'VOICES FROM VIETNAM : Tran Thi Tue Mai + The Phong+ Van Nguyen Duong ... / TENGGARA 6 -- The Phong's Blog
Thứ Hai, 9 tháng 6, 2014
voices from vietnam : tran thi tue mai + the phong+ van nguyen duong - TENGGARA 6
TENGGARA 6- Dept. of English-
Univ of Malaya - Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Tran Thi Tue Mai
Translated by
Dam Xuan Can
TRAN THI TUE MAI [ 1923- 1982]
Way to look at things of dawn
Here I am with the long nigh
Of days in the past and the future
The late carriage hastily hide farewell to the sad street
The time-ground wheels still go round and round;
Lofty trees cast shadows on the road,
While the leaves are waiting for the wind, and the branches pitying the
leaves
Here I am with the deep night,
Bewildered with love and tormented by hate;
Nothing is left in my arms,
Spring is only a useless and bitter memory.
Here I am with the long night
With myself scattered on the open book and out in the rain-tapped yard
Embracing the flowery land
Is not enough to express my boundless and compassionate love and hope.
Here I am with the deep night,
My shoulders suddenly ache under the weight of history;
Roads, far and near, and choked with the smell of death,
Whatever the name, my country is the resting side of war,
What is left? What is still amendable?
Thousands of eyes are watching each other with rising despair.
In the long night, here I am
Awakened within the blood -- mine and my people' s.
Ups and downs of life should not dishearten us:
We will survive, we will survive
I am still with the tender night
My arms open, I look forwards to watching things of dawn.
July the twentieth *
Nine o'clock at night;
The Faculty of Arts campus is packed as on a festival night.
I sneak in
The fire has risen high;
Shoulder to shoulder in a circle
We assemble around the fire
The fire is burning hot:
let us all sleep not.
Sleep not!
Sleep not!
Afyer years of intolerable ignorance
The call is thundering in every direction
Wake up, We cannot indulge in sleep anymore.
Stand up! March!
The turning of history is here!
We have had too much bloodshed and misery in this wretched land;
We will no longer stand such cruel humiliation
We are all children of Trưng Vương, Trần Hưng Đạo, Quang Trung,
Lê Lợi,
Keep on marching, says the voice of yesterday
Clear the trail! is todays' call
His voice resounding;
The young speaker on the platform delivers the message;
The starlight in his eyes he walks oout to the road
Screaming in the fog and wind
The young and brave demonstrate
To wake up the town.
Sleep not to nigh!
July the Twentieth
Sleep not to night!
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us keep up ouf anger;
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us keep up our anger;
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us hold each other's hands tightly
The hour has struck!
Wake up everybody.
*The 20th of July, 1954 was the day of the partitioning of Vietnam.
( TENGGARRA- P. 96- 97)
--------------------------
The Phong
Translated by
Dam Xuan Can
THE PHONG [ i.e. Do Manh Tuong 1932- ]
Asian Morning Western Music / poems by The Phong
(Translated by DAM XUAN CAN + Preface by LLOYD FERNANDO)
(Dai Nam Van Hien Books, Saigon 2012)
DAM XUAN CAN [1939- ] now living in Sydney/ Australia
What I choose in this mad World.
I choose autumn, pine forest and sad sunshine;
I give up writing poetry
and will not torture myself anymore
Do me a favor, my solemn-faced and wise wife.
Say to me,
" Burn a fire! Hand the mosquito-net!"
I am the voluntary slave who is fully contented.
Let us have a long sleep,
O wife, sons and daughters!
Tomorrow morning
we'll wake up early
set out to grow vegetables.
Outside the hedge
near the farm gate
We'll put up a board " Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted"
In all languahes on the world .
1964
THEPHONG
( TENGGARA, 6 - p. 95)
---------------------------------------
Van Nguyen Duong
Translated by
Dam Xuan Can
The still-remaining sadness
Give me the still-remaining sadness
Of your pair of pearl-shaped and crystal tears:
At the bottomof the sea there are pearls
Along with mysterious eyes floating here and there
Assad as your tear-glistering face in the night life
Chaistmas night wakes our memory
With music in the background
Accompanying the worn-out song "Desperate Frontier Love"
I see your wet eyes
And crystal tears dissolve in my body
drops after drop of lip-burning gin
My heart bitterly grieves as in a dream
You have become tears yourself.
O my old flame, now the wife of Phiên,
The chap used to sing the song, and was always by my side
In battle on green paddies;
With his beautiful voice he took you from ny hands.
You have moved on the dancing floor in the dim light
As on the desert of life to the waltz of the century of war,
The waltz you, Phiên and I liked so well.
You moved from country to town,
I from the partition line to the South
And your Phiên became a war casualty
We threee belong to the generation of shattered dreams
You are familiar to me one. You are frightened
At being exposed as a prey at the music and drinks
And teh singer's ttaccato voice keeps ringing in your ears.
You will hild other bodies
than that of the husband survivin g the war
Give me the still-remaining sadness
The pearl shaped eyes
And crystal tears,
I will cry for you in the days ahead
Filled with the sounds of the lean waltz of the troubled century.
Autobiography
I first learned the story of my life the year I turned ten,
When I started learning the history of my country
My mother used to say,
"Long ago our predecessors founded the coiuntry of Vietnam Under
the Sun.
Now the sun has gone down -- but why in the East "
Then I understood and was deeply moved.
In the morning I looked at the bridge sun on the fields
Where scarecrows has been set up for some thousand years
Where black buffaloes were pulling ploughs
And the menfolk planting seedlings with their hands
For one thousand years my country was enslaved by the Chinese
For eighty years by the French,
No change whatsoever was brought about
So runs my biography to the age of ten
The story of my ten years in the darkness of eighty years!
I learnt more about my life when I was twelves,
I started missing the school beating.
Dreadful seems right under my eyes
My family fled to the coastal area leaving the beloved house behind;
The peasants rose up to fight
Vast fields were left overgrown with weeds,
I no longer heard love songs alternately exchanged in sun- drenched days.
The scarecrows were in tatters showing patches of straw and mud
Decent common folk were like scarecrows
They woke up very early in the morning to watch the situation,
At dusk they were still heading to some refuge in the hamlets.
Everywhere we find the soldiers wearing combat boots
We are with our own eyes
The stinking corpses drift to the riverside
And attached by hawks and crows,
So runs my biography at the age of twelve,
At the start of a bloody war.
With a turn of the tide life changed
Life was so sad when I was fourteen
When the comeback took place everywhere,
I returned to my old village
In the old days my beautiful three-roomed house with red tiles
Occupied a privileged spot at the end of the village
Right in front of a bamboo hedge
Now the fire of war had burned all the supporting pillars,
Even trees were mowed down, the trees with gorgeous leaves,
Weeds were growing everywhere, blocking the entrance .
(TENGGARA 6, p. 98- 99)
TENGGARA 5
Thứ Hai, 2 tháng 6, 2014
lloyd fernando : picture of the artist as a eurasian / TENGGARA April, 1968.
TENGGARA/ April ,1968
Dept. of English - Univ. of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia.
Lloyd Fernando
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 Flowerit 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
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 Flowerit 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
được đăng bởi khedo@outlook.com @ 12:36
0 Nhận xét
0 Nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét
Đăng ký Đăng Nhận xét [Atom]
<< Trang chủ