Locating and Constructing the Self in Han Suyin’s The Crippled Tree

While much critical attention has been devoted to Han Suyin’s novels and historical writings, her autobiographical writings have received relatively less critical examination. This article explores Han Suyin’s transgressions of autobiographical conventions in her construction of the autobiographical subject in the first volume of her five-volume autobiographical series, namely The Crippled Tree (1965). Writing in the 1960s, Han has weaved together the very different and at times incompatible disciplines of fictions, histories, and ethnographies. The Crippled Tree also deviates from autobiographical traditions by an eclectic mix of literary genres and by a blend of narrative voices as the text constructs the national, racial and ethnic identity(ies) of the autobiographer and the autobiographical subject.