eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Originally published in 1970, under the title Times and Places, this book is a collection of twenty-three of her articles from the New Yorker, published between 1937 and 1970. Well reviewed upon first publication, the book was re-published under the current title in 2000 with a foreword by Sheila McGrath, a longtime colleague of hers at the New Yorker, and an introduction by Ken Cuthbertson, author of Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves and Adventures of Emily Hahn. One of the pieces in the book starts with the line, “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as a reason why I went to China.” Hahn was seized by a wanderlust that led her to explore nearly every corner of the world. She traveled solo to the Belgian Congo at the age of twenty-five. She was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s—where she did indeed become an opium addict for two years. For many years, she spent part of every year in New York City and part of her time living with her husband, Charles Boxer, in England. Through the course of these twenty-three distinct pieces, Emily Hahn gives us a glimpse of the tremendous range of her interests, the many places in the world she visited, and her extraordinary perception of the things, large and small, that are important in a life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497619470 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 324 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) was the author of fifty-two books, as well as one hundred eighty-one articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1929 to 1996. She was a staff writer for the magazine for forty-seven years. She wrote novels, short stories, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks, humor, travel, children’s books, and four autobiographical narratives: China to Me (1944), a literary exploration of her trip to China; Hong Kong Holiday (1946); England to Me (1949); and Kissing Cousins (1958).
The fifth of six children, she was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later 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 before leaving for Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years. Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s chief spy in pre–World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty-two years and produced two daughters. Emily Hahn’s final published piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1996, shortly before her death.
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) was the author of fifty-two books, as well as 181 articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1929 to 1996. She was a staff writer for the magazine for forty-seven years. She wrote novels, short stories, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks, humor, travel, children’s books, and four autobiographical narratives: China to Me (1944), a literary exploration of her trip to China; Hong Kong Holiday (1946); England to Me (1949); and Kissing Cousins (1958).
The fifth of six children, Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later 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 before leaving for Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years. Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s chief spy in pre–World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty-two years and produced two daughters. Hahn’s final piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1996, shortly before her death.
A revolutionary for her time, Hahn broke many of the rules of the 1920s, traveling the country dressed as a boy, working for the Red Cross in Belgium, becoming the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and having a child out of wedlock. She fought against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death.
Read an Excerpt
No Hurry to Get Home
The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the Twentieth Centurys
By Emily Hahn
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1970 Emily HahnAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-1947-0
CHAPTER 1
THE ESCAPE
Not long after my family moved from St. Louis to Chicago, I ran away from home. It is only honest to admit that the affair didn't amount to much; indeed, nobody among my relatives remembers it, except my sister Rose, today a psychiatric social worker, who claims she does. She says I ran away because I was disturbed, and she adds that we were all disturbed at the time, and that the move to Chicago was bad for us. She speaks, of course, as a social worker, but when she talks like that I'm visited by the ghost of an old resentment. "There they go again," I say to myself, "crowding in on the act." But the annoyance really is only a ghost. It is nothing like the frustration and rage I felt back in 1920 at the slightest hint that any one of the rest of the family was as miserable as I was. Mother once tried to tell me that she was unhappy, too, but I only walked off, shaking my head. The misery was mine and mine alone. I was fifteen, and entitled to undisputed possession. Had I not been forced to leave St. Louis against my will? Wasn't I always being pushed around? No one but me had my sensitivity; no one but me knew how to suffer; the others were clods. It was clear that I had to run away.
"There must have been something wrong with you," my husband said recently, when I told him the story. "Girls don't usually run away from home."
"All normal girls do," I said loftily.
But, having thought it over, I will concede that I may be mistaken about that. My family weren't really clods, and they weren't abnormal, yet out of five girls and one boy, of whom I was the next to youngest, I'm the only one who ran away.
