R.I.P. Han Suyin

[Reza]

Han Suyin obituary

Chinese-born author best known for her 1952 book A Many- Splendoured Thing


John Gittings The Guardian, Sunday 4 November 2012 13.38 EST

Colonial Hong Kong, a doomed love affair and the echoes of revolution in China were the explosive mixture that made the reputation of the author Han Suyin, who has died aged 95. The film of her 1952 book A Many-Splendoured Thing may have been just a classic weepie, but the original novel shocked Hong Kong with its tale of her love affair with a married man and its sympathy for the appeal of communism to China's downtrodden millions.

She would shock people many times again as she acted out the philosophy expounded in the film by Jennifer Jones, playing a character based on the author: "To go on living, one must be occasionally unwise." Her defence of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, though later recanted, came to overshadow her huge literary talents. The ambiguities of her identity, as the daughter of a Chinese engineer and his Belgian wife, were always close to the surface. Her writings offered more than one version of her life. Elizabeth Kuanghu Chow was born in Xinyang in the north-central province of Henan. Her father, who came from a landowning clan in Sichuan province, met his wife while studying abroad and took her home to semi-feudal China.

As a child in Beijing, she remembered travelling to school by rickshaw and seeing the bodies of those who had died of starvation – "big or small bundles of rags" – on the pavements. From the age of 12, she decided to become a doctor against the wishes of her mother who urged her to marry a foreigner – preferably an American because "all Americans are wealthy". Mother and daughter existed in a "chasm of aversion". After leaving school she paid for her fees at Yenching University in Beijing by learning to type. A Belgian businessman became her father substitute and arranged a scholarship for her to continue her medical studies in Brussels. In 1938 she returned to China to work in a French hospital in Yunnan, but was diverted on the way, meeting a handsome young officer, Tang Pao-huang (Pao), who educated her in the Nationalist version of patriotism.

They were married that year in Wuhan, just before it was abandoned to the Japanese, and fled on the same boat as Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist government. They travelled west to Chongqing, the Nationalist wartime retreat, where she discovered her father's relatives. There, she also learned how to write. A missionary doctor, Marian Manly, encouraged her to record the story of her journey with Pao, polished the text and suggested avoiding subjects such as prostitution which might cause "misunderstanding". The intention was to attract American readers to the Chinese cause. Later she regretted her "idealised version" of reality. But ideals were the currency of the time: Bertrand Russell said that Destination Chungking (1942) – published under the pen name Han Suyin, which she kept – told him more about China in an hour than he had learned there in a year.

In 1942, when Pao was posted to London as military attache, she followed him with her adopted daughter and resumed her medical studies two years later. The marriage had chilled in spite of a reconciliation engineered by the Labour politician Stafford Cripps. Through her publisher Jonathan Cape, she joined the circle of progressive Asia-minded intellectuals around Kingsley Martin, Dorothy Woodman, Margery Fry and JB Priestley. But medicine remained her goal.

Pao was posted to Washington and later to the Manchurian front where he died, fighting the communists, in 1947. Han Suyin remained in London to take her finals and then moved to Hong Kong. It was there that she met and had a passionate affair with the Times correspondent Ian Morrison. Their relationship was the basis of A Many-Splendoured Thing, which became a bestseller. It is an unashamed love story: the idyllic scenes on the hillside overlooking the harbour are in the book as much as the film, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). A sharp piece of social satire, the book pulls apart the preposterous world of expatriate Hong Kong. But faced with the choice between the revolutionary mainland and the outside world, Han Suyin was unable to make the "sacrifice of self". In a far-sighted passage of A Many-Splendoured Thing, she praised those who went back but warned that: "They may see their words twisted, their devotion warped, and their best intentions serve ends which they had not conceived."

She moved to Malaya and married, in 1952, Leon Comber, an official in the police service. Her bestseller was followed by And the Rain My Drink (1956) and The Mountain is Young (1958), set respectively in Malaya and Nepal. The first of these examined the suffering caused by British suppression of the Malayan emergency. The second arose out of a visit to Kathmandu for the coronation of King Mahendra, and her meeting Vincent Ruthnaswamy, a colonel in the Indian army, who, in 1971, became her third husband.

She took to fame with an alacrity which some found off-putting. "I could be a top-grade, highly paid [medical] specialist," she told a journalist in 1958. But she was "possessed of a demon" that forced her to write instead of practising medicine fulltime. In the 1960s she began to identify more consistently with the struggle of ex-colonial Asia. A frequent visitor to China, she wrote essays for the pro-Beijing Hong Kong journal Eastern Horizon. A selection of these was re-issued in Tigers and Butterflies (1990). Her themes were women, peasants, the divide between town and country, exploitation in many forms, and the incomprehension of the affluent west for labouring Asia.

As the Vietnam war's shadow lengthened, she denounced a society – which she knew well from lecture tours – so numbed by advertising that it could not distinguish between "napalming 50 children and sucking the latest sweet".

From this new perspective she now reviewed her own life in three volumes of autobiography, The Crippled Tree (1965), A Mortal Flower (1966) and Birdless Summer (1968). She had been invited regularly to China since 1956, when she had her first of many private meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai. She was not alone in being charmed by the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. In her book China in the Year 2001 (1967), she hailed the "remaking of man" in China as a watershed for the world. Many of her friends, Chinese and foreigners, suffered terribly in those years. Later she claimed to have intervened in many cases but the extent to which she did so is unclear. In a mildly critical article, Water Too Pure …, written in 1972, she deplored the "innocent victims". It remained unpublished until 1990.

She laboured to produce a detailed history of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, resulting in The Morning Deluge (1972) and Wind in the Tower (1976). Neither offered much original insight, and the credibility of the second volume was undermined by the political upheavals following Mao's death in 1976. Another autobiographical volume, My House Has Two Doors (1980), tried to reconcile some of these contradictions.

She plunged into Deng Xiaoping's new China, for the first time not feeling obliged to plead China's cause against a critical world. She lectured frequently to students who were beginning to ask their own questions and she welcomed the 1989 democracy movement. It "filled her with joy", and she blamed the ruling party for missing "a great opportunity … to rejuvenate itself".

Her biography Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (1994) told the story of "the most dedicated and selfless personality in China's history". She dismissed as inane suggestions that he should have opposed the Cultural Revolution, and the book failed to impress a more sceptical generation. In a slim volume of autobiography, Wind in my Sleeve (1992), she wrote of her "grief, anger, desolation" at the Beijing massacre but the book attracted little attention.

She decided that "the world was in such an intellectual mess that I would write detective stories" but she continued to visit China regularly. She funded educational projects and one for cultural relations between India and China was named after Ruthnaswamy – described as an "ambassador of friendship". He provided a strong and genuine emotional bulwark in her later years. In A Share of Loving (1987), she wrote a little noticed, tender account of her struggle, with her husband, to care for his brain-damaged son.

Han Suyin settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, and remained a splendid grande dame – it helped obscure the fact that she could be and often was a grand writer. Half-Chinese, but striving to be whole Chinese, she was as full of contradictions as her motherland. When the epic of modern China is re-examined she and her works will provide important and readable evidence.

Her husband died in 2003.

• Han Suyin (Elizabeth Comber), writer and doctor, born 12 September 1917; died 2 November 2012