I am reading a wonderful
book about Old Shanghai, and its rakes, rascals, villains, pirates, tycoons -even a few notorious women who beat the odds
against them and manage to have lives as exciting as the men, while suffering no Christian punishments.
The life story of Emily
Hahn, an American journalist, makes fictional romances, with their expected formulas and monotonous plotlines, look understated.
Emily was born in America
in the earlier part of the last century, and was the first and only woman at that time to finish mining engineering school.
She was one tough cookie,
touring America from coast to coast with a woman pal, both of them dressed as men!
She then turned up in glamorous
parts of Europe, and did a brief stint helping out in the Belgian Congo. She also toured around Africa in a jeep,
writing and having solitary adventures.
It was Shanghai where her
destiny became truly unbelievable. She changed her dresses daily, kept a pet monkey, and wrote columns for the newspapers in New York City.
A passionate woman, she
met the most handsome man in Shanghai, a romantic poet from a wealthy and opium-smoking family. They met at a Britsh
dinner party for a brief period when Chinese and Caucasians mixed socially, before the intrusion of Japanese armies crashed
into their idyllic existence.
Shanghai was a city then
full of misery and exoticism, there were daring and hunted people from all over the world there, and a backdrop of child
factory workers with holes in their limbs from the dangerous metal they handled. Fallen White Russian aristocrats working
as dressmakers and dancing girls, decadent Chinese opium-smokers living in mansions, youthful Chinese Communists bravely risking
beheading as the punishment if they were caught doing labour organizing.
Emily shocked the city
by falling madly in love with this married Chinese poet. His other wife accepted her presence. They entertained
the poets and artists of Shanghai at Emily's home as well and maintained a intense love affair until World War 11 tore
them apart.
He loved her so much he
wanted her to have a place in the family burial tomb. When she first visited his mansion, he had so many distant relatives living there, he was unable to discern between
the family and the servants.
Emily continued to shock,
fleeing to Hong Kong, where she fell in love with the head of the British Secret Police, having an illegitimate child, and
then retiring to England after the war, where her British love re-united with her, after years of anguish in a Japanese
war camp. They married,
lived in the countryside, and wrote many books.
Of her love affair with
the handsome Chinese poet, she was not told of his death for many years after he died.
It doesn't
matter, she said, I knew the day he died.
