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Han Suyin

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Han Suyin (Chinese: 韩素音; pinyin: Hán Sùyīn) (born September 12 1917), is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (Chinese: 周光湖, pinyin: Zhōu Guānghú). She is a Chinese-born Eurasian[1] author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works, as well as a physician. She currently resides in Lausanne and has written in English and French.

Biography

Han Suyin was born in Xinyang, Henan province, China. Her father was a Belgian-educated Chinese engineer surnamed Chow (Chinese: 周; pinyin: Zhōu), of Hakka heritage, while her mother was a Flemish Belgian. In 1938 Han Suyin married Pao H. Tang (Tang Paohuang), a Chinese Nationalist military officer, who was to become a general. They adopted one daughter (Yungmei).

She began work as a typist at Beijing Hospital in 1931, not yet fifteen years old. In 1933 she was admitted to Yenching University. In 1935 she went to Brussels to study science. In 1938 she returned to China, working in an American Christian mission hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan, then went again to London in 1944 to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital and graduated MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery) with Honours in 1948 and went to Hong Kong to practice medicine in 1949 at the Queen Mary Hospital. Her husband, Tang, meanwhile, had died in action during the Chinese Civil War in 1947.

In 1952, she married Leon F. Comber, a British officer in the Malayan Special Branch, and went with him to Johore, Malaya (present-day Malaysia), where she worked in the Johore Bahru General Hospital and opened a clinic in Johore Bharu and Upper Pickering Street, Singapore. (Comber resigned from the British Colonial Police Service as an acting Assistant Commissioner of Police [Special Branch] mainly because of the perceived anti-British bias of her novel And the Rain My Drink. In 2006, Dr. Comber was a Research Fellow at Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Melbourne.) In 1955, Han Suyin contributed efforts to the establishment of Nanyang University in Singapore. Specifically, she offered her services and served as physician to the institution, after having refused an offer to teach literature. Chinese writer Lin Yutang, first president of the university, had recruited her for the latter field, but she declined, indicating her desire "to make a new Asian literature, not teach Dickens", according to the Warring States Project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst[2]. Also in 1955, her best-known work, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was made into a Hollywood film. Much later, the movie itself was made into a daytime soap opera.

After Comber and Han Suyin's divorce, she later married Vincent Ratnaswamy, an Indian colonel (died January 2003 in Bangalore, India), and lived for a time in Bangalore, India. Later, Han Suyin and Vincent Ratnaswamy resided in Hong Kong and Switzerland. Since 1956, Han Suyin visited China almost annually becoming one of the first foreign nationals to visit post-1949 revolution China, including through the years of the Cultural Revolution.

Works

Cultural and political conflicts between East and West in modern history play a central role in Han Suyin's work. She also explores the struggle for liberation in Southeast Asia and the internal and foreign policies of modern China since the end of the imperial regime. Many of her writings feature the colonial backdrop in East Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Her novel A Many-Splendoured Thing, the story of a married but separated American reporter, who falls in love with a Eurasian doctor, was made into a film called Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. This also inspired a popular song.

Novels

  • Destination Chungking (1942)
  • A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952)
  • And the Rain My Drink (1956)
  • The Mountain Is Young (1958)
  • Winter Love (1962)
  • Cast But One Shadow (1962)
  • Four Faces (1963)
  • L'abbé Pierre (1965, French only)
  • L'abbé Prévost (1975, French only)
  • Till Morning Comes (1982)
  • The Enchantress (1985)

Autobiographical works

  • The Crippled Tree (1965)
  • A Mortal Flower (1966)
  • Birdless Summer (1968)
  • My House Has Two Doors (1980)
  • Phoenix Harvest (1982). (This is Volume II of the hardback edition of My House Has Two Doors, published separately in paperback.)
  • Wind In My Sleeve (1992)
  • A Share of Loving (1988)
  • Fleur de soleil, histoire de ma vie (1988, French only: Flower of sun: the story of my life)

Historical studies

  • China in the Year 2001 (1967)
  • Asia Today: Two Outlooks (1969)
  • The Morning Deluge: Mao Tsetong and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954 (1972)
  • Lhasa, the Open City (1976)
  • Wind in the Tower: Mao Tsetong and the Chinese Revolution, 1949-1965 (1976)
  • China 1890-1938: From the Warlords to World War (1989; historical photo-reportage)
  • Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (1994)

References

  1. ^ Han Suyin - In voicing her Eurasian identity, she defined a people
  2. ^ Sinologists - Lin Yutang
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