An American love story
American Emily Hahn arrived in Shanghai in May, 1935, and fell in love with a rich, handsome Chinese writer and publisher. Already married with five children, Shao Xunmei took Hahn as his lover and later married her. Together, they published books, smoked opium and survived the Japanese occupation of the city, before Hahn left Shanghai one morning in November 1939, never to return.
This controversial, passionate story is now available to mainlanders thanks to a book - Xiang Meili (Hahn's Chinese name) in Shanghai - by Wang Pu, a professor in the Chinese department of Lingnan College.
By the standards of her time, Hahn was a revolutionary. Born in 1905 in St Louis, Missouri, she was the first woman to gain a degree in mining engineering from the University of Wisconsin. After travelling to London and the Belgian Congo, she came to Shanghai looking for adventure.
Shao belonged to China's elite. A rich man thanks to property he inherited from his grandfather, an official in the Qing dynasty, he studied English literature at Cambridge University and returned to marry a rich cousin.
He published literary and political journals, in Chinese and English, and was also a writer of stories about women, lust and decadence. Hahn was different to most westerners of her time in having no racial prejudice, a precondition to her becoming the lover of a Chinese, and the second woman in his family. At that time, Chinese men were allowed more than one wife.
This sense of equality was one thing that attracted Professor Wang to write about her. 'Mixing between the races at that time was not so easy,' he said. 'People stuck to their own circles. But Hahn treated everyone the same.'
After the Japanese occupation of most of the city in 1937, Hahn and Shao married. which enabled Shao to retrieve some of his property that had been confiscated. As an American, Hahn was neutral in the Sino-Japanese war.
Shao helped Hahn interview many Chinese celebrities for material she used in articles and books. She left in 1939 for Chongqing , then the capital, to cover the war with Japan. They met once more, when Shao visited her in the US in 1946. After the communist takeover, he unwisely decided to stay in China. He was twice sent to prison, once for writing letters to Hahn and once during the Cultural Revolution. He died in poverty and disgrace in 1968.
One of his daughters later emigrated to the US, where she met Hahn, then more than 90 but still going to work each day at the New Yorker. She died in 1997, aged 92.
A case of the triumph of love over politics, perhaps?
