After a fortnight or so of work deadlines, extreme Sydney heat (a recurring ordeal), I finally have space to blog again. I’m already behind my one-post-a-week target as well as my reading target, so hands to keyboard, eyes to screen, time to get back on the horse!

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Second-hand bookstores are treasure chests; I can spend hours in them thrilled by the overwhelming choice. One of my finds last year in the Berkelouw Book Barn, was a first edition of A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) by Han Suyin.

A Many-Splendoured Thing is a semi-autobiographical story of Han Suyin (birth name: Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow), a Chinese-identifying Eurasian widow and single mother working as a doctor in late-1940s Hong Kong. There’s turmoil on the mainland as the Communists sweep south, social and racial prejudice in British-colonised Hong Kong, and eventually, the Korean War. Amidst all this uncertainty Suyin meets Mark, a married British foreign correspondent, and the two fall in love, a “many-splendoured thing” that in a period of such upheaval, is their brightest point of certainty.

The romance wasn’t the strong point. It’s there as the book’s plot, the driver and basis for some lovely emotional scenes, but the lovers’ dialogue is largely too flowery and philosophical for natural empathy. Far better are the descriptions of 1949-50s Hong Kong and all its people: the Christian missionaries who have fled China and sigh over their failures to convert more Chinese Christians; the society Englishmen and women hosting soirees in their lavish Hong Kong houses, the wealthy mainland Chinese who “relocate” to Hong Kong, the not-so-wealthy mainland Chinese who come as refugees, and the Hong Hong Chinese living their lives while their island hosts visitors both wanted and unwanted, united only in their anxiety of whether or not the Communists will invade. As a multilingual Eurasian woman and doctor, Suyin moves through all these circles sometimes smoothly, sometimes not, her observations and experiences a sharp and lyrical insight into Hong Kong at the time.

There’s so much of this book I found poignantly current. Over and over Suyin has to patiently explain to westerners the complexities of Chinese culture, that Hong Kong is different to Shanghai which is different to Peking, or that being proud of her country doesn’t make her a Communist, with a familiar growing weariness. Comments like “I’ve only been here three years. I don’t know a word of Chinese, of course. You’re the first Chinese girl I’ve talked to” could fall from the mouth of so many western expats in China, while Suyin’s furious reaction to an American man addressing her with a racist insult, which she describes as “trigger word with the Chinese, who have emotional reaction to words just as Westerners do”, comes right out of the blogosphere.

At the same time, Suyin is Chinese in a time of China’s change, and has to figure out what that identity means. She’s fiercely proud of her feudal family in Chongqing even as she knows their days in the old ways are numbered. Although the widow of a Kuomintang officer, she’s defensive of the Communists when westerners disparage them because they’re still her people. And although she spends some time in the People’s Army and leaves when she realises she can never fit in, she still seems to wish them the best in building their New China. Importantly, Suyin remains strictly apolitical, never taking a position for or against the various forces, even though her family and marital history indicate where her sympathies should naturally be. Sunyin is a doctor, she doesn’t want men to die, she simply wants to live and love in a way the world says she can’t.

Being with Mark is the closest Suyin gets to just being herself, whoever that is, but it can’t last. He offers Suyin a choice, one she notes is not hers alone, but that of many another “westernized Asian brought up between two worlds, split and two-layered.” At that line, I thought of a Beijing bar where a friend and I discussed how difficult it can feel being caught between east and west. Nearly seventy years have passed between this book and that bar. Sometimes, it still feels like the world wants us to choose.