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| Mickey and her pet gibbon |
Taking one of the lively letters Mickey wrote to her family from a trip to New Mexico, her brother-in-law sent the text to the newly-begun New Yorker, which published it. Mickey moved to New York and began writing all the time. She took a research position in England and from there moved to the Congo, where she thought she could spend most of her time reading and writing. After a couple of years in the Congo, she wrote “one of the most interesting” travel and adventure books of 1930.
Back in New York, Mickey found a sort of “coyote mentality,” as the depression deepened. People lived on subsistence diets, especially the flocks of young women who had come to the city. With her sister Helen, Mickey traveled to Japan, and then to Shanghai, where she didn’t intend to stay long. Helen went back to New York, however, and Mickey stayed. Sending dispatches back to the magazine, Mickey got deeper into the expatriate culture and especially got to know the Chinese artistic community.
Mickey became involved with Shao Yunmei, a Shanghaiese poet and publisher who had spent his young years in Europe enamored of French poets. When Shao bought a printing press with his inheritance, he and Mickey started a magazine. Only three issues were published. When Mickey wrote about him for the New Yorker, however, people couldn’t get enough of her stories. Shao was married, but he also married Mickey. The document which showed they had been married later allowed Mickey to be an “honorary Asian” and kept her out of internment camps for the British when the Japanese took over Hong Kong later.
It was suggested to Mickey that she write a biography of the Soong sisters, three Chinese women whose husbands were powerful politicians, including Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. They were skittish, worried about defamation, but Mickey, through her contacts, met them and spent time in Chongqing and Hong Kong with them. The book was published in 1941 and was pronounced excellent.
In Hong Kong Mickey met Charles Boxer, a British intelligence officer who was also a brilliant colonial historian. Like Mickey, Charles was not racist and believed the British empire to be over. They had a baby together, Carola, born in 1941. The Japanese invaded Hong Kong and Charles was wounded, then sent to prison camps. He was respected, however, because he had lived in Japan and could speak Japanese.
Asked by a Japanese official why she had married an Asian and then had a baby with Major Boxer, Mickey said, “because I’m a bad girl.” “No,” said the official, “You are good girl.” Mickey spent her time trying to collect enough food to keep her daughter alive and also find food for Charles. As difficulty mounted, Charles insisted Mickey leave, taking the Swedish prisoner exchange ship MS Gripsholm run by the Red Cross. She arrived in New York with Carola in 1943.
In New York, Mickey wrote feverishly, completing China to Me. Americans lapped up the book. Charles was reported killed, but Mickey did not lose hope. He arrived in Los Angeles and flew straight to New York. It was “the best publicized romance of the war.” They were married six days later.
Mickey and Charles moved to England, to Conygar, a dilapidated house belonging to Charles’ family in Dorset. Another daughter, Amanda, was born in 1948. Both Mickey and Charles spent their time studying and writing, though they were also sociable and gave parties. Mickey was not a good housewife, but she was interested in the mechanics of living and how they reflected the culture. After the war, women were once again in an ambivalent position between domestic life and work.
In the 1950’s, Mickey became a staff writer at the New Yorker, continuing to travel and living in both England and New York. In her later years, she was interested in wildlife preservation, especially in primate communication. Charles took academic positions in Britain and the United States, writing on European colonialism. Mickey died in New York in 1997, from complications of a surgery; Charles in 2000 in England.
I had never heard of Mickey Hahn when I ran across her in Starry and Restless [published 2026] by Julia Cooke. I was immediately taken with her insouciant presence. Her witty, observant prose is full of casual details which show what life was really like at a particular time and place. She was curious and did not hang back from the truth. She was “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world,” wrote a colleague, comfortable with well-known people, but also with the ordinary. Her beloved sisters, her daughters, nieces and nephews found her as unexpected and informal, as elusive as the rest of us do.
