130. Han Suyin — Winter Love
AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great works of literature by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…
KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. In this week’s episode, we’re excited to talk about another new-to-us novelist. Han Suyin, born in either 1916 or 1917 to a Chinese father and Belgian mother, qualified as a doctor in London before moving to Hong Kong to practice medicine. One of her novels you may have heard of, A Many-Splendored Thing, was adapted into a film in 1955 starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. I know the song, Amy, but I’ve never seen the movie. (sings the words, “Love is a many-splendored thing”)
AMY: Ooh! Yeah [sings]. Now I haven’t seen that movie either, but do you know why we both know that song so well? There’s a reason.
KIM: I think it won an award, right?
AMY: Noooo… There's a reason everybody knows it. [sings it again]
KIM: How do we know it?
AMY: It’s the very opening scene of Grease! When Sandy and Danny…
KIM: Oh my gosh! That’s exactly why we know it! Oh my god, you’re totally right! Of course! I can see it in my mind now. It’s so dramatic; the sand and the water…
AMY: Exactly.
KIM: It all goes back to Grease, the musical, for me.
AMY: Okay, but getting back to this other movie, A Many Splendored Thing, it was the successful film adaptation that enabled Suyin to quit medicine to focus on writing full time, and boy, did she! She went on to publish more than 30 books, including memoirs, biographies, volumes of cultural and political history, and novels, including the one we’re going to be discussing today, Winter Love.
KIM: Called her most vivid and best book, Winter Love is a jewel of a novella and its unusual story of two female medical students who fall passionately in love during the freezing, austere London winter of 1944 ensorcelled both of us. We can’t wait to talk about it, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!
[intro music]
AMY: Okay. Before we jump into this, uh, Kim, you used the word “ensorcelled” right before the theme song. I don't think I've ever heard that word before. Can I possibly be this old and have never encountered that?
KIM: Well, if this makes you feel better, that's the first time I've ever said it aloud. I read that word somewhere on the internet in the last month or so, and I absolutely loved it. I was ensorcelled by the word ensorcelled, and I had to work it in because it's so perfect. Right?
AMY: At first I was like, “that's not a word.” It IS a word! I Googled it!
KIM: Me too! I know. And I'm like, wow, how did I not know it?
AMY: It sounds like exactly what the meaning would be, right? Like sorcery, ensorcelled. Yeah.
KIM: And don’t we need more words like that?
AMY: Yes, we learn something new everyday! Okay. So McNally Editions had sent us Winter Love, along with three other books that they launched their imprint with last year. We read the three other books and ended up doing episodes on each of them: Troy Chimneys, They, and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, and we’ll link to those episodes in the show notes, if you want to check them out. They were all so good! McNally Editions bats it out of the park every time, don’t they?
KIM: They really do. And I knew this one would be good too, and I think that’s why I almost put off reading it, I was saving it or something… It was on my nightstand, and finally I had a window where I could pick it up… and honestly, I don’t think I put it down until I’d finished it. It’s slim for one, so it’s not a long novel, but I was just completely engrossed. It’s that good. Anyway, when I finished it and then read the little bio of Han Suyin on the back book flap, I knew immediately we had to do an episode on this one too…
AMY: Yeah, because how many novels do you read about college-aged women in the 1940s studying science?
KIM: None that I can think of. And how many novels have we read by women who were once-practicing physicians?
AMY: None, that I can think of. I’m sure there are some contemporary novelists who were, but it’s pretty unusual, I think. So, before we jump into discussing Winter Love (and I agree, Kim, I couldn’t put it down either once I started) let’s talk about Han Suyin’s life, because, no surprise given what we’ve already shared, it’s pretty interesting.
KIM: Okay, so Suyin was born Chou Kuang Hu in Xinyang in the North-Central province of Henan. (She later said of her name, “It sticks in the throat like a fishbone.”) Her father was from a land-owning clan and he met his Belgian wife, Suyin’s mother, while studying abroad. They returned together to semi-feudal China. As a child, while traveling to school in a rickshaw, Suyin would see the bodies of people who had starved to death. Maybe that was why she decided, when she was 12, that she wanted to become a doctor when she grew up. But her road to becoming a doctor wasn’t completely straightforward and it took some time. For one thing, it was completely against her mother’s wishes -- she wanted her to marry a rich American.
