Emily “Mickey” Hahn: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Shanghai Grand (2017)

“I fell in love with Mickey Hahn, the St. Louis-born journalist and adventurer who put the whole crazy Shanghai scene down on paper. In an attempt to mend a broken heart, she’d impulsively hopped an ocean liner out of San Francisco and ended up living in China and Hong Kong for eight years. The coup de foudre came when I saw a portrait of her, taken about the time she was sharing drunken confidences with Dorothy Parker in the ladies’ room of the Algonquin Hotel. In the photo her hair is boyishly short, her skin pale against a black blouse, and her full lips are parted as she gazes up at a capuchin monkey (named Punk) perched on her left shoulder. In the heyday of the flapper, she looked like a proto-beatnik, one of nature’s born individualists.

I started to read her books: a travelogue about walking across the Congo with a three-year-old pygmy boy; her recollections of defying sexism to become the first female mining engineer to graduate from the University of Wisconsin; an essay about living on D.H. Lawrence’s ranch in New Mexico, where she picked up a taste for corn liquor and dating cowboys while working as a trail guide. I liked her style (daring in fashion, breezy in prose), her utter lack of snobbery and prejudice, her fragile yet intrepid heart. In the long-out-of-print books about her Asian adventures, she took me exactly where I wanted to go: on an insider’s rickshaw ride that criss-crossed a bygone Shanghai, down alleys reverberant with the rattle of mah-jong tiles and scented with sweet almond broth, opium smoke, and the chemical bite of Flit insecticide. . . .

Through her pen portraits of Mr. Pan, not only was Mickey Hahn trafficking in cultural stereotyping for the amusement of the magazine’s sophisticated readership; she was also turning a real person—a friend and lover, to boot—into a caricature. . . . As a teenager, she might have agonized in writing about how her desire to amuse those around her ended up isolating her; but since then she’d accepted it as a genuine talent, one that had brought her a lucrative career.

‘I use people,’ she would write later: I use myself, which means that I use everything I find in my brain—experiences, impressions, memories, reading matter by other writers—everything, including the people who surround me and impinge on my awareness. Sometimes I am asked, ‘Do you think it’s nice of you?’ and I reply honestly, ‘I don’t know. It isn’t a question in my mind of being nice or not nice. I can’t help it any more than I can help breathing.’ If you had any kind of relationship with Mickey—or any writer, for that matter—you naturally ran the risk of being written about. ’People who mind should stay away from writers. I think they do, on the whole.’”—Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, and Decadence in Old China (2017)