Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(14)
Han Suyin, fifty-nine, is most famous perhaps for her bestselling novel A Many-Splendored Thing, published in 1952 and transformed into both a movie and a popular song. But she has also written a series of autobiographies, very moving in both their humanity and their vast detail. The Crippled Tree was the first, and A Mortal Flower and Birdless Summer followed.
She has just brought out Wind in the Tower, the second and concluding volume of her biography of Mao Tse-tung, whose death came almost on the eve of publication. An admittedly sympathetic work, it was eight years in the writing, and at what a moment it has appeared! Obscurity covers China: once again, fierce struggles, new paths. Mao seems certain to be the sacred figure whose legacy will be sought after for years to come. It is extraordinary how little of him is really known—the only intimate accounts are still those of Edgar Snow, the American reporter of the Far East who died in 1972.
Han Suyin did not know Mao personally. She had never read a word he’d written when one night on a Peking street she bought a pamphlet called On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People. It was 1957. She was practicing medicine in Malaya and Singapore and had gone back to China to see for herself if the new ruler was to be another Stalin, ruthless and bloody. “I would die in my soul if I did not return to see for myself.”
It was one of the turning points of her life. She was fascinated by the man, his vision, his ideas. The story of Mao began to possess her, “a story that really shook me—the love of Mao for his people.”
She saw Mao only once, in a room with forty other writers, and he did not speak. She met Chou Enlai many times, and she knew firsthand the era. She has become a kind of apologist for China now—with friends in Peking in high places, although she has enemies too, she admits. The extreme left does not like her, probably because of her European life and privileges. She has never returned to China to live. But the left is in eclipse. As always, she has been fortunate.
There were eight children in her family. One-half of them survived. “The average,” she comments, “in those days.” She had a brother who died of convulsions when the French doctor refused to come. “I’m not going to bother myself for a dirty Eurasian,” he said. There were only three mixed couples living on the Peking-Hankow railway line, and the Eurasian children were despised. “We were looked upon as prostitutes and freaks.”
Her mother named her Mathilde Rosalie Claire Elizabeth Genevieve Chou, and her father gave her the Chinese name of Chou Yueh-ping, which means guest of the moon. (In China the family name always comes first—there are only 186 surnames for all Chinese.) Their mother made the little girls remove their earrings every night. If warlords or bandits came they would rip them out of their earlobes. Rosalie—she preferred that name—went to a convent school and was raised as a Catholic. She read only pious works, “and once, Jules Verne.” In 1935 she won a scholarship to go to Belgium—there were four or five students chosen a year—and she began her medical studies. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor since the age of twelve when every Sunday on the way to church the Chous had to fight their way through hordes of beggars. “I wanted to cure them.”
The high-bourgeois family of her mother refused to accept her at first, but she eventually conquered them. One of her uncles, a diamond merchant in Amsterdam, wrote in a letter, “This girl is intelligent,” and before long she was an ornament at family dinners. She was sitting one day in a park in Brussels, far from the China which had been invaded in her absence by a powerful new Japan. Above her were the tall, summery trees of the Bois Fort. “How peaceful it all is,” her boyfriend sighed. She suddenly smashed her teacup. “I’m going to China!” she announced.
“The true me is inner-motivated,” she explains. “My craziest decisions—things that appear crazy—I’ve thought about for months.”
The voyage home was by boat from Marseilles. Onboard, in first class, was a young Chinese man who had been attending Sandhurst. He was returning to serve China, he told her. “So am I,” she said. His name was Tang Pao-huang, and he came from a landowning family, part of the ruling elite. He was sincere, handsome, intensely patriotic. He proposed when they reached Hong Kong, and in a rapture of idealism they were wed. His true nature was soon revealed. He was, in fact, a demon, a cold fanatic filled with absolute loyalty and devotion to the leader, Chiang Kai-shek. In time he was to become one of the generalissimo’s aides and eventually to find death in battle against the Communists in 1947. For the seven years they were together, he beat her.
Chiang Kai-shek had a ferocious temper. Everyone was terrified of him, Han recalls. This was the China in which six young writers, members of a leftist organization, were made to dig their own graves by Chiang’s men and then were bound, thrown into the holes, and buried alive. Suyin and her husband lived in the wartime capital, Chungking. “A woman of talent is not a virtuous woman,” he told her. He was ashamed of her, mortified that she had not immediately become pregnant, but despite everything she could not leave him. He would have killed her. She worked as a midwife, and Tang, to explain her frequent absences, invented a daughter for her. One day in Cheng-tu she bought one—children were for sale everywhere then—a year-old baby, beautiful but covered with sores and so pathetically hungry she cried when she saw a bowl of rice. Even today, thirty-five years later, Han Suyin’s voice falters and her eyes fill with tears as she remembers. She paid a thousand Chinese dollars for her daughter. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, you’ve paid too much. You could have got her for 200.’”