A LIFE’S SUMMER IN CHINA

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31908, 8 February 1969, Page 4

A LIFE’S SUMMER IN CHINA

Birdless Summer. By Han' Suyin. Jonathan Cape.; 347 pp. Inevitably, Chinese landscape painting comes to mind as one reads, or to say without derogation, ploughs through this vast book. The scene is far-reaching immense but the details are painted in meticulous miniature. It is not easy reading: neither is it easy to lay aside, since one is drawn, inexorably, into the graft, corruption or, at best, the

THEATRE The Governor’s Lady. By David Mercer. Methuen, 41 pp. British policy in Africa has been in the headlines for a long time now, and has become a topic on which every thinking person is expected to have views. Any play on the subject has good chances of becoming controversial, and is bound to stimulate some sort of discussion. But its value as drama is likely to be distorted because the bulk of the theatre-going public will unconsciously assess it as political comment. Perhaps that is just as well for David Mercer, whose “The Governor’s Lady” has little to recommend it apart from its well-stated (if rather obvious) satire of the extreme right wing. The Governor’s metamorphosis into gorilla is at first accepted by his wife as in keeping with the bestiality innate in the masculine sex. But when he climbs into a tree and starts pelting her with coconuts, she drops her poise of stoic perseverance and- shoots him, killing herself in the process. The play is told from her neurotic viewpoint, but the reader gathers from comments by the more reliable minor figures that her husband had, in fact, died six months earlier, and that the colony is now independent. This play will irritate conservatives by its triviality, and treat the left-wing to a cheap ideological uplift. An enterprising lighting expert will enjoy the last scene.

insincerities of Chiang Kai- 1 shek’s China. At no stage 1 can one leave the author to i her fate, certainly not until < ' she has resolved the dilemma 1 ' of her love for China which i ' is tested cruelly by a fanati- < [ cal husband. The book is in < ’ part a looking-back at the 1 anguished clash of their lives. 1 . This is the part in finely f ' brushed detail, against the 1 vast landscape of China at I war with Japan. ' , Filled with love and ' > admiration for everything . Chinese and resolved to play a part in the heroic struggle ! of the time, the young Eurar sian dropped her medical . studies in Belgium, in 1938, to return home. On the ' , voyage she met and fell in r love with an army officer, ! s I also returning from study in ‘ ! Europe, whom she saw as s patriotic, idealistic and sin- ' / cere. His qualities were, in i fact, the antithesis of these. : - Already before their marria age he began her moral ! re-education, in which i nothing mattered except cori rect thinking according to e the principles of Chiang Kai- , 1 shek, and the virtues of Cons fucian feudalism. “The relas tionship of busband and wife I is that of superior and - inferior, master and servant” o This was imposed by a| s' “modern” Chinese, fresh ) [from Sandhurst, on an intelliII gent young woman, fresh [from a European university. I [ She realised, quite soon, s [that she was to serve his y ambitions, once she had been ' moulded into a docile, j obedient instrument. In r bemused bewilderment, she r almost allows this to happen: e but her own ambition, to qualify in some useful capay city, then to work for the c people of China, was never y given up, despite the mental y and physical tortures r endured from her fanatical L, husband. China remained her s first and never - forsaken y love. The personal story—in i- which the husband is conr. cemed inexorably with virtue a and morality, while at the n same time lying about her to ■t his superiors and about himself to her—is told against'

the suffering of the Chinese people; the Japanese bombing, starvation, ill treatment, corruption, taxation of fantastic harshness and ingenuity; street number tax, length of door tax, bandit tax, bandit suppression congratulatory tax, tooth tax, happy tax (imposed to promote a cheerful countenance from those who paid), laziness tax on those who did not grow opium, even where opium could not be planted. Opiumeradication campaigns were to make sure that the peasant grew the opium, yet he was paid only a few coins for his labour, nothing for the crop. Han Suyin frankly discusses the scandalous activities of the war lords, the struggle among the young military class for advancement by personal favour, and gives a new, Asian view of World War 11. The canvas is tremendous, the book a major ■ work on China, although it covers only the few years (1938-1948) of the summer of one young woman’s life. She never gives up the dream of becoming a doctor. In China, she works as a midwife, and describes with almost dispassionate clarity the fate of the poor whom she sees in their darkest hour of degradation. By good chance she is able to resume her medical studies in London, where her husband is posted as military attache. With the strength of her determination to qualify first, then return to help her people, she is able to refuse to go back with him. She has by this time an adopted daughter whom she supports while studying. The book (the third part of Han Suyin’s autobiography) ends not with return to China, but to “the gates”—to Hong Kong—“to watch and wait and make up my mind. For China was not Pao (my husband), not the cruelty I had witnessed and endured, not the vile regime of Chiang and his administration. China was much more than this; it was the people I had seen, carrying their loads, sweating, starving, fighting, dying, the millions and millions.