Born in 1917, Han Suyin is the nom-de-plume of Dr Elisabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow, the Chinese-Flemish author of The Many-Splendoured Thing, an autobiographical novel, if that is possible, hugely popular in the 1950’s. The title is a line from the English ecclesiastic poet Francis Thompson.

Set in Hong Kong in 1949 and 1950, the novel is famous for its exquisite portrayal of love, and its backdrop of revolution in China and war in Korea. Suyin’s lover is a barely fictionalised portrait of Ian Morrison, the foreign correspondent of The London Times and son of Times journalist George Morrison, an Australian. The difference between her characters and real people was not great enough for those she lambasted. There was a most exuberant scandal, and a Hollywood movie in 1955.

‘Doctors,’ I said, ‘are granted the veneration and treated with the awe once reserved to seers and priests. As a consequence our lust for power is phenomenal. Imaging how corrupting it must be to hold sway over life and death. We are all megalomaniacs.’

‘But so are journalists,’ said Mark. ‘Think of the delusions we spin for the hordes of our readers. We are the great dispensers of up-to-the –minute unrest to the millions. Folie de grandeur is our occupational disease.’

It is 1949, and there is a grand exodus of missionaries from China as the Kuomintang nationalist army retreats, almost without resistance, before Mao and his Communists.

Han Suyin arrives at the Church Guest House in Hong Kong, having completed her studies in England for which she received a scholarship. She is going back to China after 8 years, She considers herself mostly Chinese, but also a Eurasian outsider. Much of this book revolves around this cultural schism. Suyin works full time at the overcrowded hospital in the British colony, and manages to be a prolific author as well as the widow-mother of a confident nine year old girl.

One of her first patients, when she has time, is an overweight missionary:

“For weeks I stood over her at meals, brandishing under her nose a written list of forbidden items. “It’s such a relief to know you are going to stay at Church Guest house for a while,” she says. “So nice to have a doctor at hand, when one’s got children.”

She describes a ‘jolly round American’ and his ideas that the entire communist revolution is thanks to him and his kind...he says the Americans have taught the Chinese Christian values, the communists respect their humanism, and Jesus was the first communist. Han does not pass judgement on his apparently arrogant remarks.

While ghastly suffering and poverty is all around, the expats are in their own little world of wealth and privilege:

‘My old doctor F.K. died last week…I rang him and the amah told me he was ill and couldn’t see anyone. “What, not even me? I am very ill too,” I said. “Luckily I got another doctor, a specialist from Boston, because F.K. died the day after. Just imagine if there had been no-one else to treat me!…”

“You are very lucky, Nora.”

“He’s terribly expensive,” she says, “but of course he’s a specialist.”

Suyin is a young doctor, and is guilty of perpetrating one of the most enduring myths of medicine, created by faulty terminology…her representation, in several places in the book, of the schizophrene as someone a ‘split mind’, in two worlds at once.

Han Suyin is generally forgiving to the communists, and stays out of politics, despite being a widow of a Kuomintang general. She does not shrink from describing the reality of feudal China when she goes to visit her banker uncle in Chungking. Her sister Suchen, who married a foreign devil, is exiled from her family, 25 metres down the street. This si a fascinating chapter on the family in China, the tensions, Chungking and the communists, executions, violence, starvation, and her capitalistic banking family hoping it will all blow over, and that trade will be untouched. She emphasises her Taoist approach to life:

‘Since we are, each one of us, unequal, and equal opportunity does not exist, I have never been able to understand why one should not accept to do evil as well as good, and with just as much clarity. I have a deep suspicion of philanthropists and do-gooders generally. I believe in relationships between people, devotion to friends, sticking to principle and the pursuit of the absolute in oneself, not of perfection to impose upon others. I am a feudalist and a Taoist, and use despotism with enlightenment, for I am doctor. One has to impose upon the sick one’s own will, and anything else is hypocrisy and nonsense. Doctors use power so much and get so much pleasure out of it. They stalk in their white gowns, like prophetic kings; the stethoscope round their necks are the badges of their magic knowledge; they survey the prostrate forms of their patients, lying helpless in neat rows on their beds. They lay healing hands and save lives. This is arrant, orgiastic power, the most corrupting one to the soul, that of doing good.

