The Future Be Yelling

It’s taken a while to kick into gear but I found myself hooked last night, reading Emily Hahn’s “China to Me” written in 1944.  We all know the Japanese repeatedly bombed Chongqing during the War, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read an account of someone who was actually trying to carry on with writing and primping, and flirting and cocktails, only to have it regularly interrupted, every day that was clear by a squadron of thirty or fifty or more Mitsubishi bombers.  How maddening that must have been for any bombed population.  Woe-be the hapless pilot like John McCain who parachuted out only to be captured by such a citizenry. 

I only visited Chongqing once, back in 1994, long before Bo Xilai came and went and left a newly incorporated post-modern, independently provincial megopolis, separated from Sichuan Province.  Like most of the country then, it was poor, rundown and all about to happen.  Unlike anywhere else there were no bicycles because it is a classically hilly city.  I remember the steep slippery steps down to the river’s edge where I boarded a boat to Wuhan, before the Three Gorges Damn had been built.  And it was easy to envision Ms. Hahn’s terrifying scene, after the warnings have been sounded, at the bottom of those steps trying to board a boat to get safely to the other side of the river, where bombers didn’t usually strike. 

Now, later in the book, she’s made her way down to Hong Kong.  She’s dating the head of British Intelligence who wants to have a child with her.  And . . . it’s November 1940.  We all know that the “day which will live, in infamy” is less than thirteen months out.  Her mom wants her to come now and this young lady who’d earlier written a book called “In No Hurry Home” buys a ticket on a steamer back to the U.S.  But later, bouncing down Queens Road, mid-romance, waiting for her pet gibbons to arrive from Shanghai, she passes up the chance.  We feel like screaming at her with hindsight: “Get out!”  And I’m sitting here in Beijing in October of 2018.  And you, tender reader are sitting where you are.  Might the future be yelling at either of us?

At the outset the text felt a bit like a chit-chatty, gossip rag account of who was sleeping with who, back in the day, but it has certainly waxed to a fullness, with her interviews with Song Mei Ling, unscripted encounter with Jiang Kai Shek, before he’s put his false teeth in and effortless name dropping of Agnes Smedley and Zhou Enlai.  Turns out she wrote the book in five week’s time.  Good for her.  Would that I could. 

I’ve read what I could find on line about the woman.  Her trekking through the Congo in the 1930s, her success as the first woman to earn a mining degree from the University of Wisconsin, nor her opium addicted concubinage to the rakish Chinese poet Shao Xunfei are covered in this work.  She apparently has a fifty-plus work oeuvre to her name.  The one question that none of these articles and wiki pages and obits seems to answer for me:  What is her ethic origin?  Not that its pressingly important, but they all say the same thing: “Emily Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 14, 1905 as one of the six children of Isaac Newton Hahn, a dry goods salesman, and Hannah Hahn, a free-spirited suffragette.”  Were the Hahns German Hahns?  Korean Hahns?  Chinese Hans?  I think I was curious because when I first secured the book I assumed she was Chinese.  It quickly becomes clear that she is American but, and I’m on thin ice here, very attractive, she looks somewhat Chinese on the cover of this book.  I can only assume that if Isaac Newton Hahn was of Chinese descent, someone would have called it out as significant.  Still . . .

I’ll leave you with one, small snippet of hers that has stayed with me.  She mentions being at some soiree in Chongqing when Chinese music was played on a phonograph.  I presume it was a recording of a folk opera.  She comments on the fact that some British gent says something like: “I say.  Can we turn that rubbish off please?”  And she recounts an interesting story from her earlier days in the Belgian Congo wherein she and some friends were playing 78s from around the world and for some reason the native hosts consistently begged them to stop and please, please play the Chinese Opera vinyl one more time. Above and beyond any other music, this was what moved them.  The high pitched Chinese opera was what they loved.

Sunday, 10/07/18