A Many-Splendored Thing

Description for A MANY-SPLENDORED THING by Han Suyin:

This is a beautiful love story---all the more impressive because it is true.  Han Suyin, 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, British traders confident that they could weather the storm, disillusioned veterans of Chiang's armies, American sailors on leave, war correspondents, Communist agents, gamblers and prostitutes---the crowded cosmopolitan Colony made feverish by the ominous gathering power of the Chinese Communists.  

In such congestion tuberculosis was on the rampage, and Han Suyin and the other doctors on the hospital staff had more patients than they could accommodate or care for.  Then at the end of one long exhausting day, in the relaxation of a friendly dinner party, Han Suyin meets a charming English correspondent, Mark Elliott and she begins to come alive. 

The story of how their attraction deepens into love is told with unembarrassed sentiment, and without the least vulgarity---and hones and enchanting picture of two intelligent lovers.  ?their romance is frowned on by the Colony, and is doomed for many reasons---Han Suyin is a Eurasian, and Mark, with a wife and family at home and with assignments which keep him on the move in the East, is anything but a free man.

In an effort to extricate herself Han Suyin flies to Chunking to visit her family; she tries to volunteer as a doctor on the Mainland, but finds herself regarded with suspicion because of her Western affiliations.  In the end she is forced back to Hong Kong, there to await Mark's return and whatever fate has in store for them.  On their brief, passionate reunion she learns that Mark has been ordered to Korea and from then on the story of their devotion moves toward its climax.