"There was never an emergency when Hahn was at the wheel. (She was beautiful, which never hurts, and came from a well-to-do family of German Jews in St. Louis.) Her writing made great use of offhandedness. She was on her way to Congo in 1935 "to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances.""
"In a "Letter from Brazil" from 1960, she casually mentions that her host "woke up one morning to find his pajamas spotted with blood; he had been bitten by a vampire bat." She roamed the world, seemingly without fetter. "It had become clear to me on the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time," she writes in "The Big Smoke.""
Emily Hahn traveled to China in the 1930s and immersed herself in Shanghai life with an offhand, adventurous tone and a stated curiosity about opium. She published fifty-two books and more than two hundred pieces for The New Yorker across eight decades. Colleague Roger Angell called her a roving heroine and described her as deeply at home in the world. She came from a well-to-do German-Jewish family in St. Louis and displayed fearless, witty comportment, roaming to places such as Congo and Brazil and recounting striking anecdotes like a host bitten by a vampire bat.
Read at The New Yorker
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