DRAFT

‘Deeply, almost domestically at home in the world’: Emily Hahn, Gendered Exceptionalisms, and US Journalists in China, 1930-1947.”

Staci Ford Department of History/American Studies, HKU

…this magazine’s roving heroine, our Belle Geste…was, in truth, something rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss. (, on Emily Hahn in Let Me Finish, 2006, 242.)

Many women made names for themselves in the US and elsewhere by writing about their time in China’s port cities (as well as in the interior). Arguably the most famous of this cohort was missionary-turned-author Pearl S. Buck, but American journalists Agnes Smedley and Helen Foster Snow, as well as British activists and journalists Stella Benson and Freda Utley (to name just a few) shared the spotlight as well. Emily Hahn (1905-1997), who will be the focus here, wrote stories that were featured regularly in . She spent six years during the late 1930s and early 1940s living mostly in , making occasional trips to Chongqing (Chungking) and Hong Kong.1 As I begin this discussion of gender, national identity, and the cross-cultural encounter, keep in mind John Haddad’s characterization of the end of the treaty port era as one of “mess, multiplicity, and flux” as well as his characterization of the 1940s as the “high watermark of American exceptionalism.” I am interested in that time of messy endings and the beginnings that followed as a result of war. To that end, Hahn gives us a glimpse of the period from the vantage point of three Chinese cities. This paper is a coda to a book I have recently published on gendered cultural production around the idea/ideal of “the American girl/woman” in Hong Kong but I believe that study has relevance for a consideration of “the American girl” as symbol and reality in other port cities in China as well. This is something that Louise Edwards has just called our attention to on the Chinese side. She, Eileen Scully and Marjorie King can tell you a lot more about various “uses”

2 of the trope of the American girl/woman in China than I can. What I do know is that both images of the American girl/woman circulating in China, as well the experiences/narratives of flesh and blood women inform multiple aspects of the Sino-US encounter. Hahn and compatriots such as Agnes Smedley and Gwen Dew were members of a rapidly-expanding cohort of Western and Westernized Chinese women living in and “reporting” Hong Kong/Macao and Mainland China during the 1930s and 1940s, although women travel writers and missionaries had, arguably, been “reporting” China for approximately a century. (The tradition is enjoying a resurgence of popularity currently as evident in the publication of books such as Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls, Alexandra Harney’s The China Price, Sheridan Praso’s The Asian Mystique, Rachel DeWoskin’s Foreign Babes in Beijing and Robyn Meredith’s The Elephant and the Dragon.) Not only was the end of the treaty-port era a high watermark for various threads of Ameican exceptionalism (the plurality of exceptionalisms is key here), it was a high watermark for Chinese exceptionalism as well. (That too is something that continues, as illustrated by the dueling exceptionalisms so prevelant in various mediascapes; from global debates about Tiger Mothers to nationalistic diatribes about trade deficits and currency values. However, that is beyond my purview today.) Here I consider the gendered dimensions of American exceptionalisms in this “treaty port twilight.” Women’s chronicles of and reflections upon their lives in China help to illuminate the varied dimensions of the exceptionalist project. I confess at the outset to embracing a bit of essentialism. Men’s stories of cross-cultural encounter, in general, tend to ignore or sideline the quotidian, “private” or domestic in order to make room for larger, frankly more swashbuckling and self-promoting stories of adventure, conquest and nation. (A colleague and I playfully use the term histosterone to describe the masculine stylistic.) Hahn herself noted the difference when she compared her style to her husband’s (Charles Boxer): “When he writes, he writes safe, impersonal histories. I shall try to hit what I think is a fair compromise. I will talk about myself and make no attempt to explain him or his emotions. That’s a difficult thing to do and in places I will fall short of my intentions. But I’ll try.”2 As scholars in women’s/gender history, transnational feminim, and postcolonial studies have noted, women engage in their own forms of self-promotion and othering; nonetheless, I think the gender lens is useful in this case.3 It is, of course but one of the lenses that might be deployed here. Hahn and her cohort worked with great intent to challenge gender

3 as well as national stereotypes. The phrase “almost domestically at home in the world” from the excerpt above above is quite meaningful. She and her sister journalists eschewed the nineteenth century cult of domesticity even as they wrote about how it continued to shape women’s lives in the twentieth. These were ambitious and educated women, changed by their cultural encounters in China where ideas about many things, including modernity and womenhood, were in flux. They found rewarding work and independence in Asia, and a platform for their experiences and views. Critical of American -- or more often British -- zenophobia, yet nonetheless keen to hold forth on various aspects of Chinese people and culture, Hahn, Smedley, and Snow depoloyed what I have called elsewhere a pedagogical impulse, expressing their views in a teaching tone. Although they did so from various political/ideological perches (and by the mid 1940s heretofore simmering differences between Smedley and Hahn would erupt into dramatic public rifts), each declared that their views were informed by close associations with Chinese insiders. Like other foreigners in China, women journalists lived with contradictions. They internalized a certain sense of entitlement, even as they sought to redress the assymetry of the cross-cultural encounter and reduce what Robert Bickers has called the “mutual incomprehension” between Chinese and foreigners in China and abroad.4 Manifestations of the pedagogical range from simple explanations of cultural difference to diatribes about various political issues. Often, the pedagogical impulse is deployed in boomerang-like fashion and turned on “the folks back home” to elucidate or chasten. The most extreme example of this is Pearl Buck’s declaration that she “loathes the American woman” because she “has made so little of her opportunities.” (More about this below.) Buck, whose pronouncements about her own identity where rather ambivalent could claim a certain insider/outsider status in both China and the US. She spoke with authority about “American women” because she was one. Yet when it suited her she also distanced herself from the label, as well as from a certain type of American woman she associated with privilege and ethnocentricity in the US and in various expatriate communities in China. As American women like Buck constructed themselves as “China experts” several themes emerged repeatedly in their narratives. These works often bore the imprint of nation and exceptionalism. Many commented frequently on the gendered dimensions of China’s port cities noting how gender imbalance shaped a larger community ethos. Second, they discuss issues that

