Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn
383
Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn
383Overview
Emily Hahn first challenged traditional gender roles in 1922 when she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin’s all-male College of Engineering, wearing trousers, smoking cigars, and adopting the nickname “Mickey.” Her love of writing led her to Manhattan, where she sold her first story to the New Yorker in 1929, launching a sixty-eight-year association with the magazine and a lifelong friendship with legendary editor Harold Ross. Imbued with an intense curiosity and zest for life, Hahn traveled to the Belgian Congo during the Great Depression, working for the Red Cross; set sail for Shanghai, becoming a Chinese poet’s concubine; had an illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong, where she carried out underground relief work during World War II; and explored newly independent India in the 1950s. Back in the United States, Hahn built her literary career while also becoming a pioneer environmentalist and wildlife conservator.
With a rich understanding of social history and a keen eye for colorful details and amusing anecdotes, author Ken Cuthbertson brings to life a brilliant, unconventional woman who traveled fearlessly because “nobody said not to go.” Hahn wrote hundreds of acclaimed articles and short stories as well as fifty books in many genres, and counted among her friends Rebecca West, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Jomo Kenyatta, and Madame and General Chiang Kai-shek.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504034050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 383 |
| Sales rank: | 52,511 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Nobody Said Not to Go
The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn
By Ken Cuthbertson
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Ken CuthbertsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3405-0
CHAPTER 1
The afternoon of September 22, 1943, was sultry and overcast in Hong Kong, the kind of liquid afternoon when Emily Hahn loved nothing better than to sit in the shade among the flowers on the terrace of her flat high up on the Peak. There she would while away the hours, sipping a cool drink as she chatted with friends, read, smoked a good cigar, or leisurely watched the comings and goings of ships in the harbor far below. Today there were no cool drinks. No friends. No books. The memories of those genteel afternoons in this outpost of the British Empire were growing as faded and dim as water-colors in the rain.
This was Day Four Hundred and Sixty-Eight of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. For Emily Hahn, her two-year-old daughter Carola, and for one hundred and twenty other foreign nationals, this day would be different. They were being repatriated in an International Red Cross prisoner exchange. More than a thousand Japanese nationals who had been in the U.S. when the war began were being shipped to Lourenço Marques, a neutral Portuguese port on the coast of East Africa. (Now known as Maputo, Mozambique.) Here, they were to be exchanged for American and Canadian civilians who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Saigon. Emily Hahn's mind was a welter of conflicting emotions as she thought of all this.
She had dreamed of freedom each and every day of her ordeal in occupied Hong Kong; it had been a struggle to survive, let alone maintain her dignity and sanity. Emily desperately wanted to escape the madness and hardship, yet she had felt a duty to stay. In truth, for once in her life she did not know what she really wanted. She felt dazed and numbed by a sense of resignation born of knowing her fate was no longer in her own hands.
The day had begun at first light, with tearful good-byes to her faithful Chinese houseboy Ah King and to Carola's amah Ah Yuk. Then, with Carola snuggled into her shoulder, Emily had taken up her suitcase and made her way through a drizzling rain to a park in downtown Victoria. Here the Japanese searched the refugees and checked their travel documents. Then they were herded onto a leaky fishing trawler for the journey to Stanley on the south coast of the island. The choppy waters of the harbor gave way to rolling ocean swells as the boat rounded the western tip of Hong Kong Island, chugging past Victoria Peak on the left. They turned directly into the wind and the driving rain. The waves breaking over the bow of the boat soaked those who were crammed together on the deck. The weather and sea conditions mattered little, for like Emily and Carola, most of the bedraggled passengers who huddled close were too seasick to care.
After ninety minutes, they arrived at Stanley Bay on the south side of the island. Here the refugees were unloaded on the quay and made to line up inside a large, empty terminal building. Japanese soldiers rechecked their papers and combed through everyone's belongings. Emily and Carola waited with the hundred and twenty other ragged, dirty, and hungry civilians being repatriated this day. They stood for several hours. While the Japanese worked slowly and methodically, the smell of unwashed bodies and the sobbing of children grew almost unbearable in the heat and humidity.
When the paperwork was done, the refugees were hustled out onto the quay. There in Stanley Bay awaiting them lay the Teia Maru, an exchange ship that was to carry them on the first leg of their journey home. Emily saw the Japanese had painted a large white cross on the hull; there was one on each side. "Now we stood some more, looking at the ship, while the people [on board], repatriates from Japan and Shanghai, looked at us," she later wrote, "and, thronging the top of the stone wall at Stanley prison camp, our friends who had to stay behind stared at our backs."
Eventually, the Hong Kong repatriates were loaded into launches to be ferried out to the Teia Maru. On board, they were met by a welcoming committee of "bossy Americans," who assigned them to cabins. Emily Hahn and Carola were put in a long, narrow cabin with two other women. Carola promptly fell asleep. Emily lay down beside her, sobbing into her pillow. She cried for Carola, for herself, and for her beloved Charles in a Japanese POW camp. The man she loved, the father of her child, was the husband of another woman. He was also a British intelligence officer who had been marked for death by his captors.
