EMILY HAHN'S 'PUNGENT TRUTH' ON CHINA
Howard, Harry Paxton
Emily Hahn's 'Pungent Truth' On China CHINA TO ME. A Partial Autobiography, by Emily Hahn. Doubleday, Doran. $3. Reviewed by Harry Paxton Howard THIS book will appeal to various tastes. Some...
...Either the men were being held in...
...It frightens me...
...Some may find this rather boring trivia, especially if he has had abundant personal contact with the Far Eastern white communities ¦whom Mickey well terms "the half-wits of the world...
...They are heading for a big disappointment...
...Is it too late to start telling the truth...
...Had there been 50 Gotham gals like Mickey Hahn in Hong Kong, the Japanese would really have found out who was boss there...
...The day of judgment is overtaking China just now, on all these points...
...She is no racialist and is not blinded by her bitterest experiences and observations...
...You have worked people up into a state where they are going to be awfully mad pretty soon...
...Actually . . . the great burden of resistance has rested on the regular Army...
...WITH regard to China, Miss Hahn writes with pungent truth: "The average American today, the one who takes a sympathetic interest in China, is full of hooey through no fault ofvhis own...
...He thinks that the guerrillas are the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in China...
...Much [guerrilla] effort is lost, anyway, because of interguerrilla arguments and jealousy and hijacking...
...Some readers may not love Mickey for some of her comments on Japanese conduct in Hong Kong, and her comparisons : "I dare say they were better-behaved, number for number, than our troops are going to be when they walk into Tokyo...
...Everywhere I go in New York I am running into dissatisfaction and an impatient feeling on the part of the public that they have been fooled...
...I'm only trying to undo some of the harm you have unwittingly done your friends...
...But you'll find it costly...
...Most of the British women escaped this indignity...
...or they just preferred Chinese women to British, a preference most people could understand, I should think...
...But there is little that is boring about her successful attempts to keep out of the concentration camp where most Americans were confined by the Japanese at Hong Kong and to gain food and comforts for herself, her child, and the child's father...
...Some readers may find "Mickey" Hahn's accounts of her bibulous and erotic adventures, her gibbons, and her illegitimate child of much interest...
...I know that many Chinese women were raped...
...Even in wartime there are "good" and "bad," quite without regard to race...
...Her account of the Japanese at Hong Kong is sane, balanced, and interesting...
...Carlson and the rest of you...
...Mickey reports some horrible things, but some decent and humane things also...
...No, Mickey, it's not too late...
...am not trying to run them down, Agnes Smedley and Ed Snow and Gen...
...And I know...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
