In December 1984, I was confined for an open-heart surgery to replace my damaged heart valves. The surgery was an act of faith as it was a last resort to life. Devices of diversion, like television and radio, were absent in the hospital. There was not even a cup of forgetfulness for me to drink all the bitter pills of sorrows and physical pains.
There were many readings of escape but I paid no attention until Ate brought Han Suyin’s Till Morning Comes. Suyin is more known for her book A Many-Splendored Thing, which was filmed into Love Is A Many Splendored Thing. And, I didn’t need love stories at my bedside table. I needed deliverance. I wanted to fly away and get lost! When my cardiologist saw the book and told me Suyin was a real medical doctor, it made me curious. While flipping the pages, I silently asked God if there would be mornings in my life when I had known only darkness during my hospital confinement.
With death lurking in the corners, I began reading the book. It was a book with many levels of reading its story. Primarily, what got to me was its poetry of language and emotions. Its eloquent, evocative, stirring language hit raw emotions which, unexpectedly, moved me beyond the inner psychic medical drama that I played out during those days. A wisp, gossamer, ineffable kind of feelings filled me. And I entered another portal of escape.
Till Morning Comes is a poignant love story between an American journalist who goes to China as a correspondent and a Chinese surgeon, described as a doctor who heals people by touch. It’s an intimate love story set during China’s breathtaking historical revolution. Love and passion chooses no background, it could happen anywhere, anytime. Amid the magnificence and squalor, the passion and cruelty of the Chinese Revolution, an interracial family with its accompanying thorns and rose is born.
On another reading is a story of love beyond, a story of enduring love for immortal China that spans the period of the Japanese war in 1940s, to the turbulent change-over to Red China, to the early 1970s when the country struggled to enlarge China through the ideologues of communism and socialism.
At this point, my heady-girl reaction was working. It was easy to understand why she had to leave China at its most tumultuous times. But, how could Stephanie leave Yong just like that, almost sneaking herself and daughter away from him? And, how could Yong let go of his wife? I wanted to rip the book to pieces. Then, I realized that I was consumed by displaced anger.
Yong’s unprepossessing love for her wife is overpowering. He feels he has no right to take away from her the things that she could do and the person she could become. He is worried that events in China would break her, cause her unhappiness and eclipse the fullness of her life. But his love for his motherland is stronger. No matter what she is going through, he would never, ever leave China. He would be part of her war, change and search for true destiny.
Suyin presents romantic love bounded by time and culture. History, social order, opposite cultures and the dynamics involved therein are sources of major conflicts between countries and people. How can an East-West love, marriage and racially-mixed family survive – no matter how magnificent and passionate the love is – when the world forbids it, when communism is considered the evil of the world and the West is looked at surreptitiously at that time in history?
After 45 days in the hospital, just after Christmas, I went home with a surgically scarred chest and a prosthetic-mitral valve inside my heart. The New Year was nearly coming when I finished reading the book. Stephanie returns to China in 1971, after 12 years. Her listless soul has been stilled for she is finally home. Sadly, Yong is violently killed by gangs in obedience to the Party’s Rectification Campaign in a bid for social equality.
Back at our home, I always woke up early for I was hungry to catch the rising sun. The hospital was empty without sunshine. As I sat on our terrace facing East where, as they say, everything begins, I knew that I wouldn’t be a regular person or have a regular life anymore. So many questions left unanswered on my mind but deep in my big, wounded, recovering heart I knew that there would still be many new mornings as I have been given another chance at life.