4 are often given little or no attention in men’s narratives but that offer pithy insights into the cross-cultural encounter (those quotidian details I mentioned above). Some narratives reflect the imprint of gender or nation more prominently than others and some place religious or regional/geographical identities in the forefront. Exceptionalist utterances might, perhaps, reinforce existing stereotypes of “American” women, as well as notions of “American-ness” circulating in China. (Think of the stereophonic effect on a Chinese pubic encountering a confident Emily Hahn in Shanghai while being reminded – via popular culture – of the excesses of American society and hyper-independent American women.) The journalists who lived in this period represented (intentionally or unintentionally) the imagined American community expanding its influence in the region and on the global stage. They also signified American womanhood and its various public associations with emancipation, sex, leisure, and liberation. Like it or not -- and it seems for the nost part they didn’t mind it -- they enjoyed a certain amount of privilege and notoriety. An added element of noteriety came as a result of the turmoil in China and the fact that women were assuming a variety of roles in various ideological as well as armed conflicts. All wrote of the ways in which war had reconfigured gender roles, as well as personal, national, and cultural identities. While many US women’s historians have characterized the period between the passage of the 19th amendment (women’s suffrage) and the resurgence of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970d a dead zone or interregnum, more recent and transnational feminist perspectives have shown that women were breaking barriers and challenging stereotypes well before the emergence of the second wave. Whether they embraced or eschewed the title of feminist, these narratives attest to a lively preoccupation with topics such as women’s participation in civil society, women’s right to claim a space in previously male- dominated professions, and the difficulty of challenging tradition and male colleagues – even those who were self-professed advocates of women’s rights. The narratives often discuss various contradictions in women’s lives. The most vocal opponents of certain traditions, were nonetheless, still coping with the very real consequences of their decision to challenge proscribed gender scripts.

5 American Women “Reporting” China

Mari Yoshihara argues that in this period white women played a number of roles in Asia, as “consumers, producers, practitioners, critics, and experts, often revealing strains of American orientalism (constructing Asians as exotic and infantile) in their attitudes and narratives.”5 She too discusses the contradictions within women’s reactions to their cultural encounters. For example, she asserts that Buck’s literary characterizations of life in China were a refreshing change from Western stereotypes, yet Buck herself often portrayed the Chinese (particularly Chinese women) as victims of larger feudal and patriarchal structures. Agnes Smedley, however, characterized the Chinese she encountered as dynamic agents of change and socio-cultural revolution.6 In her discussion of Buck, Smedley, and others, Yoshihara alerts us to the way white privilege inflected many Western women’s experiences in China, yet she notes that white women were hardly monolithic in their reactions and opinions. Like Buck and Smedley, Hahn and Snow would come to different conclusions about whiteness, power and national identity in the Pacific Theater and beyond. Both at times drew on their racial privilege during the war, and both experienced anti-Caucasian backlash as well. But, both deployed the pedagogical impulse in expressing their views of what they saw and how they were changed by war.7 As noted above, American journalists were often particularly critical of their compatriots at home. Buck claimed that one of the “major disappointments” of her life was that “women, at least in America, seem to me so fragmentary and to have made so little of their unparalleled opportunities.”8 Smedley expressed frustration with Americans who looked down on Chinese women as “oppressed” by tradition and culture. Noting that Emily Hahn had stoked the flames of Soong Sister worship in the US by eulogizing their Christian upbringing and exposure to US education, Smedley defensively quipped that the American-educated Soongs “were not the only capable women of China.” She cited the achievements of Chinese women as medical, political, educational, and military workers and organizers who, “despite the indescribable hardships under which they worked, kept growing in power and ability with the years.” For Smedley, “a new Chinese womanhood, in many ways far in advance of American womanhood, was being forged on the fierce anvil of war.”9 Gender and national identity were frequently coupled in daily discourse within China’s port cities. As Louise Edwards has already established, a lively conversation about women and

6 modernity was taking place in Shanghai and other cities. Helen Foster Snow writes about the subject from the American side of the encounter in discussing the media frenzy around Wallis Simpson:

This was the era of “glorifying the American girl” and of the Duchess of Windsor. Wallis [Simpson] had been a Navy wife at the Palace Hotel in Shanghai and in Peking for a year in 1924 … Wallis had got her first training in how to become queen of England in China, where she learned to handle a train of admirers and how to hold court. In England women were not yet allowed real freedom, so Americans were already trying to take over the British Empire … It was déclassé for British-born women to try to be charming, attractive, and liked, especially in outposts of Empire. They had to be respected. The secret American weapon was not very secret: Both sexes tried to be attractive and liked, not only by their peers but by the natives abroad, whom we suspected of being human if properly approached. The big object was to make a good impression — high style, high standards of conduct, and high cumsha. American women were allowed some freedom but at a constant high price — they had to be charming at any cost, no matter how much their feet hurt. Abroad they had to set the example — from the YMCA to the Standard Oil wives far in the interior. Only a few were beautiful outside (Wallis Warfield was no beauty); the others had to learn how to be charming inside and out (an art Wallis perfected as no other woman, though Annapolis southern Navy wives knew all her ancestral secrets). I worked hard and overtime at everything I tried, much harder than other girls — a kind of Girls Scout ingénue. Everything was important to me. Everything had meaning.10