Very likely it happened not so much because we moved to Chicago as because I had a hangover from books. I was a deep reader, plunging into a story and remaining immersed even after I'd finished it. Some of it was apt to cling for a long time, like water to a bathing suit. The "Jungle Books" clung, for example. Mowgli was a natural wanderer. I was surprised when he went back to his home cave once, after he'd grown up, to confer with Mother and Father Wolf. I assumed that he had forgotten them. I had. I was also a natural wanderer, or wanted to be. Mowgli was the real thing—the best example—but there were others. David Copperfield, for instance; he ran away, and a lot of Dickens' other children were admirably mobile, too. I was certain that Little Nell, though she thought she was sorry to slip away from home with her grandfather, must have felt some hidden enthusiasm for the road. Nor did I have to depend on Dickens for vicarious running away. I drifted downriver with Huck Finn, and got lost with Tom Sawyer, and sailed here and there, all over the world, with any number of other people, scorning the stale air of indoors.
At the same time, I much preferred to be indoors in fact; there I could read in comfort of the wild hawk to the windswept sky, the deer to the wholesome word. My mother was always sending me out to play, partly because the open air was healthful and partly because she thought reading, done to excess, ruined the eyes. We all had good eyes, and she was a keen reader herself, but she dreaded some future day when we might use up our allotted sight, so she instituted a rationing system: her children up to the age of twelve might read for pleasure only half an hour a day; when they reached their teens, they were allowed an hour. The rest of our leisure time had to be spent in the open air. This was the era of the sleeping porch, or, if you couldn't have that, of the window gaping wide all the winter night, which may have been a legacy of Theodore Roosevelt—himself a great one for wandering in the open air—or a reaction to central heating, which we rather overdid. At any rate, I found playing outdoors boring until I learned to hide books under the back porch or in a peach tree's cleft. After that, it was simply a matter of finding some spot out of sight where I could read in peace.
Later on, in Chicago, it suited me to mope as if I'd lost a paradise when we moved away from St. Louis, and I began to dream of running off—if not to that one, then to some other. And St. Louis was, in fact, a pleasant place. There must have been other towns along the Mississippi with a similar charm-places where cement had not yet tamped down everything and nature still showed through—but I thought mine unique. I firmly believed that the little girl from New York who came out every summer to visit her grandparents next door was as miserable, when the time came to return to the brownstone fronts of the East, as Persephone going back to the underworld. In New York, we children told each other, there were no back yards. That unfortunate Eastern child had to live in a flat, with no place to dig in the dirt. Actually, what should have bothered us was that St. Louis was a hell of a place for a summer resort. It rests in a topographical hollow, and the air is usually quiet, growing humid to an extreme degree in summer, except for the times when everything blows up all at once in a cyclone. Our cyclones and tornadoes were inconvenient, and even dangerous, but we were proud of them.
Fountain Avenue was where we lived, across the street from Fountain Park—an oval-shaped tract of land about three blocks long, with trees and paths and benches and trimmed grass. My parents often said contentedly that it was a splendid place for children, but I preferred our back yard—a much wilder place. I didn't know much about jungles, but I pictured them as something like the back yard. There were hibiscus bushes in it, and peach trees. Somebody else had a persimmon tree, not far off; I know it couldn't have been ours, because the fruit bounced on someone's coach-house roof when it fell, and we didn't have a coach house. A ripe persimmon that has hit a roof on its way down is a badly squashed persimmon, but those tasted wonderful, in spite of twigs and bits of dead leaf that had to be pulled off or spat out. Bitten at the proper angle, a persimmon seed puckers the mouth, and when it splits open, a little white spoon lies inside it in silhouette.
Our yard was divided from its neighbors by a high board fence, always in need of paint. It had an occasional knothole and looked like the cartoon fences through whose holes little ragamuffins steal glimpses of baseball games. The upright planks were reinforced near the top by a ledge, on which daring children walked, balancing. In time, the fence was replaced by a low wire one—everybody who was anybody was getting wire fences— and privacy was gone in our block. You could see both ways as far as the eye could travel, and I was sorry. Progress marred our alley, too. To begin with, when I pulled myself up to stand on the rim of our ashpit and peered over a wall into the alley, what I saw was almost rural. The alley was cobbled, bounded on one side by a vacant lot and a couple of wooden outhouses and a stable. In the stable lived a horse, who kept his head resting on the lower half of his divided door and always regarded me amiably. The whole place smelled of horse, cold ashes, garbage, and open ground. But one day men appeared and dug in the vacant lot, and practically the next day a tall red brick apartment building stood on it. About the same time, the stable, shed, and horse disappeared, to be replaced by concrete and brick and glass, with a lot of earthenware pots in evidence. It must have been the back of a flower shop. In the same abrupt manner—my memory moves as jerkily as an early silent movie—the rough alleyway became smoothly paved and good for roller-skating. St. Louis changed, but it was nice.
