The writing glamour girl of Emily Hahn, "Mickey" (she hates formalities), has lived and learned from nine years' excited rushing about in China's foreign port cities and in its wartime capital, Chungking. She has crowded more escapades, gossip, parties, personalities and men into her enthusiastic life than the reader can keep successful track of, and cheerfully sets some of it down for her fellow-Americans. Miss Hahn was clearly not in a hurry to get out of Hong Kong, waiting around in busy good humor and occasional enjoyment until the last possible moment for repatriation on the Gripsholm. When news of her imminent return to America preceded her every honest female among the "old China hands" groaned, and the dishonest ones gave themselves over to the prickly joy of tearing her down.

The report goes that Mickey still looks like a humdinger, whooshes about gaily with countless friends, shows disappointingly few signs of weariness or wear, and remains a vital, clever and all-too-independent creature through it all. Lacking a sense of privacy seems to be one of Emily Hahn's failings, although few readers of her "partial autobiography" will complain about it. At one point she resolves: "I would have a lock that worked on my bedroom door." She doesn't.

Like other American expatriates in the Thirties, Mickey takes pride in tweaking Mr. Babbitt's nose, sometimes confusing it with Mr. America's. But she is franker than the Left-Bankers in Paris ever managed to appear in print, and so much less the esthete or littérateur that she naively relishes the veriest trivia of her personal history, and suffers no deletions from a supercritical mental censor. Miss Hann confesses how often she found herself "bemused" by Chinese ladies. She is ever more deliciously bemused by herself, and since she is a good salesman there are infectious times between reader and author, when reader murmurs subvocally, "Atta girl!" or "You've got to hand it to her!" For she possesses not only that impossible energy which is often taken as a symbol for Americans in other countries; she is courageous, generous, intelligently curious about people's drives, their loves, their aches and pains. She is also capable of loyalty, and of directness in speech and action which might seem tactless, unsubtle, or even stupid to Europeans, but which is economical in the long run, and very appealing to American taste.

Since the book is loosely organized, and often not deftly written, there is bound to be some confusion about whom Miss Hahn is talking in the welter of whoms. Only a surgical operation would reveal, for instance, the date of her departure from China. It is worse than that if the reader hopes for light on the complicated maze of economic, political and military events comprising the Japanese war on the Chinese mainland. With a flair for the social and the personal, Mickey manages to provide interesting details about the habits of different "sets," or individuals, in Free and Occupied China, both Chinese and Japanese. But whether it is friend or foe, she has an unfailing attraction to rank, to power, to importance.

It must be said for Mickey that once she finds it she does her best to conquer it, and, if possible later, to diminish its own stuffy belief in itself. But there the attraction is, and that has something to do with her more serious political venture - her book on the Soong sisters. This peculiarly sentimental political project begins, in a way, with the beginning of Miss Hahn's narrative, in Shanghai. She is leading a helter-skelter life, first writing interviews for a local newspaper, then editing her own paper Candid Comment with the substantial help of Sinmay Zau, the aristocratic Chinese intellectual, who is the first of her lovers the reader is rapidly to meet. When we encounter Sinmay, he is all-important to her and wistfully described as wearing traditional, dark Chinese robes, set off by his beautiful, pale face. Later he takes his place in her order of values after her pet gibbons, thus: "Because of the book I had deserted the gibbons and Sinmay." (Incidentally, the attachment for apes and gibbons which fills paragraph after paragraph is a kind of screwy, slightly eccentric background for Mickey's flamboyant career in China. She deliberately ties the gibