The Eccentric Life Of Mickey Hahn
‘Nobody Said Not to Go’-Mickey Hahn
Suppose I told you that a woman from St Louis was a mining engineer, intimate of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the concubine of a spy, a foreign correspondent, an opium addict, and oh yeah, owned a pet monkey called Mr. Mills. Would you believe me? Enter Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn, born in 1905 to Isaac, a dry goods salesman, and Hannah, a suffragette, in which the movement had a profound influence throughout Mickey’s life. Her childhood was idyllic as a Monet, which Hahn would describe as “unfashionably happy.”
She loathed predictability and fought against the stereotype of female docility, and became the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin in mining engineering. Only because a professor had said to her “the female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics or any of the fundamentals of mining.” She earned her degree and got a job in Mcbride. But she was already bored when she learned of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. “If he makes it, I’ll quit my job.” He succeeded. She quit her job.
Hahn was intrepid and peripatetic. “She moved from here to there and everywhere, like some kind of beautiful, multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly,” wrote her biographer, Ken Cuthbertson. She got her first taste of traveling when she and a friend traveled across the states in a Ford T model disguised as men. Staying at D.H Lawrence’s ranch in New Mexico, where she worked as a rail guide, and picked up a penchant for corn whiskey and riding horses. She documented her travel with letters to her brother-in-law, who sent them to the New Yorker, where they were published.
Mickey then moved to depression-era New York to start her writing career. Her time was filled with attending wild parties, and writing for the New Yorker, where she developed the tongue of a perspicuous flapper. When that dabbed, she traveled to the Belgian Congo, where women didn’t usually travel alone in Africa. She volunteered with the Red Cross and worked at a hospital, where the Belgians were trying to stop the scourge of gonorrhea then sweeping the country. She lived with a pygmy tribe in the Ituru forest for two years, before desiring something more satisfying. Then came a trek across Africa alone on foot, traveling from the west to the northeast by rail, car, and boat. Mickey produced the book, Congo Solo, which offered a look at a woman’s perspective of the ill-treatment of African women under Belgian colonialist power.
She then arrived at the port of pre-wwII Shanghai. Quickly becoming a fixture on the city’s hectic social circuit, shifting effortlessly between the wealthy bon vivants, led by the financier Sir Victor Sassoon. It was all agreeable if you liked people,” Hahn said, “And I did. There were different flavors to sample.”
In Shanghai, Hahn found an apartment in the heart of the Red Light District. She loved this “crowded, screaming street” that, during her time in Shanghai, would become not just synonymous with brothels but with the fashionable set of poets, artists, and thinkers she circled with.
She spent her days learning Mandarin, teaching English to a Japanese spy, and attending dinner parties, accompanied by her pet gibbon on her shoulder, dressed in a dinner jacket and diaper. She continued to write for the New Yorker about her life as an ex-pat, and her writings played a crucial role in opening eyes to the western world of the realities of living in China. She also wrote elaborate stories for her entertainment, dropping hints of espionage. The British kept a file on her, but written across the top said to “Disregard Miss Hahn’s entire story.”
“I use people,” she admitted. “I use myself, which means that I use everything I find in my brain…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. People who mind should stay away from writers.”
Mickey rapidly scandalized Shanghai society by becoming romantically involved with the handsome married poet Sinmay Zau, who served as her cultural and political guide to China in the early years. Their affair became one of shanghai’s most prominent and he gave her access to write the biography of the famous Soong sisters, one of whom was married to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek.
Zau introduced her to opium, which she became addicted to. She later wrote “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” she eventually became free of addiction with the help of a hypnotist. Zau, who stayed in China after the revolution was not so fortunate. The authorities forced him to take cure after cure for his opium addiction, and two years later, the war with Japan ended and the Chinese civil war began. Zau did not fare well in the new China. In 1965, authorities arrested Zau for his complicated relationships. He died in 1968. She kept a photo of him in her pocket until the day she died.
After a move to Hong Kong, she started another affair with a married British intelligence officer CR Boxer. She had a baby with him after wanting to “steady” herself, but “doubted if she could have one”. ‘Nonsense!’ said the unhappily-married Major Charles Boxer, ‘I’ll let you have one!’ When Ernest Hemingway learned that Hahn was pregnant, he offered to say the baby was his, so she could avoid the scandal of adultery. She smiled and said no thanks: “Charles wouldn’t like that.”
After baby Carola was born, Japan invaded Hong Kong, and Boxer was captured as a prisoner of war. Hahn told the Japanese authorities she was Eurasian to avoid repatriation and waited for him, smuggling him food and running miles through Hong Kong streets during bombing attacks to see him. When he was finally released, upon arrival in New York, reporters asked what he would do first. He said he intended “to make an honest woman out of Mickey Hahn.” Mickey and Boxer married in New Haven as New York wouldn’t allow a divorced-for-adultery Boxer to marry there.
However, domestic life was not for Hahn. She got an apartment in Manhattan, got a writing position, and created a life that balanced nine months in New York or traveling and three months in England with her family.
Over the course of 72 years, Hahn would write 52 books and hundreds of articles and short stories, flitting seamlessly from genres as varied as memoir and history, humor and cookery, and writing about subjects as disparate as D.H. Lawrence, diamonds, apes, and the history of bohemian America. She was one of the very few writers to survive all four of the editors of the New Yorker.
Described as “a forgotten American literary treasure” by The New Yorker, yet her books were seldom read due to impeded marketing, “I made a decision to avoid being typecast,” she once said on the variety of her books. To this day, no one quite knows how to define Mickey Hahn.