Cast But One Shadow and Winter Love

by Han Suyin

Cast But One Shadow is based on a true story. During the Japanese war in South-east Asia, a little Dutch girl. Bertha Hertog, was left in Indonesia by her parents and brought up in an Indonesian village by an Indonesian woman. When she grew up, her foster mother, in true tradition, arranged a marriage for her, which the young Bertha did not appear to resent, with an Indonesian young man, a well-educated teacher; but at that juncture the parents returned and claimed back their daughter. The foster mother claimed that the child had been adopted by her. A judge in Singapore ruled that Bertha should be returned to her Dutch parents, and this set off a riot which lasted two days and in which many lives were lost. In Cast But One Shadow, Han Suyin has changed the setting by making the little girl French, and putting her in a Buddhist instead of an Islamic environment. But she was not satisfied with a straight story of unidimensional events. What really interests her is not the event itself, but its echo, its repercussions. In short, she asks; what happens in the heart of the man, the woman, the child, subject to the upheaval of war, uprooted from one culture and thrust into another?

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Han Suyin (Pinyin: Hán Sùyīn) is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (Pinyin: Zhōu Guānghú). She was a Chinese-born Eurasian author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works, as well as a physician. She wrote in English and French. She died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012.

Reviews

[Mégann Chamberland · Rating 3 out of 5]

C’était une lecture quand même difficile , mais pleine de sagesse.

[Sally Ito]

The Mixed Prose of the Mixed-Race Writer Han Suyin

The astrologer, feeling the leaden colossus of her rage raping the air about him, murmured, “There is no shark like hatred, no flood like greed.”

This bit of prose by Eurasian writer, Han Suyin grabbed me by the eyes, and had its way with me before I could even take a breath to think. Well, not really. But it did strike me as ‘florid’ in a way that seemed dated and trite. Yet why couldn’t I stop myself from reading more?

Anne continued, imposing, almost grandiose, in the grotesque baying laughing from her throat. “Pure,” she hiccupped, a sea lion vocalization, ‘pure. You do not know the facts of life, my dear. You’ve spent all your time obfuscating their lineaments.”

If I were to answer Anne, I’d say, “I suppose so.” and bow my head, guilty. But Anne, an adulterous French woman in Cambodia of the 1950’s confronting the spectre of her husband Phillipe’s besotted obsession with his missing and presumed dead sister, Sylvie, who had only recently returned to the wealthy colonial family home after being taken as a child by the Japanese during the war, and raised by village headwoman Mate whose son, Rahit has allegedly fallen in love with Sylvie and with whom she has ran away on the brink of her brother taking her to France is not talking to me.
She’s talking to the good doctor, Jacques, whom she has slept with, and who himself has fallen in love with Sylvie, and has this to say about her husband, Phillipe:

I sought to turn Sylvie from the past, where Phillipe held her, turn her to the future…And she, I think, would have learnt to love me, if Phillipe, sensing that she was escaping him, had not deliberately destroyed my image in her eyes, emphasizing the father and teacher side of me rather than the virile male. He castrated me in her mind with his “dear old fellow” and “the wise doctor has pronounced himself,” made her feel that any feeling for me …

Wait, did I just read that right? CASTRATED ME IN HER MIND?! The prose is so over the top that I stop to read it aloud to my husband. He asks me if it was written in another language first, like maybe, French?

No, this was not a translated book. It was definitely written in English. And English, as it turns out is only one of three languages the author is fluent in.
***
I found the book from which this prose was taken Cast But One Shadow and Winter Love -- in a Value Village store in my old hometown of Sherwood Park, Alberta a couple of summers ago. A non-descript looking Penguin paperback with its trademark orange trim, it contained two novellas, published in 1965, a year after I was born. Cast But One Shadow is described as the ‘story of a girl torn apart by her divided loyalty to two civilizations.’ And “Winter Love” tells the story of ‘the delicate and difficult subject of a love affair between two young women.’ Intrigued by the Chinese name of the author for I’d never heard of her, and always looking out for writing by Asians, I took the book off the shelf and opened it. I read the author’s biography – Han Suyin was born in Peking. Her mother was half Dutch, half Flemish, and her father was Chinese. She was brought up in China and learned English after she was ten years old. She attended a Chinese university in Peking, and later went to Europe. In 1938 she returned to China with her husband and lived in the interior during the Sino-Japanese war. I became instantly alert and curious. Here was a mixed-race writer I’d never heard of before who was handling the complicated topic of mixed cultural identity in an earlier age than mine.

Surely, her writing would have something to say to the world today in all its geo-political smallness through the vast interconnectivity of the Internet. Later, when I got home I typed the name Han Suyin into Google Search and was instantly provided with a rich trove of biographical information provided mostly by way of obituaries, for Han Suyin had died relatively recently at the ripe old age of 95 in November of 2012 in Lausanne, Switzerland. To say she led storied life wouldn’t even describe the half of it. Among her many literary accomplishments, her most famous book was ‘A Many Splendoured Thing’ which became the basis for the almost titular movie “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.”

