[
    {
        "id": 214972,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2000",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "24\n\npromised quick liberation from technological backwardness of China and consequently from the dependence on non-altruistic foreign assistance, or so at least hoped young, aware, fierce and idealistic Chinese patriots of the mandarin origin, Han Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, among them. Belonging to the upper class of the Old China's society, a scholarship was rather easily granted to him by the provincial government of Szechuan to study railway engineering in Belgium. He spent ten long years in Brussels (1903-1913), studying and working, and there he met his future wife, Marguerite Denis, and eventually married her in 1908. In Chapter One of The Crippled Tree Han Suyin briefly comments:\n\nWe are all products of our time, vulnerable to history. I was born because there had been, in China, a Boxer Rebellion (as the Europeans called it) in 1900, and because of this event, which the Chinese call the Uprising of the Righteous Fists, my Chinese father, instead of becoming a classical scholar, perhaps a Hanlin Academician, married my Belgian mother.\n\nRe-settlement of the Chou family from Belgium to China was a great disillusionment for both, Marguerite Denis and her young Chinese engineer husband. At that time (which - unfortunately enough - would end with the Communist Revolution only) Chinese were treated in their own motherland as citizens of the second category, by definition inferior to the whites. Han Suyin's great epic cycle on autobiography/history of China gives multiple examples to prove this abhorring and painful truth. The return trip alone was a bitter humiliation for the couple travelling such an enormously long way to the Chinese homeland with their first-born son. In Chapter Eighteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin quotes fragments of her father's memoirs, which describe some details of that event:\n\nWhen we went to collect the tickets [for the English boat], the man in the booking office (tall, blond, low-voiced) said to Marguerite: \"But, madame, you can go in first class if you wish, but not monsieur. It is the rule.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Marguerite, astonished, \"but he is my husband. Of course I shall go with him.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215197,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2000",
        "page_number": 293,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "257\n\nHan Suyin was the daughter of a Belgian (Dutch/Flemish) mother, Marguerite Denis, and a Chinese father, Chou Yen Tung, (a railway engineer) and one of eight children. She was born in Sinyang, Henan Province. Her parents met whilst her father was studying at university in Belgium. In 1932, she started work as a typist at the Peking Union Medical College to earn money to study. She entered Yenching University in 1933. She transferred to the University of Brussels in 1935 but abandoned her studies in 1938 and returned to China after the Japanese invasion. The same year, she married a Kuomintang officer, Tang Pao Huang, who rose to the rank of general before he was killed during the Civil War in 1947. Tang served for a period as a military attaché in London during World War Two. Before his death, they adopted a daughter, Mei.\n\nHan Suyin, aged three (second from left) with her father behind her\n\nIn 1944, she entered the School of Medicine, University of London and in 1948 graduated M.B., B.S. (Hons.). She took an appointment as a paediatrician at Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong, in 1949. After Mr. Morrison's death in August 1950, she continued working in Hong Kong and married Leonard (Leon) F. Comber, an English publisher, on 1 February 1952, in Hong Kong. She spent the next 10 years in Johore Bahru, Malaysia, working at an anti-tuberculosis clinic. Mr. Comber was a Special Branch officer (assistant superintendent) in Malaya between 1948 and 1960. It was in Malaysia, also, that she met her current husband, an Indian Army colonel Vincent Rathnaswamy. There is a confusing report that she practiced medicine in China until about 1961.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]