Audio Interview with Han Suyin

Han Suyin, a passionate and thought-provoking historian, talks with Don Swaim in this 1985 interview about her life as a controversial author. Suyin is author of A Many-Splendoured Thing (made into the 1955 movie Love Is a Many Splendored Thing), Till Morning Comes, Four Faces and The Mountain is Young. She has also written biographies of Zhou Enlai and Mao Tse Tung and autobiographical histories, The Crippled Tree, A Mortal Flower and A Birdless Summer.

Suyin is viewed as a controversial figure because of her unpopular views of world powers and her eagerness to question academics who tend to feed us our history. Much of history, she contends, is dictated to us by the powerful. She says history has to be seen through many eyes. There exists no one truth, but there are many truths. Most history books don’t follow that theory.

Listen how Suyin transcends her excitement for history during this interview by clicking on the link below.

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat. His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.