Late in May, it would begin to heat up. Then we were permitted to go barefoot, outside of school hours—a privilege I did not appreciate, for the sidewalks burned my feet and the asphalt in the streets melted to a mushy consistency, streaking my legs with tar. Wherever potholes in a street were being mended, there was a little heap of soft tar nearby, and I remember-though I hate to think of it—that we filched little pieces of the tar and chewed it. The parched grass of Fountain Park was easier than asphalt on the feet, but if one simply had to stay outside, the back yard was best. There we could turn on the garden hose and wallow. When the classroom thermometer at our school rose about ninety, we were sent home.
Then came vacation, and after a few weeks everybody, including us, went away. My father would go with us to Michigan, settle us in, stay a couple of weeks, and return to work. My mother always filled the family scene to a greater extent than he did; she could hardly help shouldering him out, for he was away a good deal of the time, "on the road," sellings things for a company of which he was half owner. But my father was not self-effacing. He enjoyed entertaining people, telling stories, and singing. Nevertheless, it is Mother I remember, and it was Mother I preferred. When Daddy wasn't on the road, we children went down to the streetcar stop to meet him. As he stepped off the car, we made a great demonstration, jumping and yelling and rushing to embrace him, scuffling like puppies, but I'm afraid I carried on in this manner only because the others were doing it. I was afraid of him, really. It was one of the foremost facts of our life that he was nervous and couldn't take too much noise. Nervous people, I knew, were as unpredictable as nervous dogs. Also, he affronted my vanity in the matter of what would now-adays be called sibling rivalry, by adoring my older sister Dorothy and paying less attention to the rest of us. It was only when I was older and braver that I learned to like him, and he in turn learned to recognize me. But if I didn't love my father, I certainly never realized it. I thought I loved him, and we were always in holiday mood when we set off all together for Michigan.
I wonder why Michigan. Presumably my parents thought it cooler than St. Louis, and it must have been, because anywhere was, but we didn't visit the northern woods; we went to a farm right in the heat belt. We didn't drive, of course. Cars were not quite unknown, but I can't remember anybody who actually went from one town to another by auto. We travelled on a train, taking with us a big trunk and many suitcases, getting aboard in the late afternoon and sleeping in flimsily constructed rooms of green cloth. The moldy smell of that cloth is still evocable in my nostrils. Arriving in Chicago next day, we rode across town in a Parmelee horse-drawn bus to another station. The bus was upholstered in something shabby and slippery, and the streets were bumpy. I kept sliding off the bench, but my mind was not on keeping my place, because I was looking out with horror at the streets. No skyscrapers today, not even the nightmare canyons of Wall Street, can match the towering height of Chicago's buildings as I saw them in my childhood. Not only were they tall, they faced each other across narrow streets into which the sun could not reach, and they were black all over with grime. At this point, angry Chicagoans may declare passionately that it simply isn't true, and that the Parmelee bus never followed such a route, so I hasten to assure them that I know it—now. I have tried, myself, to find those hellish buildings and the nightmare sooty pavements we rode along, but I couldn't. I can only conclude that I didn't really see them at all but read a description of such a place—some demon world—in a book, and mixed it up with reality. And yet it is vivid in my memory—the dreadful buildings, and ramshackle wooden sheds, and the brick facades of miserable tenements. It seemed natural, therefore, when my sisters spoke disparagingly of Chicago. "How dreadful it must be to have to live in Chicago!" they would say, and look with pity from the bus windows at the miserable people in the streets. Though I did not live there yet, and did not dream that I ever would, it was a place I was already glad to escape from.
