That is the trouble with real life; you can’t write it down as fiction because it is so impossible.” New Yorker China correspondent Emily “Mickey” Hahn may or may not have been paraphrasing her fellow Missourian Mark Twain when she wrote that line in her 1944 memoir China to Me: A Partial Autobiography. But even Twain would have paused before inventing a character who tested the boundaries of plausibility as much as Hahn did.
China to Me is a wild ride through some of the most turbulent settings in modern Chinese history: Shanghai in the 1930s, wartime Chongqing, and Hong Kong under Japanese occupation. Through it all, Hahn centers the narrative on herself and her (sometimes outrageous) life choices, prefiguring not only the “correspondent in China” genre, but also the new school of journalism later made famous by Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson.