Well the title says it all so don't miss it: even though the author was a journalist who lived in China between 1935 and 1943, the reader will not find any sweeping historical analysis of the political or military situation there during these agitated years. Even though she met many prominent figures during the course of her stay, the book reads more like the chronicle of the daily life of Emily Hahn, an original and a socialite. The first half of her story is set in Shanghai, the second in Hong Kong, with a few months in Chongqing in between. I found the Shanghai part a bit dull. Her Hong Kong years make for more interesting reading, especially her account of the Japanese occupation - and how she dealt with it by cleverly extracting favors from the occupants without compromising herself.
I was expecting to find something about Mao's communists. After all, the book covers a key period of the CCP's history and was written in 1944 by a reporter who went as far as writing a biography of the Soong sisters in 1939. Well, Emily Hahn mentions them briefly, but it's simply to insist on the fact that she knows nothing about them, hinting that there is not much to know anyway. Which is probably why Edgar Snow is remembered today much better than Emily Hahn on the subject of China.
Sixty years after, only one aspect of the book still stands out as remarkable to me: how this fiercely independent woman eventually became a mother at 36 and managed to bring up her baby girl alone despite the difficulties of occupation. So much for Chinese history...
The publisher's backpage note about the author presents Emily Hahn as a writer who revolutionized the Victorian era, which sounds a bit funny given that she was born in 1905, a few years after Queen Victoria's death.