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 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.

Han Suyin was born in Xinyang, Henan province, China. Her father was a 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 Yanjing (Yenching) University (later part of Peking 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 (Wade-Giles: Cheng-Tu), Sichuan, then went again to London in 1944 to study medicine, graduated MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery) 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 Commmissioner of Police [Special Branch] mainly because of the perceived anti-British approach of her novel And the Rain My Drink. In 2006, Dr. Leon Comber was a Research Fellow at Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Melbourne.) In 1955, she 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 [1]. Also in 1955, her best-known work, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was made into a Hollywood film.

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. After the two separated, Han Suyin relocated to Switzerland.

1 Works
2 External links

[edit] 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. In regard to her novels, however, someone who was close to her comments that without detracting from the brilliance of her writing, she has a propensity to mix fact with fiction that is often detrimental to the persons who are rightly or wrongly "identified" in what she writes. In Jung Chang's Mao: The Unknown Story Han Suyin is described as a Maoist sympathiser, used by Mao to spread propaganda to Western audiences.

[edit] Novels

Destination Chungking (1942) [note: Chungking=Chongqing]
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)

[edit] Autobiographical works

A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952)
And the Rain My Drink (1956)
The Crippled Tree (1965)
A Mortal Flower (1966)
Birdless Summer (1968)
My House Has Two Doors (1980)
Phoenix Harvest (1982)
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)

[edit] 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)