Hahn - China to Me A Partial Autobiography

EMILY HAHN

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Emily Hahn

Chapter 1

Shanghai? Youre going there, are you? the hairdresser said, putting another wave over my forehead. It was a small deep wave and would look all wrong nowadays, but this was in 1935. We were wearing short bobs then and our heads looked like corrugated iron. The hairdresser probably called himself a barber, because he was working in Hollywood, which carried on a lot of Middle Western habits like that.

Shanghais a lovely place, he said, spraying me with sweet-smelling sticky stuff, so that the wave would bake hard. Youll meet a good class of people there. The same you would meet in Society here. You know, titled people. Oh, youll have a very nice time; Shanghais a lovely place.

It was. I sigh for it now, titles and people and all, of any class. I havent seen it for four years and it must have changed. It would be all different anyway, even without the Japanese, because Shanghai is always changing. I was startled but not really amazed when a fellow repatriate on the Gripsholm, that ship of strange destiny which has carried so many bedraggled crowds of homing Americans, told me about an acquaintance in Shanghai: She married a rich Russian, he said. It was one of those things which would have been impossible four years ago: a rich Russian man in Shanghai. But nothing remains impossible there. Of all the cities of the world it is the town for me. Always changing, there are some things about it which never change, so that I will forever be able to know it when I come back. There will still be the Chinese. There will still be the old codgers, among whom I will someday take my place, drinking a little too much and telling each other how Shanghai isnt what it used to be. No, they cant take Shanghai away from me. Raise the cost of living, crowd in thirty thousand Jewish refugees from Europe, make rich the Russians, make poor the Americans, it will still be there.

Let the aesthetes sigh for Peking and their dream world. I dont reject Peking. Like Carmel, Santa Fe, Fiesole, it is a reward for the afterlife. Shanghai is for now, for the living me.

They used to have a conscientious society editor on the Shanghai morning paper who filled her column with records of parties and lists of guests until she used so much space that the whole thing had to be thrown out. It began to act on us like a repeated bad dream. Seeing the names, day after day, of certain indefatigable party goers was almost as bad as seeing their faces every evening, and indignant people began to write to the paper and complain. The obvious answer was made to them: Dont read the society column if you dont like it, but you couldnt help it, any more than you could help going out every night. There was a grim, dogged quality in our Shanghai gaiety. Only Thackeray could have done it justice on paper, I mean. We all did it ample justice in practice.

I have here a cutting from the journal that appeared the day after I arrived in Shanghai with my sister. Without it I would have forgotten that dinner party and everything about it, but now it all comes back to me. We had sailed from San Francisco in the Chichibu Maru with tickets for Shanghai and we had been two weeks at sea before the Japanese captain admitted that the ship did not, as a matter of fact, intend to touch at Shanghai at all. I dont know why the NYK deceived us in this matter. Perhaps it was part of a cunning plan to keep us for a while in Japan, tempting us to make a longer stopover than necessary while waiting for another ship. If so, it worked. We spent more than a fortnight in the island of the cherry blossoms and, although it all seems incredible now as I write it, I came away with the greatest reluctance. I arrived in Shanghai definitely sulky.

I dont really care for the Far East at all, I was saying to myself. The whole thing is tiresome and I am only indulging Helen by pausing on my way back to Africa. Now, just as I find a reasonably pleasant place i.e., Japan in which to loaf about and read, I am dragged away again to stay for some uncomfortable days in a vulgar, loud city like this. I dont know and I dont care who these Chinese persons may be, but everybody is aware that the Japanese are the only subtle Orientals. China is garish. China is red and gold and big, everything I dont like. Pooh.

This may puzzle you. I should explain that Japan was then as now sharply divided in her population between the civilians and the disciplined service people, the Army, Navy, and gendarmes. Of this latter class we tourists saw nothing. We saw a smiling Japan filled with charming figures in costume and eager little men in tourist agencies who told us all about Japanese music and drama and art. The only hint we ever had in those days of the stricter pattern behind the delicate landscape was in the formalities we went through when we landed; the endless questionnaires and the sharp examination of our literature. It meant nothing to us because everybody seemed so glad to see us, and there was so much to admire in the porcelain and the lacquer and the mountains and all that. I must stop writing for a bit, to kick myself. We went all mushy over Japan and, as I was saying, I turned up my nose at Shanghai.