'Deeply, Almost Domestically at Home in the World': Emily Hahn

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. (Roger Angell, 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 The New Yorker. She spent six years during the late 1930s and early 1940s living mostly in Shanghai, 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.

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