Dubious History

THE CRIPPLED TREE by Han Suyin. 461 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Han Suyin made a literary reputation of sorts by telling, in A Many-Splendored Thing, all the revealing intimate details of her carryings-on in Hong Kong with a married British foreign correspondent who got killed in the Korean War. Several autobiographical exposes later, Eurasian Suyin, now 48, tells again of herself, this time as a child, and of the declining fortunes of her father's Mandarin family at a time of chaos, civil war and foreign depredation in China. "The characters in this book," says the author, "are not fictional, neither are the events."

Actually, the book is a Moravia-type shocker telling of impaled babies, little girls six and eight years old sold to brothels, and quarterings by the thousands. The purpose of all this gore is to prove that the suffering and horror wrought upon China by the West forced the Chinese to go Communist in self-defense. Author Suyin lets her morbid imagination gallop away when she writes of such events as the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by Japan and the Western powers: "Soldiers of France and England and Germany went about with open trousers to rape women, and spears to impale the babies. Militant missionaries boasted of the peasants they shot after baptising them. One of them, an American, wrote: 'I sent eight hundred and forty-one new souls to heaven this week.' And there is that German officer having fun in Peking: 'When I go pheasant shooting, I shoot cocks and spare hens; but when hunting Chinese, I kill them all, men and women, old and young.' "

This sort of brutal treatment, says the author, explains why the Chinese people--49 years later--welcomed with open arms the Communist victory in 1949. As for the accounts of mass murder perpetrated by the Reds (Chairman Mao himself modestly admits liquidating 800,000 landlords and capitalists from 1949 to 1954), they are horror stories invented by Western propagandists. In her eyes, Communist China has done no wrong, its leaders are the most kindly of men, and she visits Peking every year. "What astonished me most," says Suyin, marveling at Mao's benevolence, is the sight of "old warlords with the blood of hundreds of Communist revolutionaries, decapitated or tortured on their executioners' knives," living comfortable, rehabilitated lives on government handouts.

As for Han Suyin herself, she prefers to live in capitalist Singapore.

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