Nobody said not to go

by Ken Cuthbertson

Known as "Mickey" to her friends, Emily Hahn traveled across the country dressed as a boy in the 192Os; worked as a Harvey Girl in Taos, New Mexico; ran away to the Belgian Congo as a Red Cross worker during the Great Depression; was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s; became an opium addict; had an affair and an illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong just before the outbreak of World War II; was involved in underground relief work in occupied Hong Kong; and moved back to the United States and became a pioneer in the fields of environmentalism and wildlife preservation before her death last year. Mickey Hahn also wrote hundreds of articles and short stories for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1995 and wrote fifty-two books in her lifetime, astonishing her publishers and agents by moving effortlessly from biography to humor to fiction to travel memoir to history.