She made it to Dar es Salaam, of course, where she horrified the British colonists by mixing with the Greeks, Argentines and others classified as "not white."
Next, and to fit this all into one post, I have to rush, she went with her sister to Japan, then to Shanghai (where she became an opium addict—which she writes about in detail), then a prisoner of the Japanese in Hong Kong with her daughter—her husband by now (although she doesn't talk about this) being the chief British spy on the island.
This was the life of a girl from a conventional, if education-valuing, family from St Louis, Missouri. So when she came home from the Congo and her parents heard her arranging to go dancing with an old friend. She stops short at the look on her mother's face ...
'You're calling for him?' she demanded, shrilly incredulous.
'You're going into a public place, a hotel, and ask for a man? At the desk?'
My jaw dropped. For years I had been living on my own—sometimes without excitement, but more often on the verge of disaster, financial or otherwise. I looked at Mother; Mother looked at me. She also began to cry.
'What will they think of you?' she asked tragically. 'Whatever will those people take you for?'
Hahn changes her arrangements to avoid upsetting her mother, this time, but it beautifully illustrates how far and bravely she travelled—utterly inspiring stuff!
Article comments
1 - DrPat
I call that last episode "traveler's disjunct." It is familiar to anyone (male or female) who has journeyed widely in the world, in returning to the stay-at-home environment. People who "live in furnished souls," as e e cummings put it, can only see your traveler's prspective as a challenge to their own (narrow) knowledge.
BTW, Hahn's first journey to an alien land was surely her time at Whiskey Tech studying mining engineering...
2 - Natalie
I haven't heard it called that before; I was introduced to the concept of "reverse culture shock" when I went to be an Australian Volunteer Abroad (vaguely comparable to the Peace Corp or VSO). We were warned we'd get culture shock when we got to our posting, AND when we went home again. (I solved the problem by not going home.)
As for the mining engineering, as an agricultural science graduate - I was only 17, that's my only explanation for the insanity - I can only agree!
3 - Temple Stark
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