NOBODY SAID NOT TO GO:
The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn
By Ken Cuthbertson
Faber and Faber, 383 pages, $29.95
Emily Hahn enjoyed a remarkable life, and Ken Cuthbertson deserves praise for taking note of a woman who has been too-little remembered. When she died at age 92 in February 1997, Roger Angell eulogized her in The New Yorker, to which she had been a contributor for more than 60 years: “She was, in truth, something rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss.”
Hahn went almost everywhere and wrote about almost everything she did: As a college student in 1924 she drove from Wisconsin to California in a Model T; at 25, after living in New York and London and seeing her first New Yorker piece and her first book published, she traveled to the Belgian Congo, where she lived for almost two years; several years later she went to Shanghai, where she lived for eight years. These and other travels produced 52 books: novels, biographies, juvenile and travel literature, and autobiographical works.
Cuthbertson knew little about Hahn when he first met her, but he was immediately awed by her. As recounted in his preface, he met her in 1986 while researching his biography on American author John Gunther, an old friend of the Hahn family’s. When he finished that book, and with her agreement, he started on the story of her life.
Born in St. Louis in January 1905 and raised in Chicago, Hahn was the fifth of six children–all but one of them girls–in an iconoclastic family. Her mother, a woman of strong convictions, was determined that her girls would go to college, and at 17 Emily enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in a general arts program. When told that a science course she wanted to take was limited to engineering students, she transferred to that school, causing not a little uproar. From her memoir “Times and Places”: ” `The female mind,’ (an academic adviser) explained carefully and kindly, `is incapable of grasping . . . any of the fundamentals of mining taught in this course.’ That remark, tout simple, is why I am a Bachelor of Science in Mining Engineering. . . . It was enough to make any girl forget a little thing like Art.”
After becoming the first woman to graduate in mining engineering from the university, she moved to New Mexico to work as a Fred Harvey tour guide. “(T)he last thing in the world I wanted was a future. . . . I merely wanted to live, without aiming for anything,” she recalled in “Times and Places.” “All I did was be happy.” That attitude defined her life. That aimlessness was the source of her accomplishments: a casual ease about life paired with a determination that is to be envied.
In 1930 Hahn set off, alone, for the Belgian Congo, where she stayed with a friend in the remote settlement of Penge. Almost two years later she decided–on a whim and with, as she wrote, ” `my usual sublime self-confidence’ “–to leave Penge, and Africa, which she did with a pygymy guide, a cook and a dozen porters carrying luggage and food. They walked for 18 days before coming upon a mining camp, from which Hahn eventually was able to make it out of Africa. She chronicled her African experiences in the book “Congo Solo.”
Perhaps the central event of her life was a visit to Shanghai with her sister Helen in 1935, just as the Chinese-Japanese war was beginning. She left eight years later, one of 1,400 American and Canadian repatriates aboard the Teia Maru as part of a prisoner swap with Japan. Her book “China to Me” chronicles her experiences in the years between. Of Hahn’s time in China, Cuthbertson quotes British historian Harriet Sergeant, who researched Shanghai of the 1930s for a book on the city: ” `(N)early everyone I interviewed had an anecdote about Emily Hahn. Men recalled her wistfully; women with vitriol.’ “
Hahn had a large presence in the city, in part because of a scandalous affair with Chinese intellectual Sinmay Zau (she was his concubine, a relationship that proved most valuable during the later years of the war). She also wrote a controversial biography of the Soong sisters, two of whom were the wives of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Most important, however, was her affair with a married British lieutenant, Charles Boxer. She had his child, he divorced his wife and, when he was released after two years in a Japanese POW camp, married her. Not that Hahn settled down. Theirs was an open marriage: while Charles settled in England, Emily did so in New York and continued to travel about the world.
Cutherbertson is not the most dynamic nor eloquent writer, but he is a thorough researcher (he spent five years on the book), and he has produced a valuable introduction to Hahn’s life. If the biography occasionally is weighed down with dry facts and lacks vitality, its bibliography of her books invites us to turn to her own stories of her life.