However, the story of Han Suyin’s life was not the book I had in hand. And therein lies the rub of my essential dilemma as a writer – so fascinated by a writer’s life do I become, the more I read and expect that life to be mirrored in the writing.

***

When I read a book, I want to be immersed in a culture mitigated by language. In fiction, characters are realized in our imaginations through description and dialogue. Imagine my consternation then with this description of Rahit, the Cambodian son of the village headwoman, Mate:

He looks like Mate in the face, mouth, high cheekbones, golden skin, brown eyes, smile. His body is slim like all Khmers’, but with strong legs, and large shoulders with the pectoral muscles emphasized, their lower edge going almost horizontally to the arm-bone. He is naked to the navel, with a loin cloth, has tied his shoes by their shoe-laces and dangles them in his hand; his bare feet have mobile toes, each one full of its own independence, so that at any moment one feels he will climb a palm with these feet much like hands; and it is his feet which make Phillipe mutter, loud enough to be heard: ‘Almost simian.’

Wait, did the writer, just say ‘Rahit was like a … a monkey?’ But then I realize, she’s qualified her description by stating that it is the French man who describes Rahit as ‘almost simian.’ The description of Rahit continues thusly:

There is not a hair on Rahit’s body, his skin is smooth; only his dark hair waves, springs from his head with a life of its own, as if it could wing itself away. It is a casque of hair that Rahit has on his round skull. And so it is with all of him. Every separate part is separately beautiful and has come together by willingness. He moves, completely unconscious, never bumping into anything, because all things round him are also come together by willingness. He does not seem to know anything about himself at all.

I’m not sure whether Phillipe’s calling Rahit ‘almost simian’ is necessarily better than the narrator’s appraisal of the character as ‘not seem(ing) to know anything about himself at all.’ My own reading of this florid description made me think of dancing toes, and hair that might jump off one’s head like you would see in a comic strip about Donald Trump.

But if you think this description of Rahit is a touch excessive, wait til you hear what he has to say about love, for Rahit, is a poet:

There is no happy or unhappy love, no pure or impure love, no love that is useless. There is only love, to be lived in all its forms, love in whose shadow we all live. All loves are valid, and all loves are imperfect. As the trees of the forest eat away the stone face, gouge its eyes and twists its lips, so encroaching time eats the face of love, blinds its sight and seals its singing mouth. As the field is left to forgetfulness when the village goes, plague-possessed, crossing water to a new clean land, so do our bodies of love waste after its passage, and in this forgetting we grow new again towards the same word, the same yearning, in another time, another place. For even the Lord of Compassion loved man so much that he comes, again and yet again, taking upon himself the face that is to be eaten by worms, the body that is to fester in putrescence, so that love can be manifest and live, from death to death.

The text sounds vaguely Christian although it is clear the Lord of Compassion being referred to here is the Buddha. That Rahit is a poet, I do not have trouble believing, but that he is also the barely literate son of a village headwoman living in the countryside outside of Phnom Penh is too far-fetched.

But why is that, I asked myself. Then it occurred to me that what I was expecting from this book was anthropological social realism. And this novel was not that. It was a novel of ideas. And the central idea it wished to explore was ‘love’ as it was expressed differently in the religions of Buddhism and Christianity in the society in which this story taking place.

Suyin’s characters were repositories of her intellectual thoughts; they were personas that represented cultural ideas and notions gleaned from her context as a mixed-race person educated in the West and the East, and who crossed the threshold between languages, ideologies, beliefs.
It was my expectations that were outmoded. Han Suyin was not thinking to superficially represent a people’s culture to another world of the curious observer-reader as exotic entertainment, but rather she was interested in exploring what she thought about those worlds as both insider and outsider with the intellectual tools she had been given through her education and upbringing. (She was fluent in three languages and a graduate of universities in Beijing and London.) And furthermore, she was using the framework of the ‘compare-and-contrast’ mode of rhetorical writing.

Indeed, Cast but One Love is dedicated appropriately enough to "Fernand Marzelle, With gratitude for restoring my faith in the intellectual honesty of the European artist."

This novel of ideas was set up like a play, where the opening is prefaced with the words ‘THE SCENE’ written above it, and descriptions of character precede their entrances into the narrative as would be typical in a play. The characters are not given names at first but are merely referred to by their position in the society. There is the ‘astrologer’ and the ‘doctor’ for example, who are later named as the novel goes along. This form of writing felt classical to me; the characters were like marble statues representing types such ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Intellectual” except ‘the poet’ in this case is revealed to be a Cambodian village teenager.

I felt uncomfortable reading this story because I had trouble situating myself in it; Intellectually, I seemed to be in a Greek amphitheatre while viscerally I was sitting in a Cambodian village house surrounded by rice paddies. The writing style seemed at odds with the location and setting of the story.

Attracted to Han Suyin in the same way writer Aamer Hossein explains in his Granta essay about her “Han Suyin: A Friendship” I, too, agreed with his assessment of her writing:

For months I tumbled through her novels and her memoirs, one after the other, entranced at times by her poetry and at others maddened by her sentences: witty and terse, whimsical, tangled and even verbose. But I remained entranced.

