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China to Me: A Partial Autobiography

by Emily Hahn

4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 · rating details · 68 ratings · 12 reviews

Emily Hahn has written biography, fiction, short stories, and essays about China—all very successful. With this "partial autobiography" she gives the story behind these writings. For here at last is the complete and delightfully candid account of her life in China during the crucial years 1935-43.

As a newspaperwoman, Miss Hahn was on the spot to witness the great events th ...more

Hardcover , Book Club Edition , 429 pages

Published 1944 by The Blakiston Company

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Jul 25, 2015 Jaylia3 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015

Candid memoir of expatriate life in 1930’s-40’s China

When I first started reading Emily Hahn’s candid memoir I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a witty and fascinating conversation that I didn’t quite have the context for. There’s a reason for that, when China to Me was first published in 1944 WWII was still going on and the public was already well aware of Emily Hahn and her unconventional somewhat scandalous life, so there were details she could assume people already knew. I was out of Candid memoir of expatriate life in 1930’s-40’s China

When I first started reading Emily Hahn’s candid memoir I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a witty and fascinating conversation that I didn’t quite have the context for. There’s a reason for that, when China to Me was first published in 1944 WWII was still going on and the public was already well aware of Emily Hahn and her unconventional somewhat scandalous life, so there were details she could assume people already knew. I was out of that loop, but I soon enough found my footing.

Hahn traveled to Shanghai with her sister in 1935, got a writing job for a British newspaper and decided to stay. She mixed with the rich and powerful, mainly British and other European expatriates, but she also had a romantic relationship and business partnership with an already married Chinese publisher and poet. Her apartment--which she describes in humorous detail--was in the red light district and she kept a pet gibbon name Mr. Mills who sometimes accompanied her to parties.

In 1940 Hahn traveled inland to the mountainous city of Chungking (now Chongqing) to interview one of the Soong sisters, who I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of, for a book she was writing about the family. All three sisters were married to prominent Chinese men--political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek, revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, and uber wealthy finance minister Kung Hsiang-hsi--but the sisters also cultivated their own positions of power and influence. Hahn was in Chungking while the Japanese were conducting bombing raids on the city, so she had to type her book between frightening but tedious sessions in cave-like air raid shelters.

But Hahn’s experiences in Chungking were nothing compared to her life in Japanese occupied Hong Kong. She had about a year in the city before the invasion, which was long enough to have an affair with a married British military officer and give birth to their baby. Up until this point Hahn’s memoir had been highly interesting to me, but her harrowing descriptions of the chaos, scarcity, and menace of living under enemy rule while trying to care for and feed her infant daughter and make sure her hospital imprisoned lover had food and medicine made the book almost impossible to put down.

Hahn was a follows-her-own-rules kind of person, and this is a lively, entertaining, and informative book, but it’s her astute and forthright observations about people, including herself, and their varied reactions to hardship, displacement, cultural difference, tests of love and loyalty, and the loss or gain of power that elevated this memoir above a simple recounting of events for me. The book closes in 1943 when Hahn finally returns to the US with her daughter, but the war is raging on so her life and the fate of her lover are still up in the air, making me very relieved that I had a biography on hand to fill me in on what happened next--though you could just check her Wikipedia page.

This memoir is well over 400 pages, and I did find myself skimming at times, but like many of my favorite books, China to Me sent me into passionate internet research mode, and it’s added several titles to my TBR list--I for sure have to read Hahn’s book about the Soong sisters. There’s a lot more by Hahn to choose from because she authored a total of 52(!) books and wrote articles, poems, and short stories for New Yorker magazine almost up until her death at the age of ninety-two in 1997.

In 2014 China to Me was republished by Open Road Media. I read an ebook review copy supplied to me at no cost by the publisher through NetGalley. Review opinions are mine.
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Mar 09, 2014 Alexis rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh man this book is great. This is like the most ladylike book ever. It is ladylike as balls. In this incredibly ladylike memoir, Emily Hahn gets up to all sorts of ridiculous doings in China. You can look at any bio of her for the big picture, but it doesn't get across the blithe and casual way she runs her terribly topical and engaging social life. Best part: the copy I got has a newspaper clipping from 1945 with a picture of her and her pet monkey. The second half is some of the best war repo ...more

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May 24, 2013 Tbfrank rated it 4 of 5 stars

Emily (Mickey) Hahn's 'China to Me' memoir is bit of a puzzle. Is it a travelogue, a window into another society, a historical record? Was it written as a means of coming to grips with the sudden arrival in America after nearly a decade of living in Asia? Is it a catalogue of names and events recorded for posterity? She wrote:

Half the men I remember that night, horsing around, are dead,
and the girls are standing in line at Stanley with cup in hand,
waiting for a handout of thin rice stew.

