A candid, rollicking literary travelogue from a pioneering New
Yorker writer, an intrepid heroine who documented China in the years
before World War II.
Deemed scandalous at the time of its publication in 1944, Emily Hahn's
now classic memoir of her years in China remains remarkable for her
insights into a tumultuous period and her frankness about her personal
exploits. A proud feminist and fearless traveler, she set out for China
in 1935 and stayed through the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese
War, wandering, carousing, living, loving--and writing.
Many of the pieces in China to Me were first published as the work of
a roving reporter in the New Yorker. All are shot through with
riveting and humanizing detail. During her travels from Nanjing to
Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, where she lived until the Japanese
invasion in 1941, Hahn embarks upon an affair with lauded Chinese poet
Shao Xunmei; gets a pet gibbon and names him Mr. Mills; establishes a
close bond with the women who would become the subjects of her
bestselling book The Soong Sisters; battles an acquired addiction to
opium; and has a child with Charles Boxer, a married British
intelligence officer.
In this unflinching glimpse of a vanished world, Hahn examines not so
much the thorny complications of political blocs and party conflict, but
the ordinary--or extraordinary--people caught up in the swells of
history. At heart, China to Me is a self-portrait of a fascinating
woman ahead of her time.
