Ariel Levy on Emily Hahn's "The Big Smoke"

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn's account of her journey from peppy globe-trotter to sallow lotus-eater (and back again) in nineteen-thirties Shanghai. This insouciant kickoff leaves you curious why Hahn went to China, of course, and why she was so keen on becoming an opium addict. More pressingly, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What else will this droll, naughty adventurer get up to?

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Plenty. Along with fifty-two books, Hahn wrote more than two hundred articles for The New Yorker, over eight decades, about goings on in places as unalike as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell described her, in an obituary from 1997, as “this magazine’s roving heroine” and “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world.” (Angell’s mother, Katharine White, was Hahn's editor, and when he was a twelve-year-old “boy naturalist” on East Ninety-third Street Hahn gave him a macaque. “Don't let her bite you,” she advised. “If she does, bite her right back.”)