As Emily Hahn lay there in her bunk aboard the Teia Maru, she recalled their tearful last meeting. Knowing she and Carola would not visit the POW camp again, Emily had ignored all the rules. She looked longingly at Charles through the barbed-wire fence as the rickshaw in which she and Carola rode passed along the adjacent roadway. They had been so tantalizingly close, yet so far apart; speaking and all physical contact were strictly forbidden. Then suddenly Carola, who was sitting on Mickey's lap, stood up and waved. "Daddy bye-bye! Daddy bye-bye!" she shouted, her words trailing out in the air like escaped balloons. These were the only two words of English that the little girl knew; her amah had taught them to her just for this occasion.
At that moment, Emily had been frozen with terror. She knew people had been shot for far less in occupied Hong Kong. But the guards did not shoot at them this day, and so Emily too turned and looked directly at Charles for one last time. She saw that the man she loved was hungry, dirty, and clad only in a ragged pair of shorts and tattered shirt. His left arm hung uselessly in a sling, almost two years after he had been wounded in the battle for Hong Kong. Despite his haggard appearance and the raw emotions clawing at his heart, Charles was a British officer and he stood firm. As their eyes locked in one hurried final embrace, Emily thought she saw a glistening in Charles's eyes. Or was it the light? She could not tell through the torrent of tears cascading down her own cheeks. As her rickshaw drew away, Emily stared back at Charles until she could see him no longer. Then he was gone. Would she ever see him again? She did not know.
After spending the better part of thirteen years abroad, Emily Hahn was going home to the U.S. She had reached a crossroads in her life. She was thirty-eight years old and a single mother. Although she was a published author, she had been out of touch with her agent and with the New York literary marketplace for several years. Everything that Emily Hahn owned was in the battered suitcase she carried with her. Where would she and her daughter go now? What would they do? How could she ever begin all over again?
Hahn hugged her daughter close as the two of them lay in their bunk. Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and pulled a blanket over them. She joined Carola in the sleep of the exhausted.
Mickey Hahn's life began at 4858 Fountain Avenue, a quiet downtown residential street in the north-central St. Louis neighborhood known as Grande Prairie. A suburb sprouted there in the years just after the Civil War on the old common fields farmed by the first French settlers in the region. By 1876, when the Grand Prairie was annexed by the city, it was a bustling community of Irish and German immigrants. Bounded on the north by St. Louis Street, on the west by Kingshighway Boulevard, on the south by Delmar Street, and on the east by Grande Boulevard — all busy commercial thoroughfares — the neighborhood was no different from countless others that grew up in cities across the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century.
Dr. Edward Saunders, the family's physician, "brought babies in his black bag," as the Hahn children were told. He obviously had one in there as his motorcar came to a halt in front of the house on the morning of January 14, 1905. Saunders's hat and muffler were pulled snug against a biting northwest wind. He hurried up the front walkway, for he was late. He was also chilled to the bone after having fumbled around for several minutes to thaw out the motor of his car. The weather report on page I of the day's St. Louis Post-Dispatch promised the cold snap would continue. It further cautioned, "Those who have ears and noses to save should prepare to save them now, for Jack Frost will continue abroad in the land."
Dr. Saunders arrived at Hannah Hahn's bedside with not a moment to spare, for she was already laboring mightily to bring her fifth daughter into the world. It was not an easy birth, for the baby was coming feet first, a breech birth. As Hannah struggled with the pain, she could hear the Hahn and Schoen families, who had gathered in the parlor to await the outcome of Hannah's labors. Isaac Hahn, her husband, reveled in the bustle of a big house filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of family life. Although he himself was the eldest of seven children, these were sensations fate had largely robbed him of as a child.
Isaac's parents, Rosa (nee Hyman) and Emmanuel Hahn, were German Jews. Rosa was born July 15, 1832, at Felheim, Bavaria. Isaac knew little about her youth, other than that she had emigrated to the Philadelphia area with her parents and eight siblings in the early 1850s. Later, at least some of the family migrated west to Memphis.
Isaac's father, Emmanuel Hahn, was born April 15, 1826, near Darmstadt, Hesse, a town in southwest Germany, about 80 miles from the French border. According to a family history that Isaac penned in 1925 at his children's urging, Emmanuel had been apprenticed to a locksmith. However, because he was the youngest of four children and was not supporting his family, he left for America at age seventeen. He settled in Memphis, Tennessee. "Naturally, his education was limited," Isaac wrote. "His mother died when he was very young, and he never knew a father's love, being a posthumous child." Like many Jews who emigrated to the American Midwest in this period, Emmanuel found work as a peddler.
Once he had established himself and put a roof over his head, Emmanuel sent for his brother and two sisters. Many of the other details of the Hahn family's early years in America have been forgotten, but it seems likely that Rosa Hyman and Emmanuel Hahn met and were married about 1855, for as Isaac explained, "In the Prayer Book is inscribed in German by my mother, 'My son Isaac was born August 18th, 1856, on Monday morning at three o'clock.' ... This was in Memphis, Tennessee, on the northwest corner of Second and Exchange Streets."