Snow playfully alludes to the way Western women in China represented nation by being respected (British) and charming (American). She asserts, albeit somewhat in jest, that displaying feminine charm is in fact a form of diplomacy. Being “charming at any cost” is simply doing one’s “patriotic duty.” Snow also claims that American men as well as women felt a certain pressure to be “attractive and liked” in China, and she praises Americans for reaching out to “the natives abroad, whom we suspected of being human if properly approached.”11 Although such critiques were delivered in a light-hearted manner, they did, to a certain extent,

7 affirm deeper beliefs some Americans held about being more egalitarian than the British they rubbed shoulders with in Shanghai and Hong Kong. What they do not engage is the negative characterizations that Louise Edwards notes. Snow also discusses differences between men and women, and her own struggle to balance literary aspirations with gendered expectations in both Chinese and American societies:

From the first minute in China, I had been incessantly busy. All my sense of immortality and accomplishment had been concentrated on my determination to write one classic book, and I was too involved in China to work on it. This has been a particularly female dilemma, which is why we have produced so few classics in any field. All along the way, we are pulled to pieces by the urgent needs of others.12

Snow knew something about being pulled “by the urgent needs of others.” In fact, it was Snow’s husband, Edgar, who, with his wife’s assistance wrote the “classic book,” Red Star over China. Snow did eventually publish her memoir, My China Years, along with several other books that enjoyed wide circulation in China rather than in the US. While she was a recognized journalist and revolutionary in her own right, her husband’s reputation did, indeed, eclipse hers. Their marriage ended as well. She spills a significant amount of ink claiming her place in the history of this period and in the ensuing years. The pedagogical impulse was depolyed to persuade her reader that Edgar was the beneficiary of her intellectual and domestic labor. Hahn, like Snow, lamented the toll her biography of The Soong Sisters took on her personal life. “Because of the book I had left my home, broken up my house, deserted the gibbons and Sinmay, and lived under conditions of acute discomfort for nearly a year.” She described her manuscript as “leading me around by the nose for eighteen months” and writes: “The fact that I had no place I could call home – that was the manuscript. My luggage, ravaged and torn and moldy, and my belongings, lost and scattered – that was the manuscript. Myself, a neglected- looking female with worn-out shoes, with teeth that called for attention – that was the manuscript.”13 Women may have expanded their public sphere of influence as the twentieth century progressed, but even in the most politically radical circles, those who challenged gendered expectations rarely had an easy time of it. The charm offensive was, as Snow recognized, often

8 less threatening to men. For women in many nations and cultures the difficulty of striking a balance between personal ambition and societal expectation was as Snow had declared, a “particularly female dilemma” if not a new one. What was new was the frequency with which women engaged the discussion of gender inequality at home and abroad in their public utterances. In their narratives we observe women’s heightened expectations and their recounting of men’s often ambivalent responses to new demands. While Hahn, Snow, and Smedly had very different views on most matters related to China, read collectively their narratives offer a glimpse of the boundary crossing taking place at the end of the treaty-port era. Despite the very real racial and social hierarchies that existed, women who were involved in social reform and war relief in both Hong Kong and China often had more frequent and more informal exchanges than their predecessors. Some women, like the Soong sisters, were well known for their American educations and Westernized tastes but in many settings Western and Chinese women collaborated, particularly in the areas of missionary education, social reform and/or charity work. Soong Ching-ling (Madam Sun Yat-sen)’s powerful China Defence League was the best-known but not the only organization that supported the Chinese resistance against the Japanese in China. In the years before the Japanese occupation, Hong Kong was home to the Women’s Concern Association, the Women’s Military Disaster Association, and the Chinese Women’s Association. These groups, along with others such as the Hong Kong chapters of the New Women’s Movement Association and the YWCA, increased women’s visibility in the public sphere and provided increased opportunities for cross- cultural collaboration.14 In her study of the internationalization of the women’s movement before World War II, Leila J. Rupp writes of the vision many women had of a collective identity. “Imagine, for a moment, a scenario in which individuals and groups across the world felt a sense of kinship, on the basis of occupation or religion or gender or politics or age or a whole host of other characteristics, with others who did not share the same nationality.” For Rupp, the expansion of international women’s organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affirmed “the myriad ways that people might feel a connection across national borders.”15 The war would force a suspension of many types of formal collaboration among women but it would nurture cross-cultural alliances of other types. In her work on women’s suffrage in China, Louise Edwards reappropriates the wave anthology in order to consider three phases of Chinese

9 women’s activism in the first half of the 20th century. Like Rupp, she challenges us to think more transnationally about women’s movements and “untangle complex connections between feminists and other political lobbyists.”16 I would add that there is still untangling to do in terms of other types of cross-cultural encounter. Hahn’s narratives help us do that.

Emily Hahn A prolific writer and an unconventional woman, Emily “Mickey” Hahn often used humor to deliver her strongest blows. The author of 52 books and 181 New Yorker essays, she wrote fiction, poetry, travel narratives, history, biographies, and cookbooks. Her greatest popularity came with two China-centered works; her biography The Soong Sisters (1941), and her “partial autobiography” China to Me (1944).17 The fifth of six children born into a Jewish-German household in St. Louis, in 1905, Hahn’s family moved to in the 1920s. She was the first woman to be awarded a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She spent a year working for the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo before coming to China. What was intended to be a short visit to China lasted nearly a decade. During this period, in addition to her work as a travel writer, biographer, and reporter (for the North- China Daily News, T’ien Hsia, and The New Yorker), she studied Mandarin and immersed herself in the social life of both the Chinese and Western communities. Flamboyant in her attire and eccentric in her tastes, she smoked cigars, became an opium addict (and wrote candidly about the addiction), kept gibbons as household pets, and engaged in what she characterized as a common law marriage with Chinese intellectual and poet Zau Sinmay in Shanghai.18 Of Hahn, American journalist Gwen Dew wrote, “Mickey is a law unto herself, and loves to do things in unique and startling ways.” Dew recounts that “Mickey had Hong Kong in a dither of social uncertainty because she was having a baby, whose father was Major Charles Boxer of the British Intelligence.”19 On the question of feminism Hahn’s biographer writes that she was more an individualist than a feminist although for him, “If you define a feminist as someone who believes women can do anything that men can, there’s no doubt that Emily Hahn was a ‘feminist’ long before the term was coined. Yet she scoffed at the notion.” Cuthbertson claims that Hahn declared that “Feminists belong to clubs. They collect money for causes…I wish feminsts well, but I’ve never wanted to be one.”20 Yet the daughter of one of Hahn’s Eurasian roomates during the Japanese

10 occupation of Hong Kong declared that “Mickey Hahn seemed like a feminist, a true-blue feminist.”21 Although I am interested in Hahn’s attitudes about feminism (her utterance that she wishes feminists well but doesn’t want to be one is actually a very contemporary sentiment), I’m more interested in the way she writes about how China changed her. Also, this is much easier to do than discern the actual historical veracity of some of the the stories she tells! (Sometimes when reading Hahn I can’t help thinking about Stephen Colbert’s paradoy of politicians who seek “truthiness” rather than accuracy.) Hahn makes frequent declarations about wanting to be truthful but she is notoriously strategic in her use of certain facts/events. To be fair, she clues her readers in by describing China to Me as “a partial autobiography,” and she acknowledges that her decision to work with the Soongs would restrict what she could disclose about the family and their dealings. However, peers and critics have noted inconsistencies, inaccuacies, and blatent insensitivity. A small example of the aforementioned is in the way Hahn explains her ability to stay out of Stanley Internment Camp and at large in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. In Hong Kong Holiday, Hahn writes that she avoided internment by claiming to be married to Shanghainese poet and intellectual Zau Sinmay. However, in Times and Places, Hahn claims she told the Japanese that she was Eurasian.22 If we proceed with caution in terms of the “truthiness” of Hahn’s narratives, they are valuable cultural historical texts and they are also insightful, witty, and textured descriptions of many aspects of Chinese and expatriate society in Shanghai, Chongqing (Chungking), and Hong Kong. In China to Me Hahn discusses the Shanghai she encountered upon her arrival in the mid- 1930s:

There were international parties, and plain British parties, and plain American parties, and there were beginning to be a lot of parties with Chinese people. Though I didn’t know it, I had stumbled into a critical period of Shanghai history, the era that marked a difference from the old days when only certain Chinese would consent to mix with foreigners, and only certain foreigners wanted to mix with the Chinese….Foreign ladies and Chinese ladies invited each other to luncheon. There was a Chinese Women’s Club…A good thing? I don’t know. It was certainly nicer for people like me, though sometimes I got a lot of wicket joy out of incidents that were not supposed to be funny.

11 The incident that Hahn refers to above is a visit to Shanghai made by women who were members of the Garden Club of America. In her own boomerang-exceptionalist parody of women from the US visiting Shanghai, Hahn recalls that “one of their ladies gave a little talk on the subject of civic beauty.”

Now Shanghai has character and I would be the last to deny it, but as for beauty, have you ever seen a Chinese city street? It is a riot of signboards. Huge gilded characters hang on metal frameworks, neon signs flash in English and Chinese from the second stories, the walls between are painted with huge crude murals depicting devils at work in enlarged stomachs, or happy Chinese mothers using electirc fans on their infants. Mrs. D -- could never have seen a Chinese street even in San Francisco, because the burden of her talk was an appeal to the women of China to do away with unsightly signboards. ‘We have succeeded in persuading the Chamber of Commerce in our town to eliminate them,’ she said, beaming, ‘and you have no idea what a difference it makes.’ The ladies of China clapped with polite warmth and then dispersed to their mah-jongg games.”1

As Hahn studies Mandarin and spends more time with Zau and his family, not only does she see things in a new light, she is able to eavesdrop on conversations about Westerners. She “discovered that the Shanghai Europeans and Americans were less dull than I had supposed: scarcely one of them was not discussed by the Chinese sooner or later. For me it was like looking at them all over again, with my previous impressions violently superseded.”23 Her narratives also point towards the differences in places, not only between various treaty ports but between treaty ports and colonies. She frequently praised Shanghai’s more cosmopolitan ouvre and Hong Kong’s racially bifurcated society. Expressing her disdain for Hong Kong’s Peak Ordinance banning Chinese from owning property, Hahn gloated, “Shanghai had none of that kind of discrimination by the time I came along.” She also asserted that the US was behind the times as well, quipping, “there was discrimination in Shanghai, but not in real estate. Our own American country club, the Columbia, wouldn’t take Chinese as members or guests.”24

1 Hahn, China to Me, (e-reads verion), 4.

12 Hahn relished opportunities to turn American exceptionalism back on US leaders who were not living up to lofty rhetoric about freedom. In The Soong Sisters, she recounts a brief exchange between a young Soong Ai-ling and Theodore Roosevelt:

When she was introduced to President Roosevelt in spite of her awe of him and the admiration her father had instilled in her for such a great man, she felt a burning need to tell him how badly his country was being run. Certain cherished ideals had been rudely broken; the hospitable country that Charlie Soong so loved, of which he had told so many homesick stories to his children, had let her down Not only her dignity as a Chinese but her sense of right was offended.‘America is very beautiful, and I am very happy here, but why do you call it a free country?’ she demanded of the President. ‘Why should a Chinese girl be kept out of a country if it is so free? We would never treat visitors to China like that. America is supposed to be the land of liberty!’ The President said he was sorry.25

In Shanghai, Hahn was a well known and visible presence within certain Chinese and foreign communities. (There were 2,000 Americans there when she arrived.) She was amused at the way people living in both the US and China often expressed similar types of impressions and stereotypes of the other. For example, she recounts the story of a Chinese landlady who was unwilling to rent an apartment to Hahn because she feared the transient American woman would wander off. “Being in China at all, she implied, was a rackety, unbalanced state, and very drifting. Just so do the Chinese think of us in America, as crazy will-of-the-wisps dashing about romantic places like Arkansas and Rhode Island and Iowa, never settling down sensibly like solid Chinese citizens in dull Szechuan and prosy Shantung.26 Hahn commented frequently on both similarities and differences between the two cultures. Readers are convinced they know where she stands on a particular issue only to find that she has changed her view in the next chapter, sometimes the next paragraph. “Little by little,” she writes, “because of all the Chinese people I met, and all their histories which I heard, I was able to see through new windows.” Of her relationship with Zau, Hahn explains, “It was not so much that I found a new world with Sinmay and his family, but I went with them around to

13 the back of the scenes and peered out at the same old world through a glow of strange-colored footlights. It was fresh and wonderful that way.”27 While some passages of China to Me celebrated insights gleaned as a result of the cross- cultural encounter, others acknowledged the contradictions she lived with each day. “In placid ignorance I sat on top of a heap of underfed coolies,” she writes.28 But Hahn had little patience with foreigners who rejected certain forms of public exploitation of labor while privately benefiting from various forms of economic and racial privilege. She recalls a particularly difficult uphill climb for rickshaw pullers in Chongqing recounting the uncomfortable exchange between herself and the pullers. Hahn wanted to get out and walk because the hill was so steep. The pullers wanted her to get back in so they could discharge their duties and return home. Her desire to be polite was seen as prolonging an already long and arduous task:

I have never gone through the phase experienced by most Europeans in China when they first see rickshas. I was always ready to admit that it was shameful to be pulled around on wheels by another human being when I was just as able to walk as he was. But, I said, why balk at a ricksha when you are doing just as much harm in every other way, merely by living like a foreigner in the overcroweded country of China? The shoes I walk in have been made by sweated labor; the shoemaker, beaten down by my bargaining, takes it out of his workers, and so they are being exploited (by me) just as much as the ricksha coolie is. The only difference between the shoemaker and the ricksha coolie is that I don’t have to watch the former during his travail.The same goes for the farmer in the field, growing my rice, and the little boys in the kitchen of my favorite restaurant, and the workers in the coal and salt mines. And so, because I want to go on wearing shoes and eating meals and using coal and salt, I use rickshas too, without wasting time in insincereity and oratory. But those chair coolies got me down.29

Although Agnes Smedley critized Hahn for idealizing the Soongs and avoiding dramatic ideological differences between various family members as well as charges of corruption against the Kungs and Chiangs, Hahn sought to place the Soongs, and social reform (including women’s movements in China) in a broad historical context:

14 The Revolution of 1911 brought about many emancipations, chiefly that of Chinese women. We who read history, when we consider the Chinese Revolution, think first of the unbinding of the feet, but there were other unbindings more significant, if not so dramatic. In Chinese domestic life, women had always held a certain power, but even there they became immeasurably freer after 1911, and all the public world was virgin territory to them; they advanced eagerly, yet fearfully, with slow steps…It is fairly obvious to anybody familiar with the Chinese temperament that the women of the upper and middle classes, those with enough means to have retained their natural animal spirits, had never been nonentities in society, even during pre-Revolution days. Enormous power was wielded in family circles by the old lady, the dowager mother-in-law; and henpecked husbands are as old a joke in China as anywhere else in the world. Those beauties who were aware of their feminine power, whose wishes were carried out anyway, without personal effort, were among the loudest decriers of the new freedom. It has always been thus. Only the really new type of girl, the ever-present Modern, demanded her right to education and an opportunity for public service. The Revolution, in short, took place just in time for Charlie Soong’s daughters. No, the Chinese have never been shocked by the Soong sisters’ assumption of power and responsibility. True, the American directness with which Soong Mayling sometimes goes about her appointed tasks may have startled the public at the beginning of her career, but it is an old story now, and the chief fact is, in the Soong Dynasty itself, was never a new story at all.30

In a section of The Soong Sisters, titled “China in 1910,” Hahn writes about Ai-ling Soong’s return to Shanghai after her years of schooling in the US. In so doing she seeks to illuminate the difficulties as well as the advantages Western-educated Chinese encounter as a result of their own cultural encounters:

It is always a tragedy for the overseas Chinese student that he must make not one, but two difficult adjustments. Hardly has he adapted himself to an entirely new life far away from his home and family than the years have passed by, swiftly as they always do for the young, and he must go back to a land grown strange and unsympathetic. Eling had left Shanghai a child in ill-fitting clothes and her hair in a braid; she returned six years later a