Now, with one of those sudden cinema jerks, I remember myself at fifteen, in high school and already halfway out of the existence I had known best. Real life was no longer a mere transition from one story world to another. I looked at and saw flesh-and-blood people of whom I'd never before been aware. I looked at, and fell in love with, an assistant teacher at the art school I attended on Saturday mornings. I was waking, but it wasn't a tingling awakening; it was a sort of drifting. There was something in me that worried me, because I had never read or heard about it—a slowness to react, a drowsiness of the spirit. When other people were hurt, they cried immediately. When I was hurt, I cried a good deal later, and half the time only because I thought it the thing to do. I thought that I might be incapable of feeling, especially when I looked around at my relatives and saw how different they were. My sister Dorothy and Mother were volatile and excitable, and clearly revelled in scenes. My father couldn't read anything emotional aloud without choking up with laughter or tears; wiping his eyes, he would say, "I'm sorry, I know it's a weakness." Yes, I thought, he was weak, but perhaps that was the way to be.
I was jealous of my privacy, but I was inconsistent about it. I wanted desperately to be noticed and equally desperately to be let alone. This wasn't a new state, to be sure. Some years before, there had been the affair of the Teddy bear. Probably I wouldn't have been so wacky about him if we'd been permitted to keep live pets, but my parents thought dogs and cats were not good for children—Mother was convinced that cats carry typhoid germs—and they were sure children were bad for dogs and cats. Mad about animals, I lavished emotion on other people's pets, until I saw the bear in a shopwindow. I was no tot in search of a cuddly companion—I must have been eleven—and the bear was a miniature Steiff model, about five inches long, but I went crazy with love and longing. I saved up my allowance. I earned money running errands and cutting grass. Finally I got the bear, and I carried it everywhere for years. In those pre-Freud days, nobody worried about such things, though I drew pictures of its face on my arithmetic papers and songbooks, and made clothes for it, and built it a house. Even now, it's a struggle to call the bear "it," and not "him." One day I took it to school. Such small bears were a novelty, and the other children in my class made a fuss about it and vied for the privilege of keeping it in their desks for allotted spaces of time. Inevitably, the teacher noticed the disturbance. She investigated, discovered the bear, and confiscated it—an act that triggered off one of the most humiliating experiences I can remember. I burst into tears—in the sixth grade, mind you, and over a Teddy bear. But that was not the worst of it. To demonstrate that I didn't really care and was unwounded, I also laughed. The effect was appalling. Laughter mixed with the weeping came out in a series of whoops that wouldn't stop. The other children stared, and so did the teacher, while I gasped and whooped and sobbed until my breath failed. In the ensuing pause, the teacher said quietly that she would give me my bear after school. I got the bear back as the teacher had promised, and nobody ever dared to tease me about the incident or even mention it again, but I still shrivel when I think of it.
So, at fifteen, I admired and envied my sister Dot, who was very much the other way and would never shrink from scenes. When she felt like it, she threw things. Even when she threw them at me, I admired her swift passion, as well as her aim. I was sadly aware that my own rebellions and quarrels were cold in comparison—thoughtful and sluggish. My attacks were planned and few. But these self-doubts were finally submerged. Dot was away at college, and her splendid tantrums no longer enlivened the day. The eldest of us, my brother Mannel, married at the close of the First World War—he had been in the Air Service—and Rose was training in psychiatry in Boston. Dauphine and I, the younger ones, now found the house spacious and calm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Hurry to Get Home by Emily Hahn. Copyright © 1970 Emily Hahn. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Special Thanks
- Foreward
- Introduction
- THE ESCAPE
- BE NOT THE FIRST
- RAYMOND
- THAT YOUNG MAN
- B.Sc.
- THE SURROUNDING HILLS
- THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE ATOM
- TILL THE WELL RUNS DRY
- KATHY, NOT ME
- AISLE K
- STEWART
- PAWPAW PIE
- CHRISTMAS WITH THE WALKERS
- DAR
- EDDYCHAN
- THE BIG SMOKE
- FOR HUMANITY'S SAKE
- SOUTHERN TOUR
- DR. BALDWIN
- ROUND TRIP TO NANKING
- PEACE COMES TO SHANGHAI
- PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
- THE SCREAM
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Copyright