Hong Kong Holiday

Author of such celebrated and acclaimed works as The Soong Sisters, China to Me, and Fractured Emerald: Ireland, Emily Hahn has been called by the New Yorker “a forgotten American literary treasure.” Now Hahn is reintroduced to a new generation of readers, bringing to light her richly textured voice and unique perspective on a world that continues to exist through both history and fiction.

In a sense, Hong Kong Holiday is a supplement to Emily Hahn’s China to Me, marked by the illustrative anecdote and incisive wit that spotlighted the most important incidents of her life during the long months from the Japanese capture of Hong Kong until she was finally returned home on the second voyage of the exchange ship, Gripsholm. Presented here is a crystal-clear picture of the oppressed city—its life in the bazaars, beauty shops, restaurants, and dens. Among the rich and among the poor, in hospitals and in internment camps, Hong Kong Holiday is exotic, intriguing, and all too real. A revolutionary woman for her time and an enormously creative writer, Emily Hahn broke all of the rules of the 1920s, including by traveling the country dressed as a boy, working for the Red Cross in Belgium, being the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and having a child out of wedlock. Hahn kept on fighting against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death at age ninety-two.

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.