To think about: What is your attitude to communists and why?

When she describes the execution of some communists watched from the balcony there is no sense of disturbance…death is their destiny, simple as that. One denounced ‘communist’ to die just before they win in ChungKing is a 12 year boy. Afterwards her family takes her to the community restaurant where there are spittoons on the tables:

I saw a large Chungking rat with a long, scaly, hairy tail creep out from under a chair and come and drink out of one of them in great gulping draughts. No-one shooed him away. No-one cared.

She describes the situation of the refugees:

‘Now Hong Kong is overcrowded. And now there may be another war. Poverty, dirt and disease are true internationalists.

There were not enough beds; there were not enough sanatoria. Hundreds of new cases went to the clinics, were seen, diagnosed, X-rayed, told to go home and to rest. How could they rest? If they stopped work they starved. So they went on until they died.

“I can sell my son,” said the girl. Behind her stood the little boy, hanging his head, sucking his thumb. He was very shy. “We come from a good family”, said the girl. ‘My little one is intelligent and well made. If I sell him, will there be enough money to cure my husband?”’

As the Communists are rehabilitating prostitutes…some into agricultural engineering and medicine at university... as part of their “New Democracy”, an American who calls Suyin “ChuChinChow” makes her pale with rage. “You guys ought to follow the American way of life” he says to her on his three week tour of six or seven Asian countries before heading home to the US backwoods to teach Asian studies. ‘Suzanne has not recovered from her sense of white superiority…’ she remarks of seeing a British woman again.

The Americans subsidised many Chinese Universities but now those educated there were being expelled along with the missionaries, media, and western teachers (some of whom it must be admitted were either counter-revolutionary, or spying, but most of whom called China their legitimate home). China wanted none of their propagandistic invasion of ideas...it was an ancient culture having a revolution so that it might stand on its own. Suyin reports in a detached way (after all, she is madly in love) the massacres and removals and denunciations and brutality and propaganda; alongside the fervent belief, the many things achieved, an honesty in trade that startled the businessmen from overseas, huge public works programs, great strides in equality and public health.

She reports the conversations in Hong Kong about stinking ‘foreign devils’ and inscrutable Chinese, and often derides the clichés the East and West have about each other. Ultimately the reader is led to consider the validity of the notion that there might be two worlds. Perhaps there is one, vast, contradictory, all-inclusive humanity, eternally bound to itself.

‘For we are all riveted to our own physiological landscape and the climate of our minds, unable to pry ourselves loose from the emotional evocation of the words we use, more important to us than their meaning; confusing feeling with thought, in this highly emotional and dangerously uneducated twentieth century in which we live.’

Her lover is killed in Korea reporting the front line with the Americans. They have, in Suyin’s eyes, sent over GI’s who call everyone Gook and kill all they see, civilians in thousands with their troops, and tens of thousands with their bombers, without finding out if they are refugees or even on their own side.

As The Many Splendoured thing comes to a close, she observes:

‘Again I realised that people bring to what they see and hear and feel the inner weather of their souls and the complexion of their minds.’

Consider: The implications of this for taking a good patient history.

Her final pass at the international situation as seen from the doctor’s point of view is a quote from a colleague when discussing the shortage of everything medical:

‘Tuberculosis may slaughter in its thousands, and Hong Kong cannot be defended for more than a few days, but defence comes first.’

References and Further Reading

Han S (1955) The Many Splendoured Thing Sheridan

Han S (1977) Lhasa, Open City: A Journey to Tibet Panther

(Here she is an astute propagandist for China, showing the down side of Tibetan Lamaism: the oppressive nobility who faced no penalty for murder; serfdom imposed by monasteries; the burning alive of twins and triplets, denounced with their mother as the devil’s seed. The Lama’s attempt to keep the Han Chinese from populating, developing, damming and mining their sacred valleys, by spreading the tale that they used children’s blood to fuel their trucks, may, however be seen in a different light by different people. pp114-117; 130)

There is also a well-known two-volume biography of Mao Tse Tung

updated: 22/03/2010