Books: Very Personal History

CHINA TO ME—Emily Hahn—Doubleday Doran ($3).

In 1926 Emily Hahn became the University of Wisconsin’s first woman graduate in mining engineering. Several years later she began to smoke cigars, wrote a satirical guide to seduction (Seductio ad Absurdum). In 1930 she turned up in the Belgian Congo wearing shorts and pith helmet, and wrote a book about it (With Naked Foot). After a spell as a reporter in London, footloose Emily’s flight from the domestic atmosphere of Winnetka took her in 1935 to newspaper work in Shanghai and an unconventional apartment in the city’s red-light district. She stayed in the Orient long enough to contribute numerous Chinese vignettes to the New Yorker, write a book about China’s most famous women (The Soong Sisters), have an illegitimate child by the chief of the British Military Intelligence in Hong Kong. Last year the Japs sent her home on the Gripsholm.

Emily’s latest book is not only a “partial autobiography,” but also a jampacked grabbag of the personalities and private lives of nearly everyone she met in China, from Asiatic prostitutes to European taipans (rich merchants). She has relatively little to say about Chinese politics (“I have not sold my soul to any political party”), though she prefers the Chungking Government to the Communists and insists that stories of quarreling among the Soong sisters (Mesdames Chiang Kaishek, H. H. Kung and Sun Yatsen) are just leftist propaganda. But readers of China to Me will learn something about China’s impact on Emily, almost everything about Emily’s impact on China.

Sir Victor and the Living Buddha. Emily’s Shanghai apartment had green walls, ceilings spangled with stars and crescent moons, silver-gilt furniture, 60 satin cushions. Gibbons were her favorite pets. Dressed in diapers, they swung from the bars of a bamboo grille. From the back room came the steady tap-tap-tap of an illegal wireless transmitter, planted there by some amiable Chinese guerrillas. Emily’s other friends included fabulously rich Sir Victor Sassoon (he gave Emily a snappy Chevrolet coupé), the gouty Living Buddha of Outer Mongolia (“I have nothing to do all day,” he said fretfully, “but chant. . . .”), an Australian brunette named Jean (she worked in Mrs. “Buffalo” San’s so-called “massage” establishment), green-trousered Dr. Chu, author of A Study of the Vaginal Vibrations of the Female Rabbit and later Puppet Wang Ching-wei’s “Ambassador” to Tokyo.

Mornings, Emily worked sparingly for the British North-China Daily News, reserving her energy and enthusiasm for Anglo-Chinese bilingual “little mags.” Evenings, she dressed her gibbons in sable fur coats, took them to cocktail parties and dinners. But after a while Emily felt bored and lonely. “I’ll get old and fat out here,” she complained to her Chinese boy friend Sinmay, a publisher. “You are morbid,” said Sinmay, “you must marry me.” She went to his lawyer and signed a paper “declaring that I considered myself his [Sinmay’s] wife ‘according to Chinese law.’ ” Nobody, Emily least of all, seemed to know just how married this made her.

The Generalissimo and Major Boxer. Influential Sinmay introduced his “bride” to the Soong sisters. One day Emily and Madame Chiang were “chattering along like old friends” when the Generalissimo strode in. He took one look at Emily (who had sprung to attention), cried “Hao, Hao, Hao!” (Good, Good, Good), fled from the room in confusion. “Sit down, Miss Hahn,” cooed Madame, smiling. “He didn’t have his teeth in.”

Emily decided that she needed the steadying influence of a baby, but doubted if she could have one. “Nonsense!” said her unhappily-married friend Major Charles Boxer of the British Military Intelligence, “I’ll let you have one.”

Emily’s international incident (a girl) was born just before Pearl Harbor. When the Japs marched into Hong Kong a few weeks later they clapped Major Boxer into jail, questioned Emily. “Why?” screamed the Jap Chief of Gendarmes. “Why you marry . . . Chinese, then . . . have baby with Major Boxer?” “Because I’m a bad girl,” said Emily.

Slap for Slap. Fortunately for Emily, the Japs greatly respected Major Boxer’s record of wily diplomacy: “Everybody say British bad, Boxer okay, girl friend okay,” they told Emily. But Emily remained her unpredictable self. She gave Jap officials English lessons in return for food, even went to dinner with them (“People [in New York] raise their eyebrows at this attitude, but nobody in occupied territory would. I wish you could have a month of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong”). Once she got tipsy, slapped the Jap Chief of Intelligence in the face. He came to see her the day before she was repatriated, slapped her back. “I thought we had better get evened up,” he said.

“I wish,” concludes Emily, “to say good-naturedly that I have suffered a lot, and I often wonder in what cause.” But unabashed Emily, now living in New York with her daughter, was making postwar plans to return to Major Boxer, who, she reports, plans to marry her as soon as he wins freedom from: 1) a Jap prison camp; 2) his wife.