21

At first, Mickey and Charles told almost no one that she was pregnant. However, when a rumor began that they had secretly married, news of the baby leaked out. When Ernest Hemingway and his wife Martha Gellhorn visited Hong Kong in the spring of 1941, Mickey met them in the bar of the Repulse Bay Hotel, where the Hemingways were staying. “When Hemingway found out that I was pregnant, he told me he’d claim to be the child’s father if I wanted him to,” Mickey recalled. “I declined. I said Charles wouldn’t like that.”1

Not long afterward, Mickey received a letter of congratulations from a girlfriend in Australia, and Ursula wrote to Charles demanding to know what was happening. As news of Mickey’s pregnancy spread, the confusion about her relationship with Charles grew. Mickey had taken up residence in Hong Kong, and she and Charles seemed to be a couple. They attended social events and were together out on the town. As always, Mickey delighted in being the center of attention.

Charles ignored the whispers and icy stares whenever he and Mickey went out. She reveled in the notoriety, for she seldom missed an opportunity to tweak the noses of the fusty members of the British community. Eyebrows were raised in the dining room of the august Hong Kong Hotel one evening when Mickey pulled out and lit a huge cigar. If the men were smoking, she could too, she argued. “I like you and would like to know you better,” one love-struck American navy officer wrote her after witnessing the scene. “Any girl that has the temerity to smoke cigars in the Hong Kong Hotel in front of all the limey colonels has my respect and admiration.”²

Charles’s friend Bill Wiseman recalled, “Hong Kong was a peacetime garrison, with all the peacetime bullshit. The King’s Birthday parade was followed by the General’s cocktail party, to which Charles took Mickey. That caused a tremendous raising of eyebrows and ‘tut-tuts,’ particularly from the handful of senior service wives who’d managed to stay behind [in Hong Kong] on one excuse or another. I think Charles introduced Mickey to the General as ‘my mistress.’ But Charles is the sort of bloke about whom so many tales have been told, many of them apocryphal, that unless you’ve seen or heard it for yourself, you can’t say it was actually so. Anyway, it was regarded as a great scandal.”³

Charles’s intelligence duties kept him busy six days a week, and many evenings he was busy with his reading and scholarly writing. That was his routine; in some ways, his life was compartmentalized and structured with an eye to military precision. Mickey understood, and she did not mind. She was deeply in love with Charles and lived for the precious time they had together, limited though it was. On Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays, they swam at the beach, spent quiet hours together, or attended social events. “Viewed on the surface, I had made a bad bargain,” Mickey wrote. “But we didn’t exist on the surface. I took surprisingly well to the stuffy routine of Hong Kong, and talked gently and patiently and contentedly with the wealthy bourgeoisie.”4

Having so much time to herself gave Mickey an opportunity to pursue her own interests. One project she undertook was to learn Mandarin Chinese—now known as Kuo Yu. This was problematic, for it was difficult to find anyone in Hong Kong who spoke the dialect well enough to teach it. Although 90 percent of Chinese use Mandarin as their everyday language, the most common of China’s seven major dialects, Yue—also called Cantonese—is dominant in Hong Kong. When a Chinese friend introduced Mickey to a woman named Ying Ping, who agreed to tutor her, Mickey began her lessons. At times this proved awkward, given the woman’s occupation: a “hostess” in a downtown “escort bureau” (brothels being illegal in Hong Kong). Mickey practiced her Mandarin by paying the woman to sit and talk. She could do so only in the early afternoon when the escort business was slow. On one occasion, when Mickey made the mistake of dropping by at night, a male patron offered to “buy her a drink.” Ying Ping and her suspicious coworkers were distressed, not so much because of the impropriety of the situation but because of the potential threat of lost business.

When she was not studying Mandarin or spending time with Charles, Mickey worked at her writing. Carl Brandt, Mickey’s agent in New York, wanted her to do another book. He hoped to follow up on the success of The Soong Sisters, which was published in the spring of 1941. The book received excellent reviews in the national press and sold well. It was Mickey’s first big commercial success. Katherine Woods, a writer for the New York Times, praised the Soongs’ story as being “as absorbing as any novel’s and much more important.” She went on to laud Mickey’s easy style and what she termed her “self-effacing intimacy.”⁵ W. H. Chamberlain of the Atlantic Monthly pronounced The Soong Sisters to be “a spirited, well-informed book.”⁶

Even those critics who chided Mickey for not passing judgment on the Soongs’ politics found a lot to like in the book. Despite a growing Western fascination with China and the Soongs, the sisters’ inaccessibility meant that Mickey’s biography was just the second to appear; the other had been a 1939 book called Three Sisters by Cornelia Spencer, the sister of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck.

