Girl Reporters: The Newswomen of Old Shanghai

The ranks of the foreign journalists of Old Shanghai were mostly filled by hard-bitten men, but by the 1920s, some of the city’s best and most interesting correspondents were women, or as they were known then, “girl reporters”.

Born at the turn of the 20th century into a changing world, these women were the first generation of with the right to vote, access to birth control, and a college education. The girl reporters of Shanghai also had an extraordinary sense of adventure, traveling across the oceans, sans chaperone, to a land they’d never seen. They often came with neither funds nor jobs, but they were plucky, ambitious, and damn fine journalists.

When she arrived in 1922, Edna Lee Booker had a job lined up with the McTyiere School. She’d been bitten by the news bug at summer jobs at the Los Angeles Herald and San Francisco Call Bulletin, and quickly parlayed that into a job as a girl reporter for the American-owned China Press newspaper.

At first, she dutifully covered the women’s teas and parades assigned to her, but what she really wanted was to be a war correspondent, so she ignored the harrumphing of the old hands at the China Press, and went off to cover the internecine wars that were breaking out all over China.

Edna Lee Booker went into battlefields, hitched rides on troop trains, interviewed the warlords, found Sun Yat-sen fleeing Guangzhou after his government fell, and hoisted herself onto his gunboat in the Pearl River for an interview. She was in the middle of the May 30th demonstrations, and she knew how to leverage being a woman to get scoops: she scored an interview with the powerful warlord Zhang Zuolin—the first woman to interview him–by charming his playboy son; she moved into the women’s quarters of the warlord Wu Peifu for an exclusive. She played tennis with first lady Mei Ling Soong and attended her wedding.

Edna Lee Booker met and married her husband, Asia Realty executive John Potter, not long after she arrived in Shanghai. They lived here for 20 years, with their two children, in a 10-servant household on Columbia Circle, hosting mah-jongg parties, going to Victor Sassoon’s balls, and playing bridge at the Columbia Country Club between chasing scoops. Booker departed Shanghai in 1940 with their daughter Patty; John stayed behind and was interned by the Japanese. After his release and repatriation, they settled in Long Island, in a house they named Pao Hai (Bohai).

Edna Lee Booker’s memoirs: News Is My Job; Flight From China

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Emily Hahn arrived in Shanghai in 1935. Adventure suited her: she had spent two years in the Belgian Congo, crossed Central Africa alone on foot, and was the first women to graduate with a mining engineering degree from the University of Madison-Wisconsin because she’d been told the female mind couldn’t grasp engineering concepts (an avid reader and writer, she’d originally wanted to study writing).

Hahn, traveling with her sister Helen, had only intended to stay for a few weeks. All that changed when “Madame Salon”, Bernardine Fritz, the city’s famous salon host swept her up in Shanghai’s social whirl. Hahn became a regular at Cathay Hotel owner Victor Sassoon’s parties and on his houseboat, and met the Chinese artists and intellectuals who frequented Fritz’s salons, including Cambridge-educated poet and publisher Shao Xunmei, who–scandalously–became her lover.

Determined to stay, she got a job as a “girl reporter” with the British-owned North China Daily News, rented a flat on Jiangsu Road (and was delighted that it was clearly in a former brothel), and in short order, acquired a gibbon and with Shao, an opium habit. She quickly became bored with the typical girl reporter stories of the foreign bubble, especially as comes to be fascinated with the Chinese world she sees with Shao.

Despite concerns about finances, Hahn left the North China Daily News to freelance: a contributor to the New Yorker since 1929, and in Shanghai, her vignettes of Mr Pan Heh-ven—a thinly disguised Shao—proved enormously popular. She contributed book reviews and articles to the journal dedicated to intercultural understanding, T’sien Hsia, published by Shao; later they launched two short-lived bilingual magazines, Vox and Candid Comment.

Emily Hahn left Shanghai in mid-1939, intending to return, but never did. She kept writing, though: over 50 books and more than 200 articles, and went into her office at the New Yorker almost until the day she died.

Emily Hahn’s memoir: China to Me: A Partial Biography;

Biography: Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn by Ken Cuthbertson

Adelaide Su-Ling Young was the wealthy, glamorous daughter of Ming Tai Chen, the owner of the China Doll nightclub in New York. She came to China on her honeymoon in 1934, with her new husband, the Chinese-American explorer Jack Young. That honeymoon was a nine-month collecting trip in Sichuan for the Museum of Natural History in New York. Although prior to this, Su-Ling had never done anything more arduous than being a camp counselor in New Hampshire, she became an adept explorer and naturalist, claimed by both China and the US as the first woman to explore Sichuan.

She settled in Shanghai between collecting trips, where she wrote for both the British-owned North China Daily News–Emily Hahn was a colleague–and for Arthur de Carle Sowerby’s China Journal, where she contributed to the explorer’s column.

It was in Shanghai where Su-Ling met Ruth Harkness, who was on a mission with her brother-in-law Quentin to bring a live panda back to the U.S. Su-Ling gave her sage advice about being a woman in the wilderness, and when Harkness succeeded in capturing a live baby panda, she named it Su-Ling.

Su Ling left China in 1949, and was a DJ in Taiwan for the American Armed Forces Network Radio Taiwan, before returning to the United States.

New Yorker Irene Corbally started out as 20-year-old cub reporter in Syracuse, and followed her dream to Paris, where she became fashion editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, she decided overnight to leave her job and her boyfriend to join her best friend in Paris who’s sailing for Shanghai the next day.

In Shanghai, with an introduction from a helpful new acquaintance to an editor at the Evening Star, she becomes the paper’s girl reporter. The Star is the China Press’ afternoon paper, located in the same building, and on her memorable first day on the job, she meets Edna Lee Booker—girl reporter for the China Press–who takes her to city editor Dinty Doyle’s wedding. There, she meets her future husband, newspaperman Bert Kuhn (who also works undercover for US Naval intelligence).

Kuhn’s stories ranged from covering birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger’s visit to Shanghai, the US army’s round the world flight, police ridealongs to ferret out opium smugglers, and uncovering a mysterious organization working to reclaim China for the Chinese.

But she is perhaps most famous for her historical first: Irene Kuhn was the first voice heard on the radio in China. Recognizing that radio stations were competition for news consumers, the China Press opened its own station. Station KRC began broadcasting from the China Press offices on December 15, 1924, with Irene reading the news, provided by British Reuters, with the Chinese daily Shun Pao providing market and stock reports and Chinese commentary.

In 1925, Kuhn left with her baby daughter for a five-month holiday in the U.S., but en route to China, she received the news that her husband Bert had died, somewhat mysteriously, back in Shanghai. Kuhn turned back, and returned to New York, where she continued to work as a journalist, screenwriter, and publicist.

Irene Kuhn’s memoir: Assigned to Adventure

There were more! To find out more about the foreign correspondents of Old Shanghai, join us on October 6, 2024

Sunday October 6, 10am DATELINE SHANGHAI: The Foreign Correspondents of Old Shanghai / RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers/ Much of the Shanghai history we know comes from the hardworking, hard playing foreign correspondents of old Shanghai: their newspaper articles and memoirs gave us the first draft of Shanghai’s history. They were remarkable men and women, whose own stories would make great copy, as they raced into war zones, climbed aboard gunships, and gathered news at Shanghai’s most famous brothel. They covered remarkable stories, from the Opium Wars to the Communist Revolution, the Japanese occupation to tales of warlords, gangsters, madams, and spies. On this walk, we’ll trace their footsteps, tell their stories, visit the sites of their newspapers and their watering holes, and see where the big stories they covered unfolded.