Books: Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalist from Opium Wars to Mao

Mickey also had two monkeys: the monkey on her back that was her opium addiction and the monkey on her shoulder that was Mr. Mills (technically a gibbon and therefore an ape, Mickey would castigate anyone who insulted him by calling him a mere monkey). Mills ensured her an instantly memorable entrée into Shanghai high society with his fondness for urinating or masturbating in public.

As well as writing some of the most evocative and descriptive prose on Shanghai in the late 1930s, Mickey managed to also become a writer who had a foot in both camps — the International Settlement social whirl of Shanghailander life and the avant garde Chinese life of the city. These two coexisting worlds that all too infrequently met and impinged on each other were the inspiration for Hahn’s writing. She was prolific across her lifetime and turned out over 50 books, including memoirs, biographies, journalism, travelogues and children’s books, most of which were rushed and written in difficult personal and political circumstances.

On the Chinese side of her life, she became notorious for her affair and marriage, as a concubine or second wife, to Zau, who was then a well-known Shanghainese poet inspired by the European Decadents of the nineteenth century. This didn’t necessarily make for great poetry in Chinese but was certainly an interesting experiment in modern Chinese writing and was symptomatic of the Shanghai mixture of Eastern and Western influences that so defined the modernist character of the city during the 1930s.

The French- and English-educated Zau published a range of avant garde magazines and literary journals in English and Chinese inspired by the likes of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé as well as the English Decadents. He was also inspired by the opium pipe, to which he introduced Hahn. A concubine, an opium addict and an avant garde publisher, she had crossed the line into modern Chinese culture in a way no other foreign journalist managed in China between the wars. Most wouldn’t have really wanted to either, but Hahn felt it essential to immerse herself. What she got, among other things, was her addiction to opium that led to a need to cure herself and subsequently one of her best pieces for the New Yorker dealing with addiction and cure: The Big Smoke.

The other side of her was pure Shanghai sojourner and she excelled at both being a central part and simultaneously critic of the excesses of Shanghailander society. Hahn chronicled the late and long dinners, the endless rounds of drinks and parties and the decadence of Shanghai shortly before its fall while personally exceeding most of these excesses. The image of her swanning around parties at Victor Sassoon’s with Mr. Mills, complete with his own ape diapers, remains one of the enduring images of old Shanghai as does, for some who knew her anyway, her tendency to answer the door completely naked without any idea who her caller was.