Clifton Fadiman, writing in The New Yorker, noted that Mickey’s “readable book fills its niche most acceptably.”⁷ Reviewer Nym Wales of the Left-leaning publication the Nation described Mickey as “the clever American novelist” and observed, “[She] is eminently qualified to have done a much better study had she not been obliged to pussyfoot in order to secure the necessary cooperation.” Even so, Wales went on to concede that “The Soong Sisters is a delightful and well-written book, and the author has handled a delicate subject with much skill.”8

Mickey was ecstatic with such reviews. They were vindication for all the misery and sacrifice she had gone through to write the book and avoid the ideological pitfalls of Chinese politics. She always felt The Soong Sisters was one of the best things she ever wrote. “I did what I think was a reasonably good job, considering the difficulties of [Chinese] politics then,” she said.⁹

The favorable reviews were a boost to her self-confidence, especially after the disappointing public reception for her novel Steps of the Sun the previous year. The only sour note for Mickey was that when she received an advance copy of The Soong Sisters, the first thing she saw was that an embossed Soong character on the front cover was printed upside down. This was considered bad luck to the Chinese. Fortunately, a frantic cable to her publisher in New York corrected the problem.

The book’s success helped Mickey convince Carl Brandt that she really was not “out of touch” with the American literary market. There was a growing interest in the United States just then in Singapore, which was seen as a bulwark against Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, so at Brandt’s urging, Mickey began researching a biography of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. “Raffles of Singapore,” as he was popularly known, had played a key role in the founding of the British Empire in the Far East in the nineteenth century. Mickey took on the project for three reasons. One was that it gave her an opportunity to work with Charles, who translated some Dutch historical documents for her. Another was that Mickey felt an affinity for Raffles, who, like her, had kept a pet gibbon. Finally, and most importantly, she needed the publisher’s advance money. Life in Hong Kong was expensive, especially with Mickey’s spending habits.

The articles and short stories she sold to The New Yorker continued to pay most of her living expenses. Bylined submissions by the magazine’s “China coast correspondent” appeared regularly, sometimes twice or three times a month in the early 1940s. The extraordinary thing about these writings is their breadth and variety. Everything in Mickey’s life was grist for her literary mill; in the hands of a lesser writer, such material could have been banal, even tedious. Mickey had an uncanny eye for intriguing detail and a refreshingly casual perspective on life. Her short stories about the Chinese character named Pan Heh-ven—a thinly disguised Sinmay—were among the most popular to appear in The New Yorker at that time. As well, Mickey attracted a large and loyal readership with her articles about everyday life in Hong Kong and Chungking, about the eccentricities and foibles of her colorful friends and neighbors, and even about her mischievous gibbons.

A friend in Shanghai had shipped many of Mickey’s personal possessions down to Hong Kong. Mr. Mills and the two other apes Sinmay had bought while Mickey was in Chungking came too. Having herself purchased two more young gibbons in Hong Kong, Mickey had acquired a small zoo. Much to the dismay of the household staff and neighbors, the five animals made themselves at home in the fresh air and sunshine on Hong Kong’s peak. When Ah King had enough of the gibbons’ hijinks, he erected a makeshift chicken-wire cage on the balcony of Mickey’s fashionable May Road flat. This proved of limited value, since Mr. Mills had a Houdini-like ability to escape. When he did so, his curiosity invariably got him into trouble. “He usually scales some likely wall and enters an open window,” Mickey explained in a New Yorker article. “After a horrible pause there comes a shriek or a crash or both, and shortly afterward he climbs out the window, saying thoughtfully to himself, ‘Oop, oop,’ as he climbs higher towards another open window.”10 Mr. Mills’s penchant for dropping in unannounced caused no end of trouble and led to strained relations between Mickey and her neighbors.

The same problems had occurred in Shanghai. This had never bothered Mickey in the past. Now, as her “condition” became apparent, it began to worry her. She and Charles had still not announced that Mickey was expecting. They had agreed that it was better if she kept a lower profile until after the baby was born in the fall of 1941, but that proved difficult. Mickey had taken a temporary job teaching school. She continued to socialize and confided her secret to only a few trusted friends. One was Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, the wife of Hong Kong’s director of medical services and the “highest ranking” wife still in town. Hilda was a red-haired, headstrong woman who was a staunch socialist; she was called “Red Hilda.” She made no moral judgments about Mickey’s pregnancy. Hilda maintained that marriage was nothing more than a “bourgeois nicety.” If a woman chose to become pregnant, that was her business alone. Such unorthodox views were not all that set Hilda apart from the crowd.

