Han Suyin : A Many Splendored Thing

Not really the cheesy romance in an exotic location that the subsequent film by Henry King  and the song by Sammy Fain had led me to expect.

And I might not even call it a novel. It's more like a collection of poems, essays, and narrative about a transitional moment in the author's life.   As one might learn from a feature story in the New York Times thirty years later, the author had a problematic childhood and first marriage.  Her Belgian mother rejected her and her first husband, a general in the Kuomintang,  had beaten her. It was the brief, unexpected, hopeless affair with a British journalist that opened her up to experience life as a "many splendored thing".  Call it sexual healing.

We never really get to meet her lover, Mark, until the final pages where we hear his voice in the letters he wrote from Korea shortly before he was killed. Those are my favorite pages. We also barely meet the daughter of this single mother.  She appears to have been mostly neglected as her mother parks her with one sheltering family after another.

The subject of the book is "who am I ?  Asian or European ?"

She has a European education that qualifies her to practice medicine in Hong Kong. She has a Chinese mandarin family that is going through the turmoil of civil war and the new, Communist state.

She declares her loyalty to China - and repeatedly tells us that she wants to serve as a physician there. She also declares her love to the journalist and wants to marry him.  Neither is going to happen.

Subsequent to writing this book, she moves around Southeast Asia, India, and Europe writing books.

That's her real identity:  a brilliant, articulate, cerebral, Taoist, aesthetic, self-centered, bi-cultural woman who writes books for curious readers like myself.

She became controversial for her steadfast defense of the communist regime. Though, we might note, she does eventually admit that Chairman Mao became senile and made mistakes -- comments that might have made her life difficult had she chosen to live in China.  By the way -- she chose not to.  She voted against that regime with her feet.