Searching for Emily Hahn on the Streets of St Louis
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom currently serves as Director of the East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University. He will move in the fall of 2006 to the History Department of the University of California at Irvine. His recent publications include ‘Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations’, which appeared in the online journal Common-Place (www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-03/ April 2004), and Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: a Reader, University of California Press, 2002, which he co-edited with Susan Brownell.
Correspondence: jwassers{at}indiana.edu
A surprising number of notable contributors to both highbrow and popular cultural genres were born in St Louis –from writers T. S. Eliot and Kate Chopin, to comedian Dick Gregory and film star Betty Grable, to rocker Chuck Berry and jazz chanteuse Josephine Baker. And yet this metropolis, once the grandest in the Midwest and the fourth largest in the country, has long had an odd sort of inferiority complex, especially vis-à-vis Chicago, the upstart city to the north that also first attracted global attention by holding an international exhibition, in its case the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Many locals now imagine that people in other places, when they think of St Louis at all, view it as a city well past its prime whose only real claim to fame is that it once served as a starting point for journeys toward the Pacific, such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition two hundred years ago.
This article draws attention to St Louis author Emily Hahn, who was born here just a year after its World's Fair took place. My interest in this long-lived author, like my interest in cities that had hosted international exhibitions, had a Shanghai connection. (There was also a more local one: her husband, the historian Charles Boxer, once taught at my university and our rare-books library houses both of their papers and manuscripts.) Of the over one-hundred essays Hahn contributed to the New Yorker before passing away in 1997, one of the most famous, ‘The Big Smoke’, was set in Shanghai, a city she lived in during the 1930s. It certainly has one of her most memorable opening lines: ‘Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China.’