She was legendary in Hong Kong’s British community because, unlike most British people, she got involved in the muck of Chinese politics. Hilda was the secretary of an organization called the China Defense League, headed by Madame Sun. Even after publication of The Soong Sisters, Madame Chiang’s older sister remained suspicious of Mickey. Madame Sun had refused to be interviewed for the book or to have anything to do with its author. Now she cautioned Hilda that Mickey was a spy. Another of Mickey’s leftist friends vouched for her, convincing Hilda that she could be trusted.

That friend was Agnes Smedley, the well-known American leftist. Smedley, who traveled for a time with Mao Tse-tung’s guerilla army as an “unofficial” Red Cross worker, was a dour, quarrelsome, and moody woman. Mickey was one of the few people with whom Agnes got along well, although they would have a serious falling out after Agnes read the Soong sisters biography and Mickey’s memoirs of her years in China. Mickey and Agnes had met in Shanghai in the late 1930s, when Agnes sometimes stayed at Mickey’s house. Their paths crossed again in Chungking. “Smedley appreciated [Emily Hahn] as a fellow writer and as a lively conversationalist with a fondness for the well-placed four-letter word,” one of Smedley’s biographers explained.11

When Mickey heard Agnes was in the hospital with a gall bladder problem, Mickey visited her. Had Agnes not been a friend of Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, she would have been kicked out of the colony. Agnes Smedley was a notorious radical, whom the British regarded as “dangerous,” in a vague, undefined sort of way. Hilda had spoken up for Agnes, who nevertheless was allowed to enter a Hong Kong hospital for treatment only after promising not to give any speeches or to otherwise disrupt the peace. Hilda also became Mickey’s patron, arranging for her medical care during her pregnancy and generally taking her under her wing.

Charles left Mickey alone in Hong Kong in May, when he went on an intelligence-gathering trip. Among the stops on his monthlong tour of the region was Singapore, where Ursula was now staying. Charles planned to meet her and to tell her the details of his affair with Mickey. He and Ursula would then iron out the details of a divorce, Charles assured Mickey. Ursula had been trying to return to Hong Kong, but was prevented from doing so by a compulsory evacuation order issued by the colonial government; the wives and children of all British citizens were ordered to leave. As an American and an “essential worker”—because she had volunteered for nursing duty—Mickey was not obliged to join them. Ironically, it was Charles who had recommended the evacuation to Hong Kong’s governor.

During his absence, Charles arranged for a friend to rent the spare bedroom in Mickey’s flat. Art Cooper, a free-spirited young army intelligence officer with a passion for literature, was in Hong Kong awaiting a posting. Mickey welcomed both the rental income and the company; Cooper was a would-be poet. “[Art] was about twenty-five,” Mickey wrote. “He had a long, sorrowful face and a deep Irish voice, and he really didn’t give much of a damn about anything but words.”¹² Mickey and Art became good friends, a development that proved all-important when Charles returned with the news that he had settled nothing with Ursula.

Mickey was distraught. Charles was now evasive and noncommittal about their future together. It was Art Cooper who forced the issue. He initiated a discussion one evening over drinks. It came out in the course of this “shotgun interview,” as Mickey termed it, that Ursula still had no idea Mickey was pregnant or that Charles had promised to marry her. For that reason, Ursula refused to agree to a divorce. Cooper got angry when he heard this. He accused Charles of being immoral and selfish. When Charles denied it, the discussion grew heated. Finally, in exasperation, Cooper looked at Mickey and asked, “Will you marry me?” She smiled. “Yes,” she said.

There followed a long, uncertain pause as the three of them sat looking at one another. Suddenly they all broke into laughter at the absurdity of the situation. Charles pledged to tell Ursula everything and do the “honorable” thing by Mickey: he would marry her as soon as his divorce was final. He would also rewrite his will so Mickey and the baby were “taken care of’ should anything happen to him.13 Charles’s initial strategy was to ask his sister Beryl, who planned to visit Singapore the first week of July, to meet with Ursula and convince her to grant him a divorce. By the time of Beryl’s arrival, Ursula had already heard from friends that Mickey was pregnant, and she was eager to end the marriage. “Poor thing, she’s had a rotten time with [Charles] and it’s not going to be easy for her now,” Beryl’s biographer Miles Clark quoted her as writing in her diary. “She’s awfully nice … and in such a beastly position. It’s too late for me to do anything, much as I should like to.”¹⁴

Mickey had Art Cooper to thank for forcing Charles’s hand. Had Art not done so, the relationship between Mickey and Charles might well have turned out differently. Mickey was deeply grateful to him. Not long afterward, when Alf Bennett came back and Art returned to Singapore, Cooper did so bearing a precious gift from Mickey: one of her favorite gibbons.

