Cover

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I will go to the forest for justice
The wind for my garment I wear.
… and the rain my drink.

(Old Chinese Ballad)

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Praise for And The Rain My Drink

“Moving and beautifully described” Times Literary Supplement, UK

“Considerable sensibility and penetration” The Sunday Times, UK

“An important book … a book of great richness … profoundly moving” The Daily Telegraph, UK

“Han Suyin can convey the heat, the squalor, and flux of Asiatic life with expert touches” TIME magazine, USA

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Foreword by Leon Comber

As Han Suyin’s former husband, I have often been asked about the genesis of her Malaysian novel And The Rain My Drink and how it came to be written. It was first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in the 1950s, while we were living in Johore Bahru. I was then a Special Branch (SB) officer in the Johore State SB headquarters.

My wife created something of a furore when we first arrived at Johore Bahru. We had been married not long before that in a small Catholic church in Pokfulam, Hong Kong, and in the absence of her father in China, she had been given away by the then Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham. She did not fit in easily with the accepted pattern of an Asian woman in those days and especially one married to an angmoh (‘foreign devil’). She was an attractive woman, nearly always wearing a cheung sam (Chinese slit gown), articulate in English and Mandarin (but not in any of the southern Chinese dialects), self-opinionated and yet charming, unique, and professionally qualified as a medical doctor with a MBBS from the University of London. She was streets ahead intellectually of most of the people we met in those days.

Not long after we arrived at JB, her first novel A Many Spendoured Thing had been published in London, and the film rights had been taken up by Hollywood. It was made into a successful movie, though the Hollywood moguls added the word ‘Love’ to its title to make it more marketable, and to this day many people still remember its moving theme song.  Although it was a ‘novel’, it was autobiographical, and it was a poignant and tragic love story of her romance before we married, with Ian Morrison, the Australian, Cambridge University-educated, Far East foreign correspondent of The London Times, who was tragically killed covering the Korean War. Ian Morrison was the son of the famous ‘Morrison of Peking’ who had been an advisor to the Chinese government in the early 20th century, and he was one of the many foreign correspondents covering the Korean War from the comparative safety of Hong Kong, which was then a British colony.

Morrison was given the name of  Mark Elliott in the book, though his real identity was known to everyone who lived in Hong Kong, and Han Suyin appeared as herself as an Eurasian doctor working in the Casualty Department of the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong.