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2 “I’m in the Middle of a War, I’m in the Middle of a Life!” Women, War, and National Identity In her memoir China to Me, Emily “Mickey” Hahn recounts her mother’s frequent pleas to her daughter to return to America and “settle down.” In her mind, Hahn composes the exasperated response she wishes she could send: “I’m in the middle of a book; I’m in the middle of a magazine; I’m in the middle of China! I’ll come back when it’s time, and when there’s something for me to do there.”1 Perplexed that her mother couldn’t “believe I belong here just as much as if I were married to a man with a job out here,” Hahn declares, “I am set in my work, which is writing, and as for marriage — well, it just hasn’t happened.” Hahn, Gwen Dew, and Eleanor Wai Chun Thom, whose narratives are the focus of this chapter, belong to a cohort of ambitious and educated women who came of age in the early twentieth century and who found rewarding work and independence in Asia. They moved between Hong Kong, China, and the US with relative ease, particularly in comparison to women of earlier generations. For all three, the pedagogical impulse was linked to declarations of individual independence as well as to what they learned in the process of their crosscultural encounters.2 All three wrote of how war had changed them as well as those around them. They affirm Gerald Horne’s assertion that World War II was a “race war” and that the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong would change attitudes as well as lives, undermining notions of white supremacy and generating critiques of colonialism that led to moderate social transformation in Hong Kong and beyond.3 Their narratives also shed light on a range of other issues and reveal the salience of various identities and affiliations in times of crisis. For instance, as a Chinese American, Eleanor Thom was able to mask her American identity and “pass” as a Chinese national in order to flee Hong Kong for Chongqing, where she formed 58 | Troubling American Women many of her ideas about postwar education for girls. Their Caucasian faces marked Dew and Hahn differently than Thom, although Hahn’s identification with Chineseness allowed her to avoid internment while Dew spent six months as a prisoner in Stanley Camp. Each reached their own conclusions about meanings of whiteness and national identity in the postwar world. All three write of the ways in which war reconfigured gender roles, personal, national, and cultural identities. Additionally, their narratives connect events in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation to a longer history of war, revolution, and change in China, dating back to 1911 and the May Fourth Period. American Women “Reporting” China Hahn and Dew were two of many Western women who made names for themselves in the US and elsewhere by writing about their time in Asia. Arguably the most famous of this cohort was missionary-turned-author Pearl S. Buck, but American journalists Agnes Smedley and Helen Foster Snow, as well as British activists and journalists Stella Benson and Freda Utley (to name just a few) shared the spotlight as well. Long before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Hahn’s “reporter at large” stories were featured regularly in The New Yorker. She spent six years during the late 1930s and early 1940s living mostly in Shanghai and Chongqing, making occasional trips to Hong Kong.4 Dew’s prewar reporting for the Detroit News had earned her a reputation as “one of Michigan’s most legendary female reporters and photographers” bringing “exotic places around the world” into the lives of readers of the News.5 She lived in Japan and China, traveling widely in Asia during the 1930s. Mari Yoshihara argues that in this period white women played a number of roles in Asia, as “consumers, producers, practitioners, critics, and experts, often revealing strains of American orientalism (constructing Asians as exotic and infantile) in their attitudes and narratives.”6 She also discusses the contradictions within women’s reactions to their crosscultural encounters. For example, Buck’s literary characterizations of life in China were a refreshing change from Western stereotypes in the tradition of Fu Manchu. Yet Buck herself often portrayed the Chinese (particularly Chinese women) as victims of larger feudal and patriarchal structures. There were alternative representations. Agnes Smedley [3.144.230.82] Project...

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