A Many-Splendored Thing [antikvár]

ForewordHan Suyin, the author of this moving book, is a Chinese woman. Born in Peking, she was educated at a Chinese university and then toured Europe for two years. In 1938 she returned to China with her husband and lived in the interior during the Sino-Japanese War, where she wrote her first book, Destination Chungking, in collaboration with an American woman missionary. It presented a vivid picture of Free China, of the sufferings of the Chinese people and of life in the old feudal provinces of Western China. In its last chapter Han Suyin foreshadowed prophetically the coming struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists.At the end of the war fate took her back to England. There, after the death of her husbandkilled in the civil war now raging in earnest in Chinashe finished her medical studies and qualified with honors at London University. At the same time she supported herself and her child by supplementing her scholarship with the income from a job. She could not, however, stay long away from her own people, and soon left England again to plunge into the turmoil of contemporary Asia.A Many-Splendored Thing is a book about that postwar Asia, shaken from end to end by stupendous, revolutionary changes. Future historians will regard this mid-twentieth century upheaval in the largest and most populous continent on earth as one of their grandest themes, and they will no doubt be able to assess it with the cool judgment of men observing great events in retrospect. For us who live in the middle of the earthquake it is more difficult to appreciate dispassionately and exactly its significance. Many petty and ludicrous prejudices on the part either of those who regard the whole upheaval