Han Suyin - Biography

Biography

Han Suyin was born in Xinyang, Henan, China. Her father was a Belgian-educated Chinese engineer, Chow Yen Tung (Chinese: 周; pinyin: Zhōu Yintong), of Hakka heritage, while her mother was Flemish.

She began work as a typist at Peking Union Medical College 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 medicine. In 1938 she returned to China, married Tang Pao-Huang (唐保黄), a Chinese Nationalist military officer, who was to become a general. She worked as a midwife in an American Christian mission hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan. Her first novel, Destination Chungking (1942), was based on her experiences during this period. In 1940, she and her husband adopted their daughter, Tang Yungmei.. In 1953, she adopted another daughter, Chew Hui-Im (Hueiying) in Singapore.

In 1944 she went to London to continue her studies in medicine at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1947, while she was still in London, her husband died in action during the Chinese Civil War. She graduated MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery) with Honours in 1948 and in 1949 went to Hong Kong to practice medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital. There she met and fell in love with Ian Morrison, a married Australian war correspondent based in Singapore, who was killed in Korea in 1950. She portrayed their relationship in the novel A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and the factual basis of their relationship is documented in her autobiography My House Has Two Doors (1980).

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 Bahru and Upper Pickering Street, Singapore.

A very human account of Han Suyin, the physician, author and woman, occurs in G. M. Glaskin's "A Many-Splendoured Woman: A Memoir of Han Suyin" disclosing even the occasional spelling mistake in her written medical prescriptions.

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 novel, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was filmed as Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. The musical theme song, "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing", won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In her autobiography 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, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, which ran from 1967 to 1973 on American TV.

In 1956, she published the novel And the Rain My Drink, whose description of the guerrilla war of Chinese rubber workers against the government was perceived very anti-British, and her husband is said to have resigned as acting Assistant Commissioner of Police mainly because of this. After the resignation, he moved in to book publishing as the local representative for London publisher Heinemann. Han Suyin and Leon Comber divorced in 1958, and he eventually moved to Hong Kong, where he became managing director for Heinemann's subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Since 1991 he has lived in Australia, where he is Honorary Research Fellow at Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.

In 1960 Han Suyin married Vincent Ratnaswamy, an Indian colonel, and lived for a time in Bangalore, India. Later, Han Suyin and Vincent Ratnaswamy resided in Hong Kong and Switzerland, where Han Suyin remained, living in Lausanne. Although later separated, they remained married until Ratnaswamy's death in January 2003.

After 1956, Han Suyin visited China almost annually. She was 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.

She died in Lausanne on 2 November 2012, aged 95. She is survived by two daughters, Tang Yung Mei and Chew Hui Im.