A Missouri Feminist Captures Shanghai

I don't usually send visitors away from our website to visit another, because I'm afraid they may never come back. But I'll take my chances by telling you that you absolutely must must must read the Wikipedia entry on Emily Hahn. You may be so entranced that you forget to return to our website. But please do come back to hear about China to Me: A Partial Autobiography, a memoir by one of the most remarkable women of the Twentieth Century.

The New Yorker called her "a Forgotten American literary treasure" and she certainly was that. But she was a treasure in so many other ways that it's almost impossible to wrap your arms around them. If I tell you that she was a revolutionary, a radical feminist, an adroit diplomat without portfolio, a sociologist, a chemical engineer, and a lover (she was the concubine of a Shanghai poet who hooked her on opium), I will have merely grazed the surface. As a feminist she fought tooth and nail against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian Era (and didn't do much for her in China, you may be sure). And she was an advocate for the environment until her death at the age of ninety-two.

Oh - and did I mention she was drop-dead gorgeous? That's her picture on the cover.

China to Me takes you on a breathtaking journey through the China of the 1930s that extends from the highest courts of political power to the personal lives of Asian prostitutes.

The best way to reconstruct her life is through her fifty-two books, of which E-Reads currently has two with more on the way.

- Richard Curtis