Han Suyin
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From Johor Bahru Directory
| Han Suyin worked in the Johore Bahru General Hospital and opened a clinic in Johore Bahru in the 1950s. |
| Fast Facts | |
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| Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow | |
| Pseudonym | Han Suyin |
| Born | 12 September 1917 Xinyang, Henan province, China |
| Occupation | Physician and author |
| Genres | Novels and autobiographical works |
| Subjects | Works on cultural and political conflicts between East and West in modern history |
| Spouse | • Pao H. Tang • Leon F. Comber • Vincent Ratnaswamy |
| Children | Tang Yungmei (adopted daughter) |
| Parents | Zhou Yuan Dong and Marguerite Denis |
Han Suyin (born 1917) is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow. A Chinese-born physician, she is the author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works. Han Suyin has written in both English and French. "Han Suyin" is a pseudonym, standing for "the clear voice of the Han people". Han Suyin is a very productive and prominent contemporary novelist. Most of her writing is in English some is in French and Chinese. Her works mainly fall into four categories: autobiography and fictions biography and sociological essays.
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2. Born in Xinyang, Henan province, China to a Chinese father of Hakka heritage and a Flemish Belgian mother, Han Suyin was admitted to Yanjing (Yenching) University (later part of Peking University) in 1933. In 1935, she went to Brussels to study science, returning to China in 1938 where she worked in an American Christian mission hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan. In the same year, Han Suyin married Pao H. Tang (Tang Paohuang), a Chinese Nationalist military officer, who later became a general.
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3. In 1944, Han Suyin went to London to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital and graduated with an honors degree in Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) in 1948.}} She then went to Hong Kong to practice medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital in 1949. Her husband, Tang, meanwhile, had died in action during the Chinese Civil War in 1947.
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4. In 1952, Han Suyin 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. Comber resigned from the British Colonial Police Service as an acting Assistant Commmissioner of Police Special Branch mainly because of the perceived anti-British bias of her novel, And the Rain My Drink.
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5. 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 work, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was made into a Hollywood film. Much later, the movie itself was made into a daytime soap opera.
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6. Cultural and political conflicts between East and West in modern history play a central role in Han Suyin's work. She also explores the struggle for liberation in Southeast Asia and the internal and foreign policies of modern China since the end of the imperial regime. Many of her writings feature the colonial backdrop in East Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries.
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7. After Comber and Han Suyin's divorce, she later married Vincent Ratnaswamy, an Indian colonel (died 2003), and lived for a time in Bangalore, India. After the two separated, Han Suyin relocated to Switzerland and currently resides in Lausanne.
