Jungle Tract

. . . AND THE RAIN MY DRINK (306 pp.)--Han Suyin--Little, Brown ($4).

Han Suyin is an attractive Eurasian (Chinese and French) physician with a born flair for melodramatizing her life. In Destination Chungking (1942), it was her barely disguised experiences as a young girl whose pleasant existence in Peking was rudely shattered by war. Her husband, Chinese General Tang Pao Huang, was killed, but Elizabeth (her real name) made it to Hong Kong. There she had a passionate and publicly observed affair with British War Correspondent Mark Elliott, and having kissed, she proceeded to tell in A Many-Splendored Thing (TIME. Dec. 8, 1952"). When Elliott was killed in Korea. Han Suyin declared that love could never come again. But only months later she had married a British policeman whose job was fighting Communists in Malaya. Now comes . . . And the Rain My Drink, not unnaturally a near novel about Malaya, in which the nicest white character is a British cop whose job it is to run down Communists. The People Inside. The book's narrator is "Suyin," who works in the big general hospital at Johore Bahru (as Author Han Suyin once did). Across the strait lies Singapore, close behind lies the jungle. And in the jungle are the Communists. As in A Many-Splendored Thing, the author finds many excuses for the Communists. This time, it is the stupidity and repression of the British, the refusal to give the Malayan Chinese a bigger stake in Malayan life, the need for young Chinese to find an outlet for their idealism.

The implied answer for the frustrated young is to go to the jungle, to the ''People Inside" (the Communists), and fight for justice. Or to go to Communist China "to give their strength and enthusiasm" to "the newest America, the earth's old country, the ancestor's land." Author Han Suyin is not so crude as to line up on the Communist side herself, but most of the native characters who are decent and serious are sympathetic to the People Inside; the despicable ones are antiCommunist, usually for despicable reasons. The whites are divided just as clearly: the thickheaded colonials who don't know the score; the sensitive cops like Luke Davis, who has the uneasy feeling that he is on the wrong side.

Red-Carpet Welcome. Despite this tendency to load her political dice. Han Suyin can convey the heat, the squalor, and flux of Asiatic life with expert touches.

Her British husband, she says, is not the nice policeman of her story, but it may or may not be of interest that he is no longer a policeman. Instead of running down Communists, he is writing a book on Chinese secret societies. Han Suyin herself is just back from an extended visit to Peking, whose comrade-intellectuals gave her a red-carpet welcome to show that they liked her and her work, even if she did not (really) like them.

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