With everything between them settled, Mickey and Charles began sharing news about the baby with friends. Mickey told Madame Kung one day as they were out driving. “Her reaction was typical,” Mickey wrote. “There was a little silence, while I held on to her hand firmly, possibly for fear she would slap me, and she stared straight ahead at the back of the chauffeur’s head. Suddenly she giggled. I dropped her hand and turned around to look at her. She giggled like a little girl.”¹⁵ Madame Kung, a devout Methodist, then proceeded to scold Mickey.

When few others in the colony noticed Mickey’s “condition”—or, she wondered, was it that no one dared inquire about the unmentionable?—Mickey and Charles made a game of it. They decided to reward the first person who asked if Mickey was pregnant. The prize would be cigars for a man, chocolate for a woman. The contest winner, in late July, turned out to be Hal Sweet, a devil-may-care American airline pilot. Sweet’s reaction to Mickey’s news provided some insight into the nationalistic antipathies that were bubbling away just beneath the colony’s placid veneer of civility. “All right, but Mickey—why a limey?” Sweet asked. An elderly American woman friend of Mickey’s reacted the same way to Mickey’s news. “Some women will stop at nothing to bring discredit to our nation!” she sputtered.16

Such comments reminded Mickey there was reason to be fearful about the reaction of Charles’s superiors when they learned about the baby. Keeping an American mistress when one’s wife had been forcibly evacuated was one thing; it was quite another to have a child with that woman. That simply was not the sort of thing a British officer did. Mickey’s fears of a backlash lessened after a chat with Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British ambassador to Chungking. He came calling when he was visiting Hong Kong. Over drinks at the Grips, Mickey confided in Clark-Kerr. He assured her that Charles would probably not get into “bad trouble” because his superiors needed him just then; war with Japan was virtually certain. The only real question was, how soon would the shooting start?

War hysteria pushed up the cost of living in Hong Kong during the summer of 1941. Mickey, five months pregnant, struggled to cope with the heat and humidity and to pay her bills. She reported in a July 28 letter home, “I am working as fast as I can on the Raffles book, but it is hot weather for heavy reading and I neglect it sometimes in favor of lighter stuff for The New Yorker.… I have not collected any [advance] money as yet since the first statement hasn’t come in and I am in danger of going broke in the midst of plenty!”¹⁷

Mickey realized how difficult it would be for her to travel to Singapore and Java to research the Raffles book. Tensions were high in the region as the slow, inexorable drift to war continued. Japanese spies were busy everywhere, especially in Hong Kong. “The waiters, barmen, hairdressers and masseurs watched, listened, and reported assiduously,” wrote British historian Tim Carew.¹⁸ The staff of the Japanese consulate noted all military movements in and around the colony, dutifully sending daily intelligence reports to Tokyo. The real “star” of Japanese spying operations in Hong Kong was an army officer named Suzuki. Everybody knew Colonel Suzuki and why he was in town, yet few people took him or his mission seriously. When he left “on holidays” at the end of November 1941, he did so with the “details of the British defence plan down to the last strand of barbed wire,” according to Tim Carew.¹⁹ Suzuki’s information proved invaluable to Japanese commanders a week later when they began their assault on Hong Kong.

The colony was rife with rumors that crack units of the Japanese army were massing to the northwest, on the Chinese side of the frontier. Charles and other intelligence officers dutifully reported these developments to their superiors, who remained skeptical. Most senior British military planners felt that if the Japanese tiger pounced on Hong Kong, the attack would come by sea; an “impregnable” defense line of pillboxes, gun emplacements, and troops strung across the hills of the New Territory would deter any landward assault. How wrong this thinking was became apparent the moment fighting began.

For now, life in Hong Kong’s insular British community continued, even after the departure of many of the wives and children. The war, as described in radio reports and newspaper wire stories, seemed distant and unreal. Even more unreal was the continuing success of Hitler and his allies. On June 22, a German army three million strong launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union. On July 24, France’s Vichy government yielded to a Japanese ultimatum, surrendering French colonies throughout Indochina. The news was equally glum elsewhere.

