Explaining East to West
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Explaining East to West Till Morning Comes By Han Suyin Bantam. 500pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Stephanie Ryder, a red-haired 21-year-old...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Stephanie Ryder, a red-haired 21-year-old Texan, is in Chungking at the time that Chiang Kai-shek, the recipient of massive help from the U.S...
...They were able to help her escape the mistreatment that had begun to threaten her life...
...Childlessness was a disgrace for a man...
...During the McCarthy and Korean War period Stephanie is saddened by the troubles of John Service, who would be cleared in six separate investigations, yet finally dismissed from the State Department...
...Nor could she avoid knowing about the gross corruption that surrounded the Leader...
...Stephanie leaps upon the colonel, shouting, pushing him so that he loses balance—and face...
...But he too will remember the moment, and the contradictory emotions Stephanie has stirred in him...
...her refusal to open the book was her sole victory over her husband during their China years, unless one counts her unexpected joy in the baby she had to buy secretly to advance his career...
...Jen Yong, on whom Stephanie naturally makes a strong impression...
...This consists of knocking down the hovels, and of rifle-whipping the men, tying them with rope, and dragging them away to be "recruited" for the Kuomintang Army...
...Then, realizing the danger of attacking a foreigner, he marches his men away...
...Born in 1917 of a Belgian mother and Chinese father, Han Suyin was educated at universities in Peking and Brussels...
...These huge, well-indexed tomes were welcomed by the common reader, but such historians as John Fairbank found them too uncritical of Mao...
...Despite genuine effort, she could not lose the inner sense of personhood that certain men find intolerable in a wife...
...Returning to China in 1938, she married a Kuomintang officer who tried literally to beat into her his own fanatic devotion to Chiang Kai-shek and the proper female subservience demanded by Confucius and Hitler...
...Besides setting up a clinic and treating poor patients, she studied and wrote about the struggle for liberation there...
...The novel ends in China, but one of its major themes is stated by Stephanie in her testimony before a Senate committee exploring the reasons for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution: "China is a very old country, with a tradition of tyranny...
...Till Morning Comes, I believe, is meant to correct the naivete in Han Suyin's past thinking, though this was never absolute...
...She has let her prose style regress from the taut, thoughtful sentences of The Many-Splendored Thing (many passages are carelessly florid...
...Once she went directly from Chou En-lai to Nehru in India, trying vainly to make him see his error in labeling China the aggressor in Tibet...
...The crumbling of these standards is the tragedy underlying her new novel...
...My House Has Two Doors, the 655-page last volume, published in 1980, carries the story through the '70s...
...Deeply guilty over the part her class had played in the centuries of famine, filth, beggary, opium addiction, and prostitution, while well-fed masters were carried by gaunt skeletons, and poor mothers had to sell their babies (Yungmei was one of them), she was sickened by inner conflict at seeing these evils'gone...
...A woman in labor, kneeling before the commanding officer, pleads to be allowed to stay until her baby is born...
...Han Suyin sends Stephanie home to Texas in Till Morning Comes, to show the American side of what the author regards as a tragic misunderstanding—tragic for tens of millions...
...Han of spying for America), and the result was two books about him and his policies, The Morning Deluge and Wind in the Tower...
...She is reporting for Here magazine and goes to photograph a settlement of squatters' huts...
...Nevertheless, readers will faithfully follow her characters through the full range of the revolution's drastic experiences?dreams and disillusionment, incredulity and suppressed outrage, effort and unearned punishment, renewed hope followed by despair, endurance giving way to apathy, all amid surroundings of moralistic slogans, slander and senseless terror...
...Based on legends of ancestors, family documents, and memoirs of older friends, it covers the period 1885-1913, including the recollections of a participant in the 1911 revolution of Sun Yat-sen...
...In London Han Suyin made friends on the level of the Kingsley Martins and the sister of Roger Fry...
...Halted in Hong Kong because her background made her persona non grata in her own country, she worked in a hospital and had the illicit love affair, doomed by the Korean War, which she recorded in The Many Splendored Thing...
...Her young son is beside her, his forehead in the dust...
...There she witnesses a "slum clearance...
...Han thinks we thereby crushed and alienated forces that were honestly groping toward what might have become democracy...
