Han Suyin

Han Suyin (Chinese: ???) is the pen name of Elisabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (Chinese: ???, pinyin: Zhou Guanghu) (12 September 1917). She is a Chinese-born author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works, as well as a physician.

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Han Suyin was born in Xinyang, Henan province, China. Her father was a Chinese engineer surnamed Chow (pinyin:Zhou, Chinese: ?), of Hakka heritage, while her mother was a Flemish Belgian. In 1938 Han Suyin married Pao H. Tang (Tang Paohuang), a Chinese Nationalist military officer, who was to become a general. They adopted one daughter.

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She began work as a typist at Beijing Hospital in 1931, not yet fifteen years old. In 1933 she was admitted to Yanjing (Yenching) University (later part of Peking University). In 1935 she went to Brussels to study medicine. In 1938 she returned to China, working in an American Christian mission hospital in Chengdu (Cheng-tu), Sichuan, then went again to London in 1944 to study, graduated with a Bachelor's of Medicine (MB) in 1948 and went to Hong Kong to practice medicine in 1949. Her husband, Tang, meanwhile, had died in action during the Chinese Civil War in 1947.

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In 1952, she married Leonard F. Comber, a British civil servant, and went with him to Johore, Malaya (present-day Malaysia), where she worked in a tuberculosis hospital. She contributed efforts to the establishment of Nanyang University in Singapore. In 1955, her best-known work, Many-Splendored Thing, was made into a Hollywood film.

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After Comber and Han Suyin's divorce, she later married Vincent Ratnaswamy, an Indian colonel (died January 2003 in Bangalore, India), and lived for a time in Bangalore, India. After the two separated, Han Suyin relocated to Switzerland. She currently resides in Lausanne and has written in English and French.

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Chinese: Chinese can mean:...

Pen name: A pen name or nom de plume is a pseudonym adopted by an author. Nom de plume is a French-language expression....

Pinyin: Pinyin (??, p?ny?n) literally means "join (together) sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to H?ny? P?ny?n (????, literal meaning: "Han language pinyin"), which is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcripti...

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