Four Hahn siblings followed in the years between 1856 and 1865: Isidor (who was known as "Bud") in 1858; Pauline in 1860; Moses in 1862; and Rebecca ("Beckie") in 1865.
Isaac's father, exempted from service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War because of his large family, served in the home guard. He earned a living by making and selling ice cream to the Confederate troops stationed at Fort Pickering, just south of Memphis. After the war, he worked as a clerk in a dry goods store. Life was not easy, and Emmanuel was just forty-one when on July 26, 1867, he died of yellow fever.
Rosa Hahn, pregnant with twins, was left to face the daunting task of raising seven children on her own. She did what she could. She rented the house in Memphis, packed up her family, and moved back East to be with her family in Philadelphia. Following the birth in late 1867 of the twins Emilie and Amelia, Rosa found it difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the story of her family's life for the next few years is right out of the pages of a Dickens novel. The baby Emilie took ill and died at age seven months. However, even with one less mouth to feed, Rosa still could not make a go of it; her situation was desperate. In 1868, when a cousin in Cleveland sent word that the Independent Order of the B'nai Brith (a fraternal order to which Emmanuel had belonged) had opened an orphanage in the Ohio city, Rosa made a tearful decision: she committed Isidor, Moses, and Pauline to the institution in the hope that there they at least would be fed and educated. Rosa kept the two youngest children, Rebecca and Amelia, while Isaac, still just twelve years of age, was thrust into the role of family breadwinner.
When Pauline returned to live with her mother in 1869, Isaac was sent to Tennessee to attend school and work in his Uncle Ben's dry goods store in La Grange, a busy commercial town just east of Memphis. Here the boy fell into the life of the community and began attending the local Methodist Sunday school. "Uncle Ben didn't want anyone to know we were Jews," Isaac recalled in his memoir, "but I confided the fact to Parson Fife, who took particular pains to convert me." Fife's plan to have Isaac — "a brand plucked from the burning," as he described him — attend a Methodist seminary might have succeeded if not for two obstacles: Uncle Ben forbade it, and Rosa Hahn counseled her son to wait until he was older before making such an important decision. Isaac never attended the seminary.
His flirtation with Methodism was just one of many sources of tension between Isaac and his uncle Ben, for the young man had developed a fiercely independent streak, which he would pass on to his daughter Mickey. Isaac became an outspoken atheist, and he and his uncle clashed often. As a result, in June 1870, Isaac went to live with his great-aunt Sophie, thirty miles southwest of La Grange in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He worked there at a variety of jobs, one of which was selling newspaper subscriptions and books. Although Isaac did not make much money, he had the opportunity to read and became familiar with the classics; Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain were favorites. Even more important, Isaac developed an insatiable appetite for ideas and the "show-me" skepticism of the self-educated man.
His life changed abruptly in February 1873 when he received a letter from a cousin informing him that his mother had died; like her husband, Rosa Hahn fell victim to yellow fever. Isaac, now seventeen, decided the time had come to make something of himself and to reunite his family. He returned home to Memphis, finding work as a clerk in a dry goods store. He was a quick learner and became a proficient bookkeeper and salesman. In this latter capacity, Isaac traveled far and wide throughout the Midwest and South. His memoirs provide a vivid sense of daily life in the America of the latter decades of the nineteenth century, for Isaac recorded the vicissitudes of his own struggles in the kind of gritty detail no history book ever could.
In those days, most people stayed close to home. Life was precarious, for health care and public sanitation were primitive or nonexistent. As a result, terrible epidemics swept the land with the regularity of the changing seasons. Yellow fever, spread by mosquitos, was among the worst. Isaac contracted the disease, but unlike his parents, he recovered and thus became immune. Others in his family were not as lucky; Isaac's brother Moses died from the disease during a summer visit to Memphis in the late 1870s, and their great-aunt Sophie succumbed a year or two later. His sister Amelia got sick and died in 1886, and although the cause of her death was not recorded, yellow fever was probably to blame.
Even as such epidemics ravaged the population, a series of severe depressions plagued the farming-based economy of the areas where Isaac worked and traveled. Many farmers went broke, and Isaac was fortunate to hang on to his job. He made the best of his situation, and through Horatio Alger pluck and luck he prospered. In the summer of 1881, Isaac joined the St. Louis–based S. A. Rider & Company, purveyors of dry goods, groceries, jewelry, and just about everything else people in the small towns and isolated farms of the American Midwest and South needed or wanted.
With money in the bank and a secure job, Isaac was ready to settle down. His opportunity came when he chanced to meet Caroline Godlove, the daughter of a business associate. As he recalled in his memoir, "I never expected to be married until my sister did, but I was nearly 31 years old, and changed my mind thinking that we could give [my younger sister] Beckie a good home and she would be happy with us until she found a home of her own."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nobody Said Not to Go by Ken Cuthbertson. Copyright © 1998 Ken Cuthbertson. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- I In the Beginning
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- II “First, We’ll Take Manhattan”
- 7
- 8
- 9
- III Traveling Light in the Dark Continent
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- IV China
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- V Hong Kong: Sunset on the Empire
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- VI Happily Ever After?
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