...Her husband was a member of the fascist inner circle, the Blue Shirts, and she saw youths being sent to Germany (Chiang's second son among them) for Nazi indoctrination...
...The author's extended Chinese family—the ideal was once five generations under one roof—made up an almost perfect microcosm, but she also had dozens of close friends who confided in her...
...It has to learn democracy...
...It does not matter that he is concerned over the wild rampages of many groups through the countryside, looting, turning people out of their houses, humiliating, torturing, killing...
...Contenting herself with visits of a few months each year, she settled for trying to give the outside world some understanding of China's aspirations and the reasons for the inevitable setbacks and contradictions that were all the West at the time seemed to want to hear about...
...The heroine's own son, reaching the age of 18, must join the Red Guards...
...Readers will learn what actually happened in China from the '40s into the '70s...
...Enraged, he bloodies her nose...
...When her husband was called back to China (to be killed at the front, perhaps by his own soldiers, who—like so many thousands of others—deserted to the Communists), she stayed in England and won a scholarship for medical training...
...For in Till Morning Comes, as she has sought to do in nearly a score of other books, Han Suyin will educate her large following...
...The moment is registered in his memory, for the officer begins to kick his mother...
...Mein Kampf was required reading...
...And it needs to be...
...After he gently protests the squalor of a remote hospital where he has been exiled, he is ostracized by his colleagues, then suddenly promoted, only to be labeled as a "Rightist" and paraded in a dunce cap through the streets before once more being restored to favor priorto meeting his violent, destined end...
...Ironically, these senders of unwelcome messages were blamed for our "losing China," although their dispatches had never been heeded...
...During the '60s and '70s Han Suyin became acquainted with Chairman Mao (though his wife tried to prevent this by accusing Dr...
...Even in Splendor she reported on the blind, inhumane dogmatism of hard-core Communists...
...We chose not to teach it at a very momentous time in history...
...On this small stipend she supported little Yungmei while living the meager life of a student...
...The people saw something quite new to them—an army that did not loot and rape but tried to help, a government that was actually honest...
...Yet she knew that her outspoken temperament and unorthodox history, the cause of problems for her everywhere, would surely put a quick and painful end to any help she might offer from within this intolerant regime...
...Although unlike most of Han Suyin's previous work this one is presented as fiction, she uses her practiced technique of interspersing detailed exposition of complex political developments with the continuing stories of emotionally appealing, often bizarre lives...
...After writing the book she married and moved to Malaya...
...Till Morning Comes will open the eyes of many blithe tourists who might otherwise rush off to China because it is chic, accepting one ready-made notion of the country or another, or none at all, without an inkling of the decades?even millennia—of unbearable poverty and oppression, cyclical uprisings, brutal purges and massacres that have repeated themselves throughout China's tumultuous past...
...Sheeven found it hard to breathe in the atmosphere of surveillance...
...Jen Yong, who never ceases to give his best professional service wherever needed, patiently struggles under Party administrators too ignorant to see the need of hygiene or of protection for the X-ray technicians...
...Nor would she forget their early idealistic days...
...He rose rapidly, and it was as the wife of the military attache that she went to England...
...I n 1949, with daughter and diploma, she departed, against all advice, for China...
...When in 1956 Han Suyin was readmitted to China, she found she could not submit herself to thelong process of "remolding...
...In 1965 Han Suyin published the first of her four volumes of "China Autobiography History," The Crippled Tree...
...She rallies the neighbors and gets the woman to the hospital, into the hands of Dr...
...Recognizing the great achievement, she hated her own "pusillanimity...
...On the other hand she knew Chinese history, and with her own Europe-sensitized nose had smelled the stench of the poverty that preceded the Communists' cleanup...
...to fight the common enemy, Japan, is turning his guns instead against his Chinese brothers and supposed allies, the Communists...
...This short sequence has all the elements required by the author of the 1952 best seller, TheMany-Splendored Thing, to build a novel with legitimate historical suspense that will be read by tens of thousands...
...She clearly kept conscientious notes of her thousands of interviews with everyone from peasants, students and waiters to the highest officials...
...The story begins in wartime when America, disregarding truthful reporting by correspondents like Theodore White and the furious opposition of realistic military men headed by General ("Vinegar Joe") Stilwell, made the fatal choice of supporting the oppressive regime clinging to power, unsupported by the popular will...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
