Han Suyin - Works

Novelist and doctor, born in Beijing, China. She studied medicine at Beijing, Brussels, and London, and practised in Hong Kong until 1964. Her many novels include Destination Chungking (1942), A Many-splendoured Thing (1952, film 1955), and Four Faces (1963). She also wrote a semi-autobiographical and historical trilogy, The Crippled Tree (1965), A Mortal Flower (1966), and Birdless Summer (1968), as well as The Morning Deluge (1972), The Wind in the Tower (1976), and Han Suyin's China (1987). Later works include Tigers and Butterflies (1990) and the autobiographical Wind in my Sleeve (1992).

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.

Han Suyin was born in Xinyang, Henan province, China. Her father was a Chinese engineer surnamed Chow (Chinese: 周; Tang (Tang Paohuang), a Chinese Nationalist military officer, who was to become a general. 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 & 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. 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. 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 .

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.

Works

Cultural and political conflicts between East and West in modern history play a central role in Han Suyin's work. In Jung Chang's Mao: The Unknown Story Han Suyin is decsribed as a Maoist sympathiser, used by Mao to spread propaganda to Western audiences.

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)

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)

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;