AMY: Right. So, she started out as a typist at a medical college in China and then in 1935, she moved to Brussels where she began studying medicine. In 1938, she returned to China and married a Chinese Nationalist military officer. She then worked as a midwife at Christian mission hospital and in 1940, she and her husband adopted a daughter. Her first novel, 1942’s Destination Chunking was based on her experiences during this time. In 1944, she went to London with her daughter and began to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital there. While she was in London, her husband died in action in the Chinese Civil War.
KIM: Uh, yeah, and I also just want to note, these are just the highlights of her story. There's so much more too. We didn't want to overdo it by telling you every little thing because it would just go on forever.
AMY: Yeah. If it seems like we're giving you a lot of facts, it's because this is actually the condensed version.
KIM: That’s exactly right. Suyin graduated with Honors and a Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery degree in 1948, and in 1949, she went to Hong Kong to practice medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital. It was there she met and fell in love with Ian Morrison; he was a married Australian war correspondent. Morrison was killed in Korea in 1950. Suyin fictionalized their relationship in the bestselling novel A Many-Splendored Thing and their relationship is documented in her autobiography My House Has Two Doors. She wrote a lot of memoirs and autobiographical material, so there are many volumes of additional information on her as well. She chose the pen name Han Suyin, which she translated as “a common little voice.”
AMY: In 1952, she married a British officer who was sent to Malaysia. She joined him there and worked in a hospital before opening a clinic. And then the following year, she adopted another daughter in Singapore. In 1955, she contributed to the establishment of Nanyang University in Singapore.
KIM: Okay, I love an anecdote from that time: She served as a physician at the university, declining a teaching position in the English department because she wanted "to make a new Asian literature, not teach Dickens.” So she wanted to be the one creating the literature. In 1955, Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing was filmed and the titular theme song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Interestingly, she distanced herself from the film, saying she never wanted to see it and that she’d sold the film rights to pay for an operation for one of her daughters who suffered from tuberculosis.
AMY: Wow, okay. But according to the McNally Editions biography, the adaptation is what allowed her to become a full-time writer. Most of her writing features a colonized East Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, but Winter Love is an exception to that. And, with that, let’s begin our discussion of that book.
KIM: All right. Winter Love was originally published in 1962 as one of two novellas in a book called Two Loves. And Iet’s kick this off by giving a quick synopsis of Winter Love. It’s the winter of 1944, so that’s toward the latter end of World War II. London is still being bombed, there are air raids happening regularly, and people are surviving on food rations. If that’s not enough, it’s bitterly cold that year. It’s a pretty bleak time, but for Red, our narrator, who is looking back on this winter from some decades later, as a married woman with a child, it is indelibly etched into her memory as the one time when she was fully alive. She’s remembering her early 20s as a student at Horsham Science College where she falls in love with a married classmate named Mara. Their “meet cute” is Red asking Mara to partner with her on a cat dissection. Not typical, but I love it!
AMY: Yeah, Sounds like a pitch for the Hallmark Channel! “We met over a feline spleen!” Anyway, they begin a passionate love affair that we know from the start is doomed (as we said Red is married with a child in the present), so we’re not giving anything away there when we say that.
KIM: Yes, and in juxtaposition with the factual coldness of the time she’s remembering, the memory itself is almost like this fur coat that she can put on and luxuriate in in the privacy of her own mind. Amy, after you read the novel you texted me right away. Do you want to share your initial impressions?
AMY: Yeah. I think when I texted you, I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this book is gorgeous. It's a little jewel of a book.” There's a very lyrical quality to the writing that makes it kind of sublime. But then there's all this urban grittiness mixed in, um, the city and the smog you know? It feels gray throughout the book. And in a way, now that I'm thinking about it, that's kind of, um, a good parallel to make between Red, our narrator and Mara. Because Red is kind of, how do I wanna say it? Um…
KIM: She can be cold on the outside.
