The Body is a Vessel

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

The body is a vessel

I am reading the WWII memoir of the New Yorker writer Emily Hahn. When the Hapanese occuy Hong Kong, she is living there with her two month old daughter. The father, her lover Charles Boxer, head of British Intelligence, is arrested and then, she believes, execulted.

When I draw her, I give Emily Hahn red hair, through the photos of her are black and white, because her writing makes her life so vivid to me.

In WWII, my mother is in the Women’s Army Corps. She’s stationed on a merchant marine ship sailing back and forth across the north Atlantic. Ships are sunk every day. I have nothing my mother wrote. Not a letter. Her few photos are black and white too. But when I imagine her this young, her hair is light brown.

In her books and in life, everyone calls Emily Hahn ‘Mickey.’

She is famous in Shanghai and later in Hong Kong for going to parties with a pet monkey named Mr. Mills.

That’s hard to match. My mother’s name was Mary.

But she had a Boston Terrier named Damnit. To save time, she told me, when she had to yell, ‘Damnit, get off the bed!’

Before the war in Shanghai, Mickey married the poet Shao Xumei, who another poet once called the most beautiful man in China.

In his poem “Woman” Shao Xumei writes:

I suspect you, woman, I suspect you just like

I suspect a resplendent rainbow in the sky

I do not know whether your red face is for me

Translated by Hal Swindall and Jicheng Sun

Before the war, while Mickey is in Shanghai, my mother survives a flood in Kentucky that washes away the house where she grew up in. Her grandmother drowns and she almost does too.

While living with Shao, Mickey takes up opium. “I was quite determined. It took me a year or so to become addicted,” she writes, “but I kept at it.” 

My mother drank Bourbon. There’s a photo of her at the end of a bar, all the other soldiers men. She is smiling, a glass in one hand. By the time I’m in school, she’s stopped smiling. She’s addicted to valium, which a doctor prescribed as a cure for unhappiness. She washed down the pills with Bourbon. 

I don’t why either of them chose a numbing addiction. My mother never told me. And it is too late to ask her now. Mickey doesn’t say in any of her books. Or rather, I don’t believe what she does say.

I wrote a memoir. I, too, know how to confess everything and still lie. 

I also wrote whole book of poems about the birth of my daughter, how my love for her is everything, how would do anything to protect her “In her fist, my glove red. This morning, that simple, this love. If I say wing, imagine the rest of the bird.”

But that is my version of the story. You would have to ask my daughter for hers. I wish I’d asked my mother for more of her story. 

Mickey moves to Hong Kong, leaving Shao and kicking her opium habit. She tells her new lover, Charles Boxer, she thinks a child would be a stabilizing influence but she isn’t sure she can have one.

“Nonsense,” he says, “I’ll give you one.” And he does. 

Meanwhile my father is somewhere in the Pacific, fighting island to island. After the war, when he and my mother finally meet, she’ll get pregnant too. The army offers her an abortion. But my father’s commanding officer orders him to marry her intead.

In their uniforms, Charles Boxer and my father look like the many of the men scattered across that world at war. They look so alike, they could be the same man. Or at least soldiers in the same bar. 

Using proof of her marriage to Shao, Mickey convinces the Japanese to let her stay in Hong Kong she knows if she is sent to the internment camp with the other Americans and British, where there is no medicine and little food, her daughter may die. 

The merchant marine ship my mother sails on is not a hospital ship and she is not a doctor or a nurse, but she is the officer in charge of bringing home soldiers who have lost their limbs or their minds.

There is barely enough food for the soldiers, less for the crew, and my mother, always skinny, loses so much weight she has to keep her trousers up with a knotted rope. 

The more I think about Emily Hahn, about Mickey, the less realistic my ideas about her become. 

Her life overlaps with my mother’s, blends. Maybe they met. Maybe they passed on the street in Hong Kong or met in a bar in New York. I imagine them as roommates, rivals, friends.

Maybe this is me on the bed with Mickey and not her daughter.

Maybe this is Mickey and not my mother looking out at the world.

Emily Hahn and her daughter survive the war. Charles Boxer was not executed so survives too. He and Hahn are married. My parents, though wounded in their own ways, marry. Considering the death toll of the war, these are happy endings.

Shao Xunmei survives the war too, but is imprisoned under the Communists. A friend says, “When he came out of jail, he was so thin, he looked just like a monkey.” Hahn does not learn of his death for years.

Still I cannot stop thinking of Emily Hahn pregnant in Hong Kong, the Japanese sure to arrive any day.

I think of my mother on her ship in the Atlantic. One day, a shell shocked soldier got a gun and shot her. He also shot and killed the Chaplain, who might or might not have been her lover. She showed me the blue scar in her shoulder where the bullet went in, a bullet that was still inside her.

“Our bodies are vessels,” she said.

I think about that moment.

Then I draw my mother with red hair.