Suyin, Han

A Many-Splendored Thing

Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. First American Edition. Hardcover. “Han Suyin (c. 1916-2012), the author, with her nine-year-old daughter Mei, came to Hong Kong in February, 1949; her husband, a disciple of Sun Yat-sen and a Nationalist general, had been killed fighting the Communists. With her medical degree which she had earned in her graduate study in England, the young widow was welcomed as a resident doctor in the overcrowded hospital in Hong Kong. At the time of her arrival, Hong Kong’s population had been trebled by the exodus from the China mainland, and new arrivals were streaming in at the rate of 10,000 a week—missionaries uprooted and unable to comprehend the new hatred with which they had been ejected, wealthy Chinese fleeing from the Red confiscation…the crowded cosmopolitan colony made feverish by the ominous gathering power of the Chinese Communists.” (from Front Cover flap). Born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, the physician and author who wrote under the pen name “Han Suyin” was born in Henan, China to a Flemish mother and Chinese father. She began her formal medical training at age 14, in 1931—working first in Peking, then going on to Brussels before completing a graduate program in England. After this, she returned to China and married Tang Pao-Huang, a soon-to-be general for the ill-fated Chinese Nationalists. Her first marriage was to last nine years, cut short in 1947 when her husband was killed in the Chinese Civil War. It is precisely around this time where the plot line of the heavily-autobiographical “A Many-Splendored Thing” begins. The book is centered around a British war correspondent who has a wife and family in Singapore (“Mark Eliot” in the novel, Australian journalist Ian Morrison in real life) and his affair “…with a Eurasian doctor originally from Mainland China, only to encounter prejudice from her family and from Hong Kong society.” In real life, Ian Morrison was a daredevil war correspondent for the British national newspaper, The Times. Despite having cheated death on the battlefield three times prior (and this isn’t including the numerous bullet-grazing[s] Morrison himself wrote of), in 1950 an unrepentant warzone finally took him. Morrison died covering the Korean War on August 12, 1950 when the jeep carrying him drove over a landmine. Suyin later remarried and continued to write prolifically--but not without lapsing (volubly) into the propagandistic fervor of Mao Zedong’s (b. 1893-1976) “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution.” While most radicals treat their ideologies as French chefs treat butter—e.g., it must be present in everything—Suyin’s fiction is at notable moments unblemished by this urge-&-tendency. Her second novel—despite the plot orbiting around a war-torn world right-then enduring chaotic geopolitical realignment—is one such point of reprieve. Hardcover in unclipped dust-jacket: First Edition, as stated on copyright page; First Printing (with no references to further printings, thereon). Book in very fine condition with only slight shelf-wear to fine-edges; minute sunning to topmost fine-edge of spine; two tiny bump-nicks to text-block; four surface-level, horizontal nicks-scrapes varying in size (see photos) present at recto board; one similar instance of same at verse board near topmost fine-edge; interior clean and pages crisp. Unrestored dust-jacket in very fine condition with only moderate-to-pronounced shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners; slight-to-moderate rubbing to front, back covers & spine; tiny exhibits of slight chipping to same—all in all extremely well-preserved by the protective jacket the cover has remained in, undisturbed. Very Fine / Fine. [Item #4833]

Price: $100.00