AMY: Yeah. Red can be abrasive. She comes from a poor background. Um, Mara is beautiful and elegant and kind of a pampered princess. You know, she lives a more luxurious lifestyle. So it's something about the juxtaposition of those two elements, the grittiness with the beauty, I guess. And I'd love to read from the novel just to give a little example, maybe of what I'm talking about. So, this is a kind of descriptive passage, but remember this is Red reflecting back on the time period
[Amy reads]
AMY: So yeah, that's just a good example of what I was talking about, the kind of urban decay with this, like glory of her relationship with Mara.
KIM: Yeah. The cold and the warmth existing together so perfectly.
AMY: So not only is she setting you up for the heartache we know is coming, but she also really painting this descriptive picture of London in winter. You feel the chill.
KIM: It’s like you’re there. There’s an elegant precision and spareness in the language, and you could even say that there’s a surgical precision to the way she cuts quickly and deeply into these characters of Red and Mara. Mara’s beauty and carefree ways stands in stark contrast to this austere environment that we mentioned before.
AMY: So Red lives in a grubby, depressing rooming house while Mara on the other hand, has a more upper class, privileged existence. She lives with her husband in a nice apartment with luxuries like a private bathroom with hot water.
KIM: Oh yeah, she sets it up so well (the differences between their lives) in this scene when Red comes over to Mara’s apartment and Mara invites her to take a hot bath. It’s steamy in more ways than one-- Anyway, then Mara’s husband Frank comes home and ruins the whole spell!
AMY: Oh, he always does, anytime he enters the scene, right?
KIM: Yeah, cold water on it.
AMY: So Mara doesn’t have to worry about money because of her marriage to Frank, and Red is almost too careful about money and Red comes across as outwardly confident to the point of bossiness. She’s kind of aggressive, can’t help but taunt her and punish her for what she sees as weakness and passivity.
KIM: Yeah, i t’s these and other differences in their personalities that eventually contribute to the breakup of what is essentially a domestic partnership. Ultimately though, for Red, it’s the judgment of society—that’s what Red lives in fear of. It kind of reminded me of the female equivalent of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain story that was adapted into a film.
AMY: Yeah, that’s funny, I hadn’t thought of that at all when I was reading the book, and I’m surprised, because there are similarities there, like, they can’t be open about their relationship, obviously, in this time period. Funny enough, the one movie that was coming to mind for me while I was reading it was that 1960s Georgie Girl. I think just aesthetically that sort of like city, um, I knew I was in the 1940s, but for some reason, maybe because we're dealing more bluntly with sex in this novel, I felt like it was more modern than that almost.
KIM: Withnail and I, too. It's so cold and miserable in London in the winter. I mean, the two guys and their relationship and sort of, they're finding warmth together but their relationship is kind of doomed too. And it's also gritty. London Winter,
AMY: Listeners, if you don’t know Withnail and I…
KIM: It’s one of our favorite movies, basically.
AMY: We love it. You have to stop immediately… well, first listen to the rest of this podcast and then go find Withnail and I.
KIM: Yeah, I’m sure some of our listeners from England have seen it many times.
AMY: Speaking of Withnail and I, there's also a point in the book where Red and Mara managed to go away on a little vacation. But they end up in this disastrous situation that sort of, “We've gone on holiday by mistake!” from Withnail and I.
KIM: Best line ever!
AMY: Um, so that's getting to be a section of the book where we're starting to see the cracks in Red and Maura's relationship where you're like, “Oh, are they gonna be able to hold this together?”
KIM: The rose-colored glasses are kind of off a little bit.
AMY: Yeah. And they have all these external pressures on them. And then you're also seeing, like, internally, maybe it's just not meant to be sort of thing.
KIM: Though I kept wondering after I read it was that if Mara and Red had been able to live openly as a couple, would they have “made it” or would their personality traits have caused them to break up anyway? Maybe they would have been able to work out these kinks a little bit. In the Kirkus Review for Winter Love, it reads: “A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.” So I guess the answer is, at least they would have been able to try if they had been able to live together openly.
AMY: Yeah. I mean the experience of reading it and I think the fact that they're sneaking around and trying not to get caught. You internalize that as a reader, right? You're feeling the pressure and the tension and it was giving me anxiety as I was reading it, especially because I fell in love with them as a couple, right? You're “shipping” a couple? Um, They were cute together.
