thing could eventually be fitted into some grand Western conceptual framework. Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the few Europeans of any authority to throw light on the dilemma of the intelligent observer of cultures alien to his own. In Tristes Tropiques he declares, " Implicity we claim for our own society, for its customs, and for its norms, a position of privilege, since an observer from a different social group would pass different verdicts upon those same examples."
Today, European norms jangle vigorously with much that has remained inarticulate for centuries in Asian societies. Even some influential Asians -- particularly Southest
Asians -- while seeking political disengagement seem to act on the simple-minded premise that the only task of Asian societies is to hurry up and become exactly like European societies. The Asian experience, after centuries of contact with the West, is a vast paradox. How, to speak only of the Asian writer, can one etablish a foothold which will give one a vision not limitingly regional, but which will yet restore a sense of proportion between modern European dominance and abiding Asian traditions? Han Suyin, of course, hasn' t got the ideal anthropologist' s detachment nor, as yet, the poise of the true artist to answer this question. Hers is the response of one deeply involved, loquacious, strident, yet intrinsically useful, " Strange are the ways of history," she declares,
where no singlr thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging, growing near wholeness. To understand any event in any country, one must go back three generations. A century ago sprouted the seed, root of to-days' s tree, whose branches cast thheir spreading shade over
our heads, whose leaves may fall in a storm only to be replaced by a myriad other leaves.
Not, admittedly, an entirely satisfactory way of putting it. The style is a shade poeticised, the metaphor too organic. -- too suggestive of fluent, predictable developments in Asia. The writer, no less than the specialist, must view with bafflement the kinds of society evolving in Southeast Asia, for example, partly as a result of the mass migration of Chinese overseas which Miss Han touches on in The Crippled Tree, and the massive American involvement in Vietnam to which she also refers. Anthropologists must put away their mathematical models while they ponder with subtler perception, the extraordinary phenomenon of inter-culture assimi-
lation, conflict and growth taking place in Asia to-day. As for the Asian writer such a context demands of him many knowledges, many skills -- almost too many. Perhaps at the moment one can attempt to do more than begin with one's own life history -- as James Joyces did fifty years ago in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man --
and , given the present tangled skein, interleave that history with the more public fortunes of one's countries -- for there, surely, is the crux of being Eurasian whether by descent, like Miss Han, or from upbringing and environment like countless Asians to-day. In a sense, all Asians are Eurasians, even the Chinese in the new China with an imported Europen political ideology profoundly transforming their lives. Considering that it was on Western initiative that East met West, it is odd to think how few Europeans are Eurasians in the same sense s well.
Miss Han's chosen scopoe is audacious, her industyry enviable. She deals with the coming of the Hakkas to Szechuan in the late seventeenth century (her family are Hakkas or, more correctly, Hans); the scramble of the Western powers especially Germany, France, Britain and the United States for financial and commercial control in China; the movement of people en masse from region to region in China. She goes into some detail in tracing the events which led to the Boxer Uprising and culminated in the first Chinese Revolution of 1911 under Sun Yatsen. She traces the chaos that followed where dissident generals became warlords in particular districts and pillaged the countryside and massacred innocent peasants. Her first volume end with the rise of Chiang Kaichek with his victorious armies from the South brutaly exteminating Communists along the way, and the forecasts the allegiance Chiang was to offer to Western interests on the side. Miss Han declares that " so far as research can make it so, historical accuracy has been maintained" in dealing with his wide canvas. Historians, most likely, will consider it futile to enter into professional debate upon the account she gives. Hers is history absorbed into a personal vision, embraced in a personal kind of way, an invaluable guide-line into nationalistic motivations in modern Asia, at the very least. But there is little to transcend nationalism in these volumes, no real answer to the Europocentrism she so rightly chastises.
Miss Han's wide-ranging scrutiny of the past is often persuasive, always interesting. The eternal upheaval and chaos are clearly intended to mirror on a wider scale the desintegration of her own family. For two-thirds of The Crippled Tree, the reader is held by the quite moving story of the conflict between her parents and the early years of their adjustment to one another. These chapters although varied in content, hold together remarkably well. Her control vanishes, however, when she reverts to the story of her own unloved childhood. She adopts the devices of referring to herself in the third person here, by her childhood name Rosalie, but there is an irritating, uncritical adoption of the child's sense of injustice. She is at her best when she writes of others, whether it is her father and mother, or her Elder Brother, called Son of Spring, or practically any one else whether connected or not with her family. Miss Han's strong, perpective, troubled, nostalgia eventually disarms criticism since what she seeks to understand concerns many millions of Asians to-day:
In Rosalie a fragmentation of the total self occured, each piece recreating from its own sum of facts a
person functioning seperately, with holding itself from the other, yet throughout maintening a secret vigilance, boneless, coherence, fragile as the thread that guided Theseus in his labyrinth. Others born
like her of two worlds, whoc hoose not to accept this splitting, fragmentation of monolithic, identity
into several selves, found themselves later unable to face the contradictions latent in their own beings. Consistency left them criplled for the world's incoherence ( The Crippled Tree, p. 382).
She was to learn later that "the overseas Chinese had a good many adaption problems, as many as a Eurasian like myself."
Compared with the first volume, there seems to be rather less reason in A Mortal Flower for the bold experiment of associating a personnal history, however intrin-sically interesting, with the evolution of modern China. The story of " Rosalie-me"
( as Miss Han rather earnestly refers to herself during one phase of A Mortal Flowers), her work as a typist, her entry into Yenching Univeristy in Peking her undergraduate days in Belgium, her lectures on behalf of the Communists, her early affairs, and her decision to return to a China in 1938 on the verge of fresh turmoil, the account of all these does not rest comfortably between the chapters devoted to straightforward history. In grappling with her own fragment self, Han Suyin reveals a flair for self-dramatisation and a strong desire for self-justifification; she also writes with impressive non ideological social passion. Often these attitudes war with one another -- it would be too much to expect that they should be fully composed. Past and present, Chinese heritage and European education, liberal views and socialist sympathies, objective spectator and propandist of the new China, historian and passionately involded writer, all these jostle with one another, and together are symptomatic of the fragmented self she speaks of. Her hold of events is predictably uncertain, given their wide scope. With A Mortal Flower it becomes clear that she makes frequent and questionable use of hindsight. The re-ordering of the past loses its value as an effort to understand the present and becomes, rather, a justification of the present. The panoramic view of West-East entanglement appears to shrink frequently to a platform for the new China. Her control of tone is similarly uncertain. Self-conscious poeticism alternates with stridency. If these are three volumes to come, it should be possible to remedy such faults, or at any rate for a reader to evaluate them more fairly.
In these volumes there has been -- so far -- an effort at epic; what one actually has is rather more of a picture, a filmic spectacle on a grand scale. When the remaining volumes are published, Miss Han's great effort will easily run to much more than a thousand pages. We could have has A Portrait of the Artist as a Eurasian and may, one day, still do. One remembers that Stephen Hero, which was James Joyce's original manuscript for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was more than 1500 pages long. Stphen Hero was eventually honed down to a lean 300 pages, varied, aesthetically apt, and culturally a sharply defined reflector of Joyce's age. It is pure conjecture whether Miss Han will symphathies lie; she has established albeit rather more precariuously, a balance between her Eastern and Western heritage. It remains to be seen whether, in view of her preferred scope, she will consider the challenge worthwhile of choosing between absorbingly intelligent special pleading or being writer and only a writer and nothing but a writer. Only the ignorant -- and Europocentrics -- would say that that is an easy choice for a Eurasian to-day .
LLOYD FERNANDO
----
* Han Suyin, The Crippled Tree, (London: Cape, 1965); A Mortal Flower ( London : Cape, 1966)
( TENGGARA October, 1868 - p. 92- 95)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lloyd Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka in 1926 in 1938, his family migrated to Singapore. Mr Fernando was educated at St Patrick's in Singapore, with the occupation nterrupting, that education from 1943 to 1945. During the Japanese attack on Singapore, Mr Fernando's father was killed. During the Japanese occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labor jobs.
Mr Fernando thereafter graduated from the Univeristy of Malaysia in Singapore and subsequently served as an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic. Mr Fernando became an assistance lecturer at the Univeristy of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr Fernando was awarded a scholarship at Leeds University, UK, where he received his Ph.D.
In 1967 Fernando was appointed to serve a professor at the The English Department of the Univeristy of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978. Subsquently, Mr Fernando studied law at City Univeristy in the UK and then at the Middie Temple, returning to Malaysia with two law degrees whereupon he was employed by a law firm and thereafter started a seperate law pratice business in 1997.
Mr Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities , and
Literary works [edit]
- Scorpion Orchid , 1976, ISBN 978-0-686-77802-8
- Culture in Conflict, 1986, ISBN 978-9971-4-9021-8
- Green in the Colour, 1993, ISBN 978-981-3002-68-5
"New Women" in the Late Victorian Nond, 1977,
ISBN 978-0-271-01241-4 WIKIPEDIA
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