15 fashionable young woman. Perhaps she had a chip on her shoulder: there is no doubt that the good people of Shanghai carried chips on theirs. For six years she had been imbibing the ideas of America, and like her father she felt that she must now take up the burden of changing Chinese civilization in order to bring it as near as possible to her heart’s desire, which was modeled on the United States of America. She was shocked, too, by the attitude of the foreigners. Just as Charlie had been, she was now subjected to a first sight of their arrogance abroad. Then too, as a woman she was up against a bigger problem than her father’s. Unfortunately for her, most Chinese resent to an extreme degree any attempt to make them depart from their norm. They had no desire to be changed by these young snips. Instinctively they were resenting more and more the returned students with their unspoken criticism and unhappy disappointment in the land of their birth. Eling was face to face with the enormous inertia of the most conservative nation in the world.31

Hahn resorts to exceptionalist tropes of the US and American women as liberated and free, but lambastes American expatriates for their arrogance as well as characterizing certain Chinese as backward and resistant to “Ameican directness.” She also notes that Ai-ling had returned at a particularly propitious moment. China was changing and the Soongs could engage in cross- cultural cherry-picking in their efforts to reform Chinese society. The lesson, she asserted, should not be lost on Americans, who needed to pay attention as well. New ideas about fashion, language, education, and civic participation were soon to seem quite ordinary:

Her foreign-style dress, her manner of speaking English, which she used instinctively in the early days following her return, her very record of scholarship made matters difficult: people simply could not understand any girl of their circle becoming so changed. The period did not last long. Eling fought a gallant battle and won it, not only for herself but in behalf of her brothers and sisters who were to follow her home across the Pacific. Ultimately she won over the old neighbors and friends who had been so suspicious of her; to get along with her mother was more difficult but she managed. The Old Guard, who had decried the new education on the grounds that it makes a girl forward and unwomanly, now retracted their words. They had not even the satisfaction of complaining

16 that Eling had lost the tongue of her forefathers: her Shanghai dialect was clear and fluent.32

A series of New Yorker essays (published between 1936 and 1942) loosely based on Hahn’s experiences with Zau Sinmay and his family was republished in the 1940s as Mr. Pan and billed as, “a brilliant introduction to the private lives of one of the greatest of freedom loving races.”33 Hahn uses the central character, Pan Heh-ven, as a ventriloquist for launching her own critique against racism in the US as well as China:

“You see,” resumed Heh-ven,“ we Chinese say that after a girl has her child she must not get up or be moved for a month. I have heard that you foreigners are different. Your wives get up three days after the birth, or even the same day, and do their housework.” This sounded strangely familiar. Where had I heard that story? Then I remembered that we tell the same thing about Negroes in , and that each nation speaks so of its barbarian neighbors, and thus we all feel superiorly delicate and civilized and happy.34

Hahn’s musings on moderninty and womanhood are sprinkled throughout her writings from this period and the Mr. Pan essays feature an ongoing dialogue between the narrator (Hahn) and the protagonist (a thinly disguised Zau) about the differences between Western/Chinese women.

My cousin is a typical modern Chinese girl, which is something you cannot understand. She has heard about modern girls in Europe and America, and she has admired them in the cinema, and she has studied English for twelve years, though she is afraid to speak it, and she learned to play tennis and to dance, and if she goes out with some young man, why, my father does not object, for he does not watch nor care at all what his children do. Yet it is not simple for her, for when she is at last alone with a young man she does not feel in her heart as those English girls feel.”35

Here the actual voices of Chinese women are silenced as Hahn allows Pan to speak on their behalf. In fact, Hahn does this a fair amount in her work and some critics have argued that is because of her own unwillingness to own up to the fact that Zau’s wife, Zoa, was rendered

17 voiceless by Hahn/Zau’s relationship. Again, the contradictions in Hahn’s rhetoric about gender foreshadow those that third-wave/postcolonial and transnational feminist would foreground later in the century. Not only did Hahn see herself as a defender of the Soongs to the West, and a commentator on the changes taking place in both Western and Chinese women’s lives, she felt she had a well-informed perspective on other geopolitical events. Her experience, she believed, allowed her to be more au fait with realities in the world at large:

I still feel that Shanghai, as far away as it is, was the best center I have ever found for European and American developments. Back in Chicago when the Abyssinian fever first took hold of Italy, how much did you know about it? Only what you saw in the papers and heard on the radio. Now in America you can listen in to European radio, of course – I mean, when there isn’t a war going on. You aren’t exactly isolated, I admit. But out in Shanghai we were better off than that: we were in neutral territory and we had small bits of all the governments in the world right there, where we could talk to them. I dined with Italians while all this was going on. I could talk to them – ships’ captains and consuls. I could turn around at the same dinner and talk to British diplomats. It happened often, because Shanghai hostesses couldn’t be expected to remember all the strains and stresses of European politics when they planned their dinners. I don’t wish to claim that I knew any more about Italy’s actions in Africa just because I met some idiotic little Italian officer at a cocktail party, but certainly I knew more about why Italy did what she did.”36

After six years in Shanghai and Chongqing, Hahn returned to Hong Kong, ironically, to escape the turmoil in the Mainland. In the months prior to the Japanese occupation, she lived a relatively carefree existence, teaching English, socializing, and working on her biography of the Soong sisters. Speaking of the mood in Hong Kong, Hahn writes, “Both British and Americans act as if the war were around the corner these days and each party likely to be the last. We live high, and I was very late for class.”37 Although many Westerners, particularly women, had left Hong Kong, Hahn stayed in order to be near British Intelligence officer Major Charles Boxer. Boxer was married, although he and his wife were separated. His affair with Hahn was an open secret but when Hahn became pregnant with Boxer’s child, the news shocked the small

