Hong Kong Affair

A MANY-SPLENDORED THING (366 pp.) -- Han Suyin -- Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.75).

All Hong Kong knew about Han Suyin's love affair with Mark Elliott. They were inseparable, walking the streets of the city and the hills of the island at all hours, meeting openly at his hotel. They made no effort to keep the affair quiet, but in gossip-ridden Hong Kong it would not have helped much if they had. She was a well-known doctor, the Eurasian widow of a Chinese Nationalist general who had been killed fighting the Communists. He was a British newspaper correspondent. She had a small daughter. He had a wife and children. As if all that weren't trouble enough, Han was politically troubled as well: now that the Communist armies were victorious, she was more than a little beguiled by the propaganda of her country's new masters.

Monsoon of the Heart. Han Suyin's A Many-Splendored Thing is frankly autobiographical. It makes uncomfortable reading because it so willfully, often tastelessly, exposes the deepest private feelings of its principals. Yet there are occasional moments of passionate feeling that almost give dignity to generally unpleasant revelations. Mark Elliott, who had merely been looking for a mistress, soon found himself swamped by a monsoon of the heart. Said he: "I had wanted something beyond the figments of reality, beyond the specious solidity of this rock-bottom world. A steady, passionate flame. A singlehearted ecstasy. And now it has happened . . . everything has come alive, every moment a shooting star." And Han, somewhat more composed: "Whatever happens now, I cannot be too sad. Sadness is so ungrateful when this has been given." There are too many pages of such high-falutin exchanges, which were undoubtedly not so much recalled as reshaped (or even invented) during tranquillity. Author Suyin does better when she sets out to describe the Hong Kong of 1949 and 1950, its unwieldy population swelled each week by thousands of refugees escaping from the Communists. She can make the squalor, the despair, the poverty and the vice come tragically alive. But all these are the backdrop for a love affair. Han Suyin had friends who saw to it that she did not suffer.

Red Saviors? Throughout her book. Author Suyin works at giving an impression of herself as a political neutral. But the Communists keep coming off best, looking in the end like stern but idealistic saviors. Would she stick by Mark, or go back to work for Communist China? Part of her dilemma was solved when Mark was killed covering the Korean war.

Han Suyin's real name was Elizabeth Tang, widow of General Tang Pao Huang, onetime Chinese military attache in London. She began pouring both her lover's grief and her pro-Communist sympathies into a book almost as soon as Mark Elliott's death was announced. The act of writing seems to have brought a kind of peace to Elizabeth. In her book she wrote: "It is not going to happen again." Months later, she married a British policeman, moved to Malaya.

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