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Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1992, pp: 107-126 107 The Autobiographies of Han Suyin: A Female Postcolonial Subjectivity By Helen M. Buss Finding a literary placement for a writer such as Han Suyin-a novelist/autobiographer /historian, of Chinese and Belgianparentage, Chinese upbringing, European and British education, who holds a Hong Kong passport and resides in Switzerland with her Indian husband-is the kind of challenge which will in the future more frequently present itself to the literary critic concerned v.riththe phenomenon of postcolonial literature in English. While writers such as Salman Rushdie and the Bharati Mukherjee (151) have commented on what Mukherjee calls the "deep sense of marginality" of such writers, neither of these represents quite so many margins as does Han. For the critic, finding a venue for work on such a writer presents new margins, since Han has no location in the politics of postcolonialism, where a writer's direct ties to the ideological, geographical, racial, and historical struggles within the old British empire, still tends to mandate if his or her work is considered worthy of academic attention. I presented an earlier version of this article at an American Studies conference on the concerns of the Pacific Rim, simply because it was the first time I had seen Han's name listed under any category used for the classification of writers. And indeed "Pacific Rim," if geography must continue to signifya writer's cultural location, is a good designation for Han. Although her only claim to United States identity is the language she writes 108 Canadian Review of American Studies in and the fact that both her mother and daughter became citizens of that country, she is certainly an "American," a hybrid "new world" person. Her writing is often obsessed with the new world of the "rim"where the national characters of, and the relationships between, the two giants of the Pacific, America and China-the two places that hold Han's personal posterity and her past-are acted out. Until critical venues of a more international variety, released from geography and nationalism begin to invent themselves, it is that vast "rim"concept-which describes not so much a new territory, but a new angle from which to view our globe-on which I tentatively situate Han Suyin. Constructing a strategy for a critical reading that can encompass a work of history and literature as diverse in its concerns and as lengthy in its narrative as Han Suyin'sfive-volumeautobiography is an even more complex task than finding a critical venue suitable to Han. I hope to make some gestures toward evolving such a reading strategy by bringing together theories of subjectivity,genre, and women's writing. All three concerns are foregrounded by Han herself in the first fifteen pages of her first volume, The CrippledTree (CT). In terms of her construction of herself as a human subject Han writes of her sense of herself in the present of the writing moment: Indeed it is suffering, to go on growing, to hold to what is, to try to understand, to knock down one's own preconceptions. To find one's memories ravaged by time and revolution, one's intimate illusions ripped up, laughter for one's private desolation the only answer: to realize how difficult, agonizing, is the process of understanding, and how long it takes. And so I am writing this book, having achieved one thing all Asians will understand, and I think many Europeans too: a continuity between what was and what is, a sense of destiny fulfilled,not by some Higher Power, nor by mystic concatenation of stars, but by the relentless logic of each day lived with courage, within the enormous scope that word day implies. Helen M Buss I 109 In this book all the records are authentic, the facts as accurate as research could make them. I set them down, since the time may come when it is impossible for such as I to write. (18-19) In these personal and poetic words Han both recognizes and contests the poststructuralist theory of the constructed and temporary nature of subjectivity, that we are, as...

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