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I was spellbound by this revelation and decided to write an article on the subject for The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, a Hong Kong publication of which I am the Hon. Editor. This appeared in 2001.2
In researching this article I had a look around the WWW and came across a webpage dedicated to Suyin hosted by the University of Minnesota and maintained by Professor Teresa Kowalska of the Silesian University, Katowice. Without any real hope of getting a response, I e-mailed Teresa and she promptly replied. This started an exchange of e-mails, which continues to this day, initially about Han Suyin, but latterly about every subject imaginable. We have become friends.
Teresa has been an ardent admirer of Han Suyin for many years and has met her four times now. She has written a number of articles about her and in 2002 told me of her magnum opus; a Polish translation of Suyin's The Crippled Tree. However, she was having great difficulty in finding a Polish publisher and the cost seemed likely to be prohibitive.
By this stage I had also developed an admiration for Suyin. None of her books had ever been published in Polish and it seemed important to rectify this state of affairs by making the power and poignancy of her writing available to the Polish reading public. What follows is an account of a collaboration between a Polish professor of chemistry and a then Hong Kong assistant commissioner of police (who, incidentally, headed the information technology department at the time) to publish Kalekie drzewo!
I spoke to the HKBRAS publisher in Hong Kong (Pally Printing Co.) and he agreed upon a very favourable fee. Both he and I, however, were considerably worried about our ability to produce a book in Polish, of which we speak not one word. Taking the plunge, however, I asked Teresa to e-mail me the manuscript. This I handed to our publisher and asked him to produce the first proofs in hard copy. I forget the details but it seems that we got the typesetting all wrong for the Polish language and when Teresa saw the proofs she understandably went into paroxysms of despair at what we had done to her epic work. Henry Law (our
'Vol. 40.
Suyin and husband Vincent live, in retirement, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vincent died in December 2002. R.L.P.