18 expatriate community. In her narratives, Hahn claims to have been nonplussed by the attention although she admits to being rather cavalier about the toll the affair took on Boxer’s wife, Ursula.38 Hahn did, however, have plenty of critics and enemies in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China. One acquaintance at the Queen Mary Hospital, where Hahn and other women lived for a time at the beginning of the war, recalls that she was “alarmed by her rather unscrupulous use of people to achieve her ends.”39 Hahn’s biting but unpretentious prose, and her middle-class upbringing, made her a magnet for a variety of such criticisms. Nonetheless she reached a much wider audience at home and internationally than her more “radical” sisters, even though she remained less popular than many of the male authors of the day. Her biographer recounts an exchange between Hahn and British writer Rebecca West, who told Hahn, “Like you, I’d have a far higher reputation if I were male.”40 While many felt that Hahn was partial to the Chiangs and the Nationalist cause, Hahn herself writes of a political awakening in China that prompted her to study and reflect on an issue from all sides. Over time, Hahn’s views evolve and reflect a greater sensitivity to white privilege and racism generally. A number of experiences, including her relationships with Japanese occupation officials, Chinese and Eurasian friends and acquaintances, and her struggles to provide for herself and her young daughter Carola (born just six weeks before the first Japanese bombs rained down on Hong Kong) would shape Hahn’s postwar perspective. Regardless of the real reason she avoided internment, because she did so, Hahn developed a different perspective on Hong Kong in this period. As she writes, “Though this action left Carola and me without means of support, we were no worse off than all the others outside, the Chinese and Eurasians and Portuguese-Chinese from Macao, along with a sprinkling of neutral whites, and I thought this existence would be vastly preferable to life in prison camp.”41 It is also possible that her relationship with Boxer further shaped her views on race and colonialism. Regardless of what forces led Hahn to express certain views, evidence of her shifting viewpoint is found in the following passage from Hong Kong Holiday:

It was hard in those days to maintain a detached point of view, but I was always trying to, and I had forced myself to admit, soon after the surrender, that there was one thing in the ostensible Japanese war aims that ought to be pleasing to anyone

19 raised in a democracy. Not that you would expect any of us Hong Kong Americans to be happy, trapped far from home and forced to listen to the Japs shouting on the radio and the movie screen and in the papers, “Asia for the Asiatics! Down with the whites!” But when they said the white imperialists had been wickedly unfair to the non-Caucasian peoples, well, they were telling the truth.42

As her time in Asia drew to a close, Hahn noted the ways in which even Hong Kong had become a more open and tolerant society. She reports that she could, without drawing attention, stroll through the streets of postwar Hong Kong with Frankie Zung, a dark-skinned man of West Indian and Chinese background. “People didn’t look surprised at seeing us together, as they would have before the war,” she says. “The Japanese have certainly succeeded in wiping out the color bar, I said to myself.”43 Yet while she observed certain attitudinal changes in the society around her, Hahn was not terribly idealistic about the future. “We’ll win,” she writes, “but we’ll still be up against the color bar and all the resentment it stirs up.”44 Highly critical of Japanese propaganda, and of such slogans as “Asia for the Asiatics,” Hahn nonetheless understood the impulse to turn the tables on Westerners: “It comes as a shock when we discover that black and white are not the only colors there are, morally speaking. Old as I am, it took the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong to show me just how many shades of gray really do exist.”45 Hahn’s exceptionalist utterances became less frequent as her time in Hong Kong drew to a close. In its stead was a more internationally oriented perspective on the postwar world. Hahn liked feeling less “American” as a result of her time in China and Hong Kong but at one point during her Shanghai years her agent pleaded with her to return to the US because whe was out of touch with her readers. Her response is quite timely in light of current events:

I had flown into passions of rage when my agent wrote me that I was Losing Touch with America. “As if anyone could lose touch nowadays!” I stormed. “Nowadays when the radio makes it impossible to cut yourself off from your own civilization, even if you wanted to! Nowadays when we have magazines and movies and long-distance telephones and air mail! The man’s talking nonsense.” But he wasn’t. It takes more than radio and television to bridge the gap between China and America. I had been away too long, and

20 the fact that I htalked that way was proof of it, if only I had known. But wait a minute. When I say “too long,” what do I mean? Had I been away too long for my own good? Or did I mean that I had been away so long that my individuality was being lost? If the latter is what I mean (and what my agent means too), then I think that, after all, my long stay in the Orient wasn’t a bad thing. I a not at all enamoured of the individuality I lost. I was a smart aleck. It wasn’t a bad thing at all, leaving that young woman at the bottom of the Whangpoo or wherever I had dropped her.”46

Hahn returned to the US and continued writing about what she had seen and how she was adjusting to life at home. For the remainder of her career she deployed the pedagogical impulse in more globally-savvy tones. Some of her most poignant prose focuses on this period. When the war ended and Hahn learned that Boxer was safe, the couple reunited and, once Boxer was officially divorced, they married. Hahn divided her time between Asia, , and and her prose, as well as the recollections of those who knew her best, indicate that she was divided in other ways as well. It is in Hahn’s willingness to expose us to her contradictions, her candor about some lapses of judgment, mistakes, and personal foibles as well as her inability to acknowledge others that humanizes her and makes her a compelling narrator of a particular historical era. Additionally, she reminds us of the importance of parsing gendering from various other elements of identity in the cultural production of elites on both sides of the Sino-US encounter. We are living in a moment of dueling national as well as transnational exceptionalisms and a resurgence of anxiety of cultural difference in these times of economic and political uncertainty and flux.

