Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing: Han Suyin and the Image of Asia

Abstract

The Chinese-Belgian writer and activist Han Suyin’s (1917–2012) second novel, A Many-Splendoured Thing, was published in 1952 to worldwide critical acclaim and enormous sales. Set in Hong Kong during the course of the Communist takeover of mainland China, the book gives a very lightly fictionalized account of Han’s brief love affair with the Times of London’s celebrated Asia correspondent, Ian Morrison (1913–1950). Cut short by Morrison’s death in 1950 while covering the Korean War, the relationship had been a scandalous one. Morrison was married with young children. Worse, Han Suyin was Eurasian—the child of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother—and thus at the time seen by many, including among Eurasians themselves, as literally embodying the least desirable traits of both races. Occupying a doubly marginalized position in colonial society, Eurasian women, it was believed, were irredeemably promiscuous—the embodiment of their parents’ sexual incontinence and a source of temptation to all white men, married or single. Though the novel had been written in Hong Kong, by the time of its publication Han Suyin had moved to Singapore with her new husband, an officer in the British Special Branch. In both places, Han found herself largely ostracized by the local foreign communities. Singapore, after all, had been the home of Morrison’s wife and family, and the longstanding racial hierarchies erected in Britain’s remaining Asian colonies remained firmly, if increasingly anachronistically, intact. But with the success of A Many-Splendoured Thing she found herself a new, much wider community. Through her tale of exultant but doomed interracial romance, she became, in effect, the authentic, and highly attractive voice of a new era in Asia.