“Whenever I think of the Christmas season I spent in the eastern reaches of the Belgian Congo, in 1932, I experience a floating sense of unreality. A number of questions occur to me and are unanswered.
For example, where exactly was I? I can’t be certain, though I remember the house all right — a pleasantly big, rambling bungalow set among coffee plantations — and I have a vivid recollection of the country, the unfenced miles of red soil open to a brilliantly sunny sky. Far off, mountains crouched like blue tigers. . .”
From Emily Hahn’s memoir No Hurry To Get Home.
I owe the discovery of Emily Hahn to an unexpected request by a customer at Red Hill Books. Much I’ve learned lately I owe to the inquiring minds of bookstore customers. In this case, the woman was looking for a biography of Emily Hahn, one that we did not have in stock and would have been too expensive to order. She was thankful though for my diligence in trying to track one down.
“Who was Emily Hahn anyway?” I asked her. She said, “Go find out. You won’t regret it.”
Coincidentally a day or two later, No Hurry To Get Home was priced and ready to be shelved. Somebody must have sold us a copy just out of the blue one day. Although not the biography the woman had been looking for, it remains the source material for much of Hahn’s life story. So I bought it. As will often happen at a bookstore where you work: half your paycheck will go to books.
From the back cover biography of Hahn:
“A writer for the New Yorker for nearly seventy years, Hahn was a woman ahead of her time, graced with a sense of adventure and a gift for living. . . she was seized with a wanderlust that inspired her to explore nearly every corner of the globe: she traveled solo to the Belgian Congo at the age of twenty-five, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shangai in the 1930’s. . .and had an affair with, and eventually married Britain’s chief spy in Hong Kong. . .”
On the final pages of the book, another thumb-size bio fleshes her out even more: “Author of fifty-two books, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories she produced for The New Yorker. . .she became the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She did graduate work at both Columbia and Oxford. . .Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s spy in pre-World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty-two years. . .”
It is incredible that people don’t know more about her. And she’s an excellent writer! Although many of her books are out of print, her memoir, No Hurry To Get Home and the biography of her, No One Said Not To Go can be tracked down by intrepid book hunters. (Powells and Abebooks are the places to start. As is Red Hill Books!) Finally I have to ask too what exactly was a “loving and unconventional marriage” in 1930’s terms? Sounds awesome.
