Read: Nobody Said Not To Go

Nobody Said Not To Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn by Ken Cuthbertson
Source: Library

Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn was a woman ahead of her time. She was daring, brash, and some might say foolish. She led a life of adventure – at the age of 17, she became the first female engineering student at the University of Wisconsin (they tried to expel her but failed); during the Great Depression, she ran off to the Belgian Congo (and ended up walking 18 days through very remote areas without the ‘necessities’ that most colonial travelers took with them – tent, cot, bathtub); in the 1930s, she became a concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, and met the Soong Sisters; then she became involved and had a child with the then-married head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong just before WWII. All of which she promptly wrote about in her numerous books, such as The Soong Sistersand China to Me.

She was “something rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fear”, as Roger Angell wrote in her obituary. Hahn was not without her flaws. For instance, she became addicted to opium when she lived in Shanghai, and later, morphine.

I know that biographies aren’t necessarily the best way to learn about someone’s life, but this book was a great introduction to Hahn, whom I knew very little about, and her adventures and it made me want to read her own words. She’s such a prolific writer, having churned out some 50-odd books, many of which are semi-autobiographical (one of them is titled a ‘memoir’ – No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the 20th Century - but is really a collection of her New Yorker articles). But, to get a complete picture of Hahn’s colourful life, Nobody Said Not To Go is a great start as Cuthbertson puts together her adventures pretty well and manages to create a good sense of the high times in which Hahn lived.

There is no doubt that Hahn was a character. Alfia Vecchion Wallace wrote this sweet tribute to her unusual grandmother: “Chances are that your grandmother didn’t smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment. Chances are that she didn’t teach you Swahili obscenities. Chances are that when she took you to the zoo, she didn’t start whooping passionately at the top of her lungs as you passed the gibbon cage. Sadly for you… your grandmother was not Emily Hahn.”

But thankfully, we are still able to read and appreciate Hahn’s words and adventures today.

This is my third read for the Women Unbound Challenge.

This is such a great read for this challenge, as Hahn believed very much in women’s ‘freedom to choose’. She wrote in a book for young readers: “Today [1959] girls can be reporters or engineers or officers in the armed forces, if they like. If most of them still prefer to stay at home to raise their children, that is also excellent. Free choice is a very precious thing.”