NOTES

1 Hahn published her first essay with The New Yorker at age twenty-four and her last piece for the magazine was a poem written decades earlier but published in 1996 when she was ninety- one. 2 Hahn, China to Me, 209. 3 See the works of Anne McClintock, Kumari Jayawardena, and Antoinette Burton in postcolonial studies, Amy Kaplan and Lauren Berlant in American studies, and Linda Kerber and Mary Suzanne Schriber in women’s history. 4 Robert Bickers, “The Scramble for China,” lecture delivered at the Hong Kong University Department of History seminary, 16 May 2011.

21

5 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. 6 See Yoshihara’s chapter on Smedley in Embracing the East. 7 Staci Ford, Troubling American Women: Narratives of Gender and Nation in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). 8 Pearl S. Buck as quoted in Nora Stirling, Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (New York: New Century Publishers, Inc., 1983), 182. Stirling notes (on page 183) that at a luncheon in 1931 Buck “exploded with exasperation at the ‘selfish, ignorant, self-indulgent American women of wealth and privilege.’” 9 Agnes Smedley, “Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Hsiao Hung,” in Battle Hymn of China (1940– 41), 523–524, as reprinted in Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (New York: The Feminist Press, 1976), 100–101. 10 Helen Foster Snow, My China Years (New York: William Morrow and Company, 184), 48. 11 Snow, My China Years, 48. 12 Snow, My China Years, 149. 13 Hahn, China to Me, 201. 14 See “The Outbreak of War in China to 1941,” in Xianggang bainian (A Hundred Years of Hong Kong), as cited in David Faure, ed., A Documentary History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997), 211. 15 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 229. 16 See Louise Edwards, “Women’s Suffrage in China: Challenging Scholarly Conventions,” in Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms, 1789-1945 (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 285. 17 Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters (New York: Doubleday, 1941) and China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (1944), e-reads edition, 1999. 18 Hahn, China to Me. 19 Dew, Prisoner, 210. 20 Ken Cuthbertson, Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn. (Boston: Faber and Faber, London, 1998), 2-3 21 Cuthbertson, Nobody Said, 262. 22 Compare Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, chapters 1–4 with Times and Places, 284. 23 Hahn, China to Me, 11. 24 Hahn, China to Me, 38. Hahn continues: “some businessman created a scandal by brining Anna May Wong, American citizen, to bowl in the Columbia bowling alley. They wouldn’t let her do it. ‘You have to be careful,’ the committee would say vaguely when they were asked what it was all about. Shanghai wasn’t perfect on that score, not by any means; it was thanks to Tang Leang-li, however, that I learned all about Hong Kong and how stupid a British colonial crowd can be when it tries.” (37-38) 25 Hahn, The Soong Sisters, 42. 26 Hahn, China to Me, 36. 27 Hahn, China to Me, 10. 28 Hahn, China to Me, 13. 29 Hahn, China to Me, 118. 30 Hahn, The Soong Sisters, preface, xvi-xvii. 31 Hahn, The Soong Sisters, 61.

22

32 Hahn, The Soong Sisters, 62 33 Hahn, Mr. Pan, cover description 34 Hahn, “Unto Us,” Mr. Pan, 228. 35 Hahn, “The Modern Girl,” Mr Pan, 128. 36 Hahn, China to Me, 36. 37 Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, 14. 38 Robert L. Gandt, Season of Storms: The Siege of Hongkong 1941 (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1982), 21. 39 Hoe, The Private Life of Old Hong Kong, 277. 40 Cuthbertson, Nobody Told Me Not to Go, 1. 41 Hahn, No Hurry to Get Home (Originally published as Times and Places), 283–284. 42 Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, 246. 43 Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, 251. 44 Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, 259. 45 Hahn, Hong Kong Holiday, 221. 46 Hahn, China to Me, 204-5.

23 For others, American exceptionalism is code for the liberal internationalist aspiration for a world made free and peaceful not through the assertion of unchecked American power and influence, but rather through the erection of a system of international law and organization that protects domestic liberty by moderating international anarchy. Protected by two oceans, and bordered by weaker neighbours, the US largely focused on westward expansion in the 19th century and tried to avoid entanglement in the struggle for power then taking place in Europe. Emily "Mickey" Hahn (Chinese: é …ç¾Žéº—, January 14, 1905 – February 18, 1997) was an American journalist and author. Considered an early feminist and called "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker magazine, she was the author of 54 books and more than 200 articles and short stories.[1] Her novels in the 20th century played a significant role in opening up Asia and Africa to the west. Her extensive travels throughout her life and her love of animals influenced much of her writing. According to Roger Angell of The New Yorker, Hahn "was, in truth, something rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss."[9]. England, and return to the US. gender equal country in the world, an image described by many as ‘Swedish exceptionalism’. (de los Reyes et al, 2002; Andersson, 2009; Shierup and Ã…hlund, 2011; Habel, 2012; Fahlgren, 2013). most gender equal nation in the world is of international as well as national interest since that. notion has had such significance in international deliberations about equality. In recent years. ridiculed by journalists, politicians and others in Denmark. Even in this Danish critique of the. gender equality model, however, the latter is constructed as Swedish, in contrast to the Danish. gender equality. The second issue we address in this volume concerns the fantasies and temporalities that are. produced through notions of the gender equality norm and its many paradoxes.