KIM: Yeah. I agree.
AMY:Um, we'll just leave it there right now and let you, the listener, read the book to find out what ultimately happens to their relationship.So let’s circle back to Suyin’s life. Besides the science college, are there any connections we can make between her life and the story in Winter Love?
KIM: Well, as I said earlier, she did write several volumes of autobiography, so there may be some more specific connections there if you read those, but she definitely knew what it was like to be an outsider or to have her feet in two worlds. As a reminder, she’s half Chinese and half European. Her granddaughter, the writer Karen Shepard, wrote a piece for The Millions that I’ll read from:
“Certainly, she hadn’t had it easy. A younger sibling had died because no doctor, white or Asian, would touch the infant, and my grandmother’s own mother — who, to her credit, did touch her — nevertheless referred to her as “the yellowish object.” With that row to hoe, the yellowish object became a Eurasian force of nature, a woman who was fierce and charismatic, as well as chameleon-like and a master at control and getting what she wanted. “I do what I want,” she said in one interview. “That’s the leitmotiv of my life.” My father, even to her face, called her Dragon Lady.”
So, you know, I think I can see some similarities between her and Red. I’ll link to Shepard’s full essay in our show notes too so you can read.
AMY: Yeah, that’s making me think more about Red too, and why she is kind of so tough and abrasive. It’s known by the pen name Sui Sin Far, who was half-British and half-Chinese. We did a previous episode on her, and we’re going to be doing an episode on her sister, Winifred, later this year. But I remember our guest from that Sui Sin Far episode, Victoria Namkung, she too is Eurasian and she was talking about having your feet in both worlds and not feeling like you fully belong. ] Anyway, after 1956, Han visited China almost every year. In 1960 Han married an Indian colonel and lived in Bangalore, India. They later lived in Hong Kong and Switzerland, where she remained, living in Lausanne. She died in Switzerland in 2012 at age 95. You know what else I was thinking of that we didn't even discuss yet is just the fact that she was a straight woman and she wrote a gay love story.
KIM: Yeah, you asked me if we could connect her life. There's nothing that I read in researching her that in any way indicated that she was lesbian. Um, I only read about her many relationships with men. Uh, but I wonder if in her autobiographies, if she mentioned anything like that.
AMY: Yeah. Or what inspired her to choose that for a subject matter. When I was reading it, not knowing her biography at all, I kind of read into this narrator saying, you know, now I'm married and have a child, but I'm reflecting back. You know, my first instinct is to just go ahead and put the author in that situation.
KIM: Yeah, yeah.
AMY: Um, but yeah, like you said, we couldn't find any information, any
evidence pointing to that.
KIM: No, no. If any listeners know of her and anything about that, let us know.
AMY: Yeah. But also it just makes me think what a revolutionary thing to be writing about at the time that she did.
KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AMY: I mean, it's so different from anything from that period that I know of.
So It was written after A Many Splendored Thing, which was hugely successful. So then to really change gears, knowing that you already have this audience that knows you for this sweeping love story…
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: … a heterosexual love story and be like, “I'm gonna try something else out here and see what everybody does with it.”
KIM: Yeah. And most of her other work actually was focused on post-colonial or colonial China and environs, like the fact that she even had a novel set in London during the war was a complete aberration from
all of her other work, which is also interesting too.
AMY: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's such a beautiful book. It's so quick to read, and I think we both have the same experience where I just, I'd be walking through a room and I'd see it sitting there, and I'd have to go over and pick it up and continue, I need to find out what happens next.
KIM: We were ensorcelled, what can we say!
AMY: We were ensorcelled. One hundred percent. we're gonna make ensorcelled a thing. I pledge.
KIM: Ensorcelled T-shirts.
AMY: Yes.
KIM: We’re going to try to make it happen. Listeners,
AMY: 2023, the year of “ensorcelled.” And with that, we urge you to go pick up a copy of Winter Love. McNally Editions has a beautiful copy. For more information on this episode and past episodes, visit LostLadiesofLit.com.
KIM: If you love the show, we would be thrilled if you could give us a five star review wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners find us and we can’t tell you what it means to us..
AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.