Han Suyin

Han Suyin () (born September 12, 1917), is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (). She is a Chinese-born Eurasian 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

She began work as a typist at Beijing Hospital in 1931, not yet fifteen years old. In 1933 she was admitted to Yenching University where she felt she was discriminated against as a Eurasian. 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. She described her wartime experiences in her memoir, Destination Chungking.

She went again to London in 1944 to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital. Her autobiographical novel Winter Love set during this period of her life, concerns her own acceptance of her biraciality and bisexuality. She 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 Hong Kong, she met and fell in love with Ian Morrison, a British war correspondent and a married man based in Singapore, who was killed in Korea in 1950. She portrayed their relationship in A Many-Splendoured Thing and the factual basis of their relationship is documented in My House Has Two Doors.

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. Also in 1955, her best-known work, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was made into a Hollywood film. In her autobiographical work My House Has Two Doors, she distanced herself from the film, saying that although the film was shown for many weeks at the Cathay Cinema in Singapore to packed audiences, she never went to see it, and that the film rights were sold to pay for an operation on her adopted daughter who was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Much later, the movie itself was made into a daytime soap opera.

After Comber and Han Suyin's divorce, she 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. Although separated, they remained married until Ratnaswamy's death. 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. In 1974 she was the featured speaker at the founding national convention of the US China Peoples Friendship Association in Los Angeles.

Works

Her novel A Many-Splendoured Thing, the story of a married British foreign correspondent Mark Elliot 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.

Influences

Novels

Autobiographical works

Historical studies

References

Notes

External links

Category:1917 births Category:Living people Category:Chinese novelists Category:Chinese people of Belgian descent Category:Hakka people Category:Hong Kong novelists Category:Writers of Chinese descent Category:American writers of Chinese descent Category:Peking University alumni Category:People from Xinyang Category:Swiss novelists