Every time I would want to put down the book in frustration, something in it drew me back again. Slowly, I began to get the sense that this writer was creating her own unique world – and particularly in the case of Cast but One Shadow – an allegorical one that mirrored its author’s French-English-Chinese sensibility in language, tone, and subject matter. For example, she could well identify with the Frenchman’s ‘almost simian’ appraisal of Rahit’s appearance, having been called herself as I read in one obituary -- ‘a yellowish object’ by her callow European mother. But on the other hand, I wondered if being considered a ‘simian’ is more an insult to the European mind then to the Asian and that is what constituted my own reading of the language as offensive.
Han Suyin was creating the space and locale of the nowhere and somewhere that is fiction. If I went to Cambodia, I would perhaps see people like Rahit, but likely never hear them speak in the same way. But naively expecting them, too, made me aware of my predilection for realism – a taste – that in its own way is as absurd as expecting Romeo or Juliet to speak like current day Italian teenagers.

It was really only near the end of the book when I realized that Cast But One Shadow was more Buddhist allegory than roman a clef. When the final mystery as to who killed Sylvie is revealed, all the characters except the poet Rahit, must face a flood. The flood is not so much literal as metaphorical. For even as the waters reach the soon-to-be-victim’s feet, they are not running away, but rather, are watching a TV set tied to the upper branches of a tree on which a show of a human being dismembered piece by piece is playing. This bizarre and horrific imagery – and the way it was set up in this scene – seemed like a stage production setting where the props act as metaphors rather than as decoration. (I can’t help but think this horrific imagery is the prophetic precursor to the atrocities that soon would take place in that country under the rule of the Khmer Rouge.)

In mythological terms what does a ‘flood’ mean? How does the flood work as a metaphor? In Christian thinking, it represents God’s judgement and his desire to wash clean the earth of its sinful inhabitants. But this is not the right interpretation of events here, so Suyin, writing in the words of the character Prem says, “I forget, you are Christians, not Buddhists so you would not know that the Lord of Compassion spoke, figuratively, of course, of the Deadly Floods; three in number; the waters of death which are ignorance, lust, and the desire of becoming, of never ceasing to be.”

Reading Prem’s words near the end of this novel, I feel the kind of genuine satisfaction of reading a good thesis statement in an essay – here is a religious truth being expressed – one that contrasts one religion’s tenets to another by addressing a certain audience for whom the comment is intended. And then, I have no trouble at all interpreting the flood as metaphorical as it has been explained to me by Prem, for the characters in this story have certainly been swept away by these waters – lust, ignorance, desire of becoming – in the most florid of terms, at times, by the writer.
The only person who escapes the flood is the poet, Rahit, who is described as ‘almost unconscious’ and whose body’s ‘Every separate part is separately beautiful and has come together by willingness. ‘These phrases of description of Rahit’s person are a far cry from the ‘almost simian’ description of Rahit by the French character. Of all the characters, Rahit is described by the narrator in a way that most embodies the Buddhist ideal of the detached and least desirous of the ‘becoming’ that threatens to wash away the others in a flood of ‘lust’ and ‘ignorance.’ That is why he is not washed away by those things that overwhelm everyone else.

***

Cast But One Shadow is an ambitious intellectual work. And in dwelling on this piece of writing, I came to understand my own literary proclivities and expectations which are colored by my own prejudices and preferences. I want books by certain people to read a certain way. And when they do not, I become frustrated. The difficulty of a compare-and-contrast mode of analysis as of the kind presented in this novel is how one is always choosing one over the other – some kind of hierarchical judgement is always at play in the reader’s mind, when the analysis ultimately rests on the basis of an encounter between two unlike things. Such an encounter can sometimes just be uncomfortable but also catalytic. Something else is created in the encounter which is neither one thing or the other. Cast But One Shadow is exactly that kind of ‘something else’ by a writer struggling in her being to cast her own unique blended shadow in the world of literature in the English language.

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curieux et éternel, que somme nous que les choix que nous font et nos responsabilités pour ces choix, qu'est vraiment la prédétermination et le libre-arbitre, voudrait-on dire que vouloir répondre à ces questions mène au désespoir ou au contraire une espérance d'une vie meilleure pour l'individu autant que pour l'Humanité? Un roman-cloître, une étude des caractères, un dialogue entre 5 personnes, assis dans une hutte cambodgienne, dans une situation particulière - unique et banale - une fille qui, suite à la guerre devient orpheline pour être élevée dans un pays étranger qui devient le sien seulement pour retrouver, quelques années plus tard, sa famille de naissance n'étant plus vraiment sa famille réelle, avec tous les complications de la société coloniale et de la société masculine de l'époque, une situation et un roman qui n'en est pas si simple que cela paraît à première vue, et nos propres réactions du lecteur à ce roman en est le témoignage, un miroir, en quelque sorte.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this book was a person, they would hang around coffee shops reading books on Eastern philosophy and telling people about them. Basically, I thought it was pretty pretentious and waffly, although at points it did seem to realise that, with all it's characters locked in their own pain and refusing to acknowledge everyone elses and the fortune teller who did try to tell them that, but waffled around a bit as well.