Her Emily (Mickey) Hahn's 'China to Me' memoir is bit of a puzzle. Is it a travelogue, a window into another society, a historical record? Was it written as a means of coming to grips with the sudden arrival in America after nearly a decade of living in Asia? Is it a catalogue of names and events recorded for posterity? She wrote:

Half the men I remember that night, horsing around, are dead,
and the girls are standing in line at Stanley with cup in hand,
waiting for a handout of thin rice stew.

Her writing styple is without a doubt geared toward the magazine reader, a conversational tone, hinting at larger topics without great depth or detail. Sprinkled throughout are names of persons known and unknown - mostly the later today. The first third of the book sheds light on Mickey's character as well as the life of foreigners living in China in the 1930's. Picturing her home with the human and animal managerie she maintained underlines her unconventional nature. It also serves to ground her as a legitimate observer in a time of great change in China. The central portion covers the writing of her well-known book on the Soong sisters, the wives of the New China's leaders. The remainder describes life in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. In the center of it all is a love story which might be the essence of minimialism, presented in such a matter of fact way that the reader knows it was completely different.

Her experiences during the occupation of Hong Kong seem at odds with the stories that came out of the internment camps. While she benefited from an association with highly placed Japanese officials, her life was different from the internees only in the apparent freedom of movement she was allowed and the company she kept. Those outside the camps were subject to sudden terrors, violence and criminal behaviors every much as those inside. She was fortunate to be part of a support network that worked for the survival of themselves and the internees alike.

Mickey's personality is such that hers fears and concerns, while noted, do not take over the narrative. As she wrote, she likes to be the boss and naturally could not maintain the proper demeanor as an enemy national. Clearly, the Japanese did not know what to make of her. Throughout, she does not hesitate to criticize herself, her actions or her behaviors but holds fast to her purpose of providing for her daughter and for her daughter's father.

This is not a tell-all tale and the reader is left with the impression that a lot has been left unwritten. Her purpose, however, was not to document conditions and events that others were in better positions to detail or who had already done so. At that, anything from the pen of this extraordinarily interesting woman is well worth reading. ...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

According to Emily Hahn’s biographer, she “feverishly” wrote China to Me in just a few months, and it reads as if she’s recalling China in a breathless rush. It was, indeed, a breathless adventure.

At the outset I didn’t know what to make of this book. She opens by talking about her Hollywood hairdresser and then about the society pages of the Shanghai newspaper. What kind of a spoiled ditz have we here? I suspected she was like a chatty aunt who has traveled everywhere and could tell you of coun According to Emily Hahn’s biographer, she “feverishly” wrote China to Me in just a few months, and it reads as if she’s recalling China in a breathless rush. It was, indeed, a breathless adventure.

At the outset I didn’t know what to make of this book. She opens by talking about her Hollywood hairdresser and then about the society pages of the Shanghai newspaper. What kind of a spoiled ditz have we here? I suspected she was like a chatty aunt who has traveled everywhere and could tell you of countless adventures if only you could keep her focused on one narrative without diverging into a diatribe about, for example, the inability of the Chinese to construct a proper chair.

She is so much more than that.

Cut her some slack. Skim, skip a few pages if you must. By the middle of the book she is in Hong Kong being shelled by the invading, raping, looting Japanese Army. She falls in love with a married British spy (though she never identifies him as a spy because when she was writing the book, the war had not ended and he was a Japanese POW). To add to the danger, she has a baby. Her lover is in prison; her baby is starving; she is in constant danger of random violence or death. In addition, she is engaged in clandestine relief work for which the penalties are severe.

At one point she is among a group being raided by Japanese thugs:

Terror seems to make people very, very sad. We were indistinct in the candlelight, but I could see the faces pretty well and everyone was hangdog, and kept his eyes fixed on the table. Actors registering fear in the movies don’t do it right. I know that now. Alec had been tied painfully tightly and his face was twisted with the effort not to yelp. They didn’t tie me up at all, nor the luscious Lena, nor Veronica, nor Susie, and that was terrifying too. In spite of all the airy things I had been saying about rape, now that I thought my time had come I was so afraid of it that I turned to jelly.

Along the way she occasionally finds time to write a poem or to analyze, cold-bloodedly, the political use of rape, or to point out that all the English and American journalists didn’t know diddly about the communists in China (which made the book anathema to certain journalists in the USA).

Here is how her baby came about — she had dinner at a restaurant with Charles (her lover) and some guests. A woman named Mrs. Lee asks:

”Have you any babies, Madam?”

“No,” I said solemnly shaking my head. “No, I can’t have any children.”

“Oh, isn’t that a pity!”

Over on the other side of the table, Charles pricked up his ears and looked at me. “Nonsense,” said Charles crisply. “Of course you can have children.”

“As it happens, I can’t,” I said, and I thought I was telling the truth. “I’ve been told so, often, by doctors. I can’t.”

“Of course you can. I’ll bet you anything you like.”

“What is this nonsense?” he demanded in the taxi, after we had sent the guests off to the ferry. “Is that why you carry on so about children, weeping at Wu Teh-chen’s and keeping gibbons and all that?”

“Oh no. I don’t want children. I never did.”

“All women want children,” said Charles with amusing certainty. “But see here; do you really want a child? If so, I’ll let you have one.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s have one,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. It can be my heir. Just to make things all right, if I can get a divorce and if it all works out, we might even get married. If we want to, that is, and after a long time for considering.”

“Do you mean it?” I asked after a pause. I knew already, though, that he did. He was being flippant, but that is the way Charles is; he just is flippant. It didn’t alter the fact that he meant it.

“I never heard such nonsense,” said Charles indignantly. “Can’t have children! Whatever will Mrs. Lee think of me?”

“All right," I said, “let’s try.”

It was a proposal, flippant and indignant. Emily Hahn herself could churn flippantly and indignantly throughout the giant insane nation of China — or the many warring nations of China — and you can accompany her.

At the end of the book, (I am spoiling nothing by telling you this) she has one final visit with Charles, her lover, in his prisoner-of-war camp, knowing she may never see him alive again:

The officer turned his back a minute and we kissed each other briefly, and then it was time for Charles to go. As they walked away I heard the officer say: “You’re allowed to kiss her good-by.”

“But I did already,” said Charles.

“Did you? I didn’t see you.”

“Well, I did, I tell you.”

They went out through the door arguing about it. Carola, who had been shy of Charles, now looked disconcerted. “Uncle’s gone,” she said.

“Uncle? That wasn’t Uncle, you silly baby. That was your daddy.”

“Oh?” She accepted the correction without argument. “Daddy’s gone,” she said. She began to whimper.

“Daddy’s gone,” I said.

The father of her child is led back to prison — probably never to see her again — arguing about whether he kissed her or not. It’s this odd mix of the small and the large, the mess that is China, the mess that is all of our lives, that comes through so clearly. What a book.
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Jan 29, 2012 Danielle McClellan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Emily Hahn is one of my all time favorite writers/women/adventurers and if I were an actress she is the one character that I would want to play in a film. In her autobiographical writing, Hahn is brutally honest about her complicated life and nobody could ever accuse her of taking the easy road. She talks about her decision to leave her comfortable home to move to the Southwest to become an engineer, and later, move to Asia, where she hooked up with a Chinese lover, a pet monkey, and a minor opi ...more

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Sep 14, 2013 Amy VanGundy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is essentially a travelogue from an American journalist/adventurer-ess in China prior to and during the Japanese invasion of China. The name Emily Hahn was unfamiliar to me, but upon doing some light research it was apparent that she was quite a woman!

The style of the book was a little off-putting at first. It is very "chatty" and extremely detailed in terms of people and places. It takes time to grasp all the people she describes only to have her then move to another city and introduce a ...more

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Oct 04, 2009 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: tried-to-read-but-couldn-t-make-it

I was hoping that this memoir of an American woman living and working in 1936 Shanghai would be evocative of the time, but she spends a lot of her time writing sbout the socializing and local politics, all which would have been relevant to a reader at that time, but left me feeling kind of lost. Couldn't finish it.

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Feb 27, 2012 Carin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Very interesting to hear first-hand experience of someone during the invasion of China by the Japanese and occupation of Hong Kong.
More interesting to read from a reporter's perspective at that time.
Even more interesting to read from a western, female reporter's perspective.

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May 18, 2011 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wow, what an amazing life this woman lead, from the high life of an ex-pat in Shanghai in 1935 to starvation in Hong Kong under the Japanese. And all written without a self-pitying attitude, she was quite a character.

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Jan 11, 2013 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides marked it as to-read

Shelves: memoir , east-asia

From the jacket flap: "This book has not been condensed. Its bulk is less because of government paper quota regulations on all publishers."

It has an EH monogram embossed on the front cover.

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Feb 28, 2008 Bill Robinson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everybody

I was a boy and learned about the adventures of a courageous woman missionary in China during WWII. I would like to know more about Emily Hahn, the author.

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Aug 16, 2009 Louis is currently reading it · review of another edition

Just starting this in bits and chunks.

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About Emily Hahn

"Mickey" Hahn was called "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker magazine; she was the author of 52 books and more than 180 articles and stories. Her father was a hardware salesman and her mother a suffragette. She and her siblings were brought up to be independent and to think for themselves and she became the first woman to take a degree in mining engineering from the Universi ...more

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No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the Century

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