Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn

Traces the life of the author and her travels around the world

She'd have been famous if only she'd been male!
When in the midst of the Great Depression writer Emily Hahn quit a $25-per-week teaching job in New York to run off to the African jungles in search of adventure, a male colleague cautioned her to "be careful." After all, he pointed out, Africa was no place for a woman. "I still don't know what he meant," Hahn told an interviewer more than six decades later. Her coy reaction wasn't surprising, for "careful" was never a word that was part of the Hahn vocabulary. Her appetite for adventure was insatiable. Emily Hahn, cigar-smoking adventurer, pioneer feminist, teacher, mother, and the author of 52 books and hundreds of articles for The New Yorker, died February 18, 1997, in New York City. She had been in hospital for three weeks, after breaking her right leg in a fall at her apartment. Hahn, who for many years lived part-time in the U.K. with her husband, the historian Charles R. Boxer, came to prominence in the 1940s as a result of her writings about China. The Soong Sisters (1941), a biography of the Middle Kingdom's illustrious "first family," and an irreverent tell-all memoir entitled China to Me (1944), which chronicled Hahn's life, loves, and freewheeling adventures in the Far East, were best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Hahn wrote in an astounding variety of literary genres: biographies, history, humor, women's issues, bohemianism, travel, cooking, children's literature, zoology, fiction, and natural history. To the dismay of literary agents and a succession of publishers, she steadfastly refused to be "pigeon-holed" or to become predictable. That goes a long way towards explaining why apart from the success of her China books, Hahn never found the mass audience of many of her less prodigious male contemporaries. If she was bitter about this, it was never apparent. Nonetheless, Hahn was fond of pointing out that her good friend and mentor Dame Rebecca West had once told her: "If you and I had been born male and had written what we've written, we'd be a lot better known." Like the woman herself, Hahn's writing was characterized by arresting opening lines. "Not long after my family moved from St. Louis to Chicago, I ran away from home," begins her 1970 memoir Times and Places. And then there's China to Me: " 'Shanghai? You're going there, are you?' the hairdresser said, putting another wave over my forehead." Emily Hahn's distinctive, highly personal literary style was uniquely her own. But she is best remembered for the articles she produced during a 68-year career as a contributor to The New Yorker. She was one of a small handful of writers who worked for all four of the magazine's editors--Harold Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, and Tina Brown. Hahn--"Mickey" to her family and friends--was born January 14, 1905, into a Jewish-German family in St. Louis, Missouri. The fifth of six children, Emily Hahn was a rebel from the beginning. She came by her feistiness naturally, for her father Isaac Newton Hahn, a hardware salesman by vocation, was an atheist who read passages from the Bible to his children so he could point out inconsistencies. Hahn's mother, Hannah (Schoen), was an avowed suffragette who was considered "fast" because she rode a bicycle while wearing bloomers and sometimes worked as a stenographer even after she married. The Hahn children were encouraged to write and think for themselves. Yet oddly enough, Emily Hahn never thought of herself as a writer until much later in life. At age 18, she and a girlfriend disguised themselves as men and drove across America in a Model-T Ford. In 1922, she caused an uproar when she became the first woman to enroll in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Hahn really wanted to study English literature, but changed her mind when one of her professors told her the female mind was "incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics." After graduating, Hahn worked briefly as an oil geologist before quitting to become a Harvey Girl--a guide who took tourists on horseback expeditions into the wilderness around Sante Fe, New Mexico. In 1928, Hahn moved to New York to do graduate studies in geology. While there, she began to write seriously. Her first New Yorker pieces, published the following year, were actually letters she had sent her brother-in-law in Chicago. Without her knowledge, he removed the salutations and submitted them to New Yorker editor Harold Ross. However, successes in those early days were rare, and Hahn's mood plumetted along with the economy. After a failed suicide attempt, she ran away to the Belgian Congo to spend two years living among pygmies at a Croix Rouge du Congo medical outpost. In the spring of 1935 she and her sister sailed for Japan and China. Although Hahn did not know it at the time, this would be the start of the eight-year adventure that defined the rest of her life. She spent almost five years in Shanghai, where she scandalized the European community by becoming the concubine of a Chinese poet and intellectual named Sinmay Zau and by getting addicted to opium. "I was young and I thought it was romantic to smoke [it]," she once told an interviewer. It was also through her involvement with Sinmay Zau that she met Communist revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, as well as the illustrious Soong sisters, about whom she eventually wrote. In the fall of 1941 Hahn settled in Hong Kong, where she fell in love with a married British officer who was the head of military intelligence in the colony. A few weeks before Pearl Harbor, Hahn gave birth to Major Charles Boxer's child, a daughter they called Carola. When Boxer was badly wounded in the Japanese attack on Hong Kong and subsequently became a POW, Hahn convinced Japanese officials she was Eurasian. This enabled her to avoid detention and to stay free so she could take food parcels to Boxer and his starving fellow POWs. She also became involved in secret relief work for which she was given a citation by a grateful Hong Kong government following the war. Hahn and her daughter were repatriated to the U.S. in a 1943 prisoner exchange. After the war Hahn married Boxer, who became a distinguished professor of Dutch and Portuguese colonial history. The Boxers subsequently had another daughter, Amanda. She lives and works in London as an actress. From the late 1940s onwards the Boxers maintained anunconventional marriage: he lived near Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, 30 minutes north of London, while she moved to New York. Here she joined the staff of The New Yorker, working alongside such literary luminaries as James Thurber, E.B. White, and S.J. Perelman. Each summer, Hahn journeyed to England, where she stayed with her husband for 91 days--the maximum period allowable before she was required to pay British income taxes. Throughout her years at The New Yorker Hahn was one of the magazine's most prolific writers. When she wasn't in New York, she was a roving correspondent filing reports that were as far-flung as they were eclectic; she wrote about everything from angels and rabbis to diamonds and Indian maharajahs. In her later years, Hahn wrote several books about zoology. Apes were always one of her favorite topics; she kept pet gibbons in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and created a stir by outfitting her favorite companion, Mr. Mills, in a tailored mink suit. Hahn was also one of the pioneers in experiments that explored the possibilities of communications between man and animals. Emily Hahn continued to go to her New Yorker office each day that she was in New York, up to just a few weeks before her death. She was still an occasional contributor to that magazine and to others. Hahn is survived by her husband Charles, 94, her daughters Carola Boxer Vecchio of New York, Amanda Boxer of London.