The Last Puritan in Shanghai: The Faded Romance of China Trade Finance and the Queerly Transnational Melancholy of Emily Hahn’s Wartime Opium Smoking

Abstract

In 1936 the author and journalist Emily “Mickey” Hahn (1905-1997) reviewed George Santayana’s The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1935) for the English-language monthly T’ien Hsia while living in Shanghai. The essay considers the legacy of the 19th-Century China Trade as a context for understanding Santayana’s memoir and Hahn’s situated critical response to it. To do so the chapter explains how the nineteenth-century mercantile biography presented a national romance of globally extensive free trade. This allegorical bildungsroman charted the rise of a commercial patriarch who ventured to China on a quest to secure a capital foundation for his family in New England. The linear narrative of individual commercial heroism straightened the complexity of global finance capital, inaugurating patrilineal vectors of China Trade fortune that promised national free trade futurity. Santayana and Hahn resist the commercial heroism of the mercantile biography, but in very different ways. Theories of gender related to queer senses of time and personal history help explain their different perspectives on the US China Trade and the role of opium in building merchant fortunes.