Despite these developments, Mickey and other residents of Hong Kong carried on with the routine of their lives. They did so despite an influx of hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees “fleeing the bomb and bayonet of China’s invaders,” as one contemporary account noted.20 Most British citizens in Hong Kong still had little social contact with Chinese; Charles was an exception. He and Mickey had many Chinese friends. They sensed the anti-British sentiment among well-to-do Chinese, and Mickey was “homesick” for the China she had known in Shanghai. “My servants were Hong Kong servants,” she wrote, “May Road style, respectful and distant.”²¹ Ah King was uneasy whenever Mickey’s Chinese friends dropped by the flat. Once, when she invited a visiting Sikh policeman to tea, both men were acutely embarrassed. The Sikh friend confided that the people he was staying with had warned that if the Hong Kong police spotted him on the Peak he would be sent away.

Such blatant racism angered Mickey, who did not hesitate to speak her mind on the subject. Not that it did any good. No one listened to her; after all, she was a “foreign neutral” with no real involvement in the colony or in the turmoil that was raging around her. The only thing that really made her different was that unlike most of her friends, Mickey had not joined the exodus of women and children. In July, she received a visit from James and Mary Endicott and their four children, who reluctantly had decided to return home to Canada. Stephen Endicott, the eldest son, recalled meeting Mickey and Charles in Hong Kong. What struck him most was that Charles seemed “ill at ease.” This was understandable, given James Endicott’s occupation and his evangelical fervor. “I gathered [Charles] was married,” Stephen Endicott said, “but my parents didn’t discuss with Mickey the fact she was having his child.”²²

The Endicotts stayed several weeks in Hong Kong, waiting for their ship. In the interval, one of the Endicott boys fell ill with measles. He and his father stayed behind when the rest of the family departed on a Norwegian freighter. James Endicott and his son left in mid-August, sailing via Shanghai, where they visited some of Mickey’s friends, including Sinmay and Corin Bernfelt, the young Englishwoman Mickey had chummed with in Chungking. “Met with Corin and Sinmay. He had shaved and didn’t look quite so dignified, but more youthful,” Endicott reported in a letter to Mickey. “He had a slight paralytic stroke to the left side of his face, which spoiled the symmetry … but I could see the beauty of it. It is certainly a remarkable face. There is a naïve and childlike quality to his makeup. We talked a bit about your novel [Steps of the Sun], which [Sinmay] said had been ruined by the publisher. He claims it originally had a philosophy and real depth to it, but the U.S. publisher had made it ‘cheap.’ That was the word he used. Only the adventures of an American girl in the Orient.”23

Mickey smiled at that latter phrase, for her “adventures” were continuing at a bewildering pace. She was increasingly anxious as her baby’s projected early October due date drew nearer. Charles, fearing a Japanese attack and a bloody uprising against the British by embittered Sikh and Chinese dissidents, suggested Mickey go somewhere “safe” to give birth. She refused. Her place was at Charles’s side, she argued. That decision was not easy. Often in the dead of night, when the heat and her aching back kept her awake, a million questions ran through Mickey’s mind. How would she know when it was time to have the baby? What would happen to it if she died in childbirth? What would happen to her and to the baby if Charles was killed in the coming war? Where would she go? What would she do? What would her family back home say about all of this? Suddenly it was all overwhelming and bewildering.

Mickey’s angst heightened in the wake of Agnes Smedley’s departure. Agnes had agreed to visit the Hahns in Chicago to alert them to developments in Mickey’s life. The only American woman Mickey knew who was still in town was Charlotte Gower, an anthropology professor at Ling Nan University. Dr. Gower, bespectacled and scholarly, was surprisingly empathetic when Mickey told her about the baby. When Charles asked Gower to move in with Mickey during the last six weeks of her pregnancy, she agreed. Mickey was grateful for the female company, especially after she fell and sprained an ankle while getting out of a taxi.

It turned out that Gower was not Mickey’s only houseguest that fall. When Ah King’s wife and daughter, who lived across the bay in Kowloon, fell ill with typhoid fever, Mickey got them admitted to a hospital. They recovered, and Mickey paid the bill, “which was very low; about twelve Hong Kong dollars altogether, as I remember,” she recalled.²⁴ Afterward, Mickey invited the women to stay at her flat despite a landlord’s edict that forbade the families of servants from living with them. “I said to hell with the landlord,” Mickey explained. “It wasn’t a legal ruling anyway.”25

That act of kindness was returned in spades and helped save Mickey’s life, for it bought her Ah King’s undying gratitude and loyalty. Both proved invaluable in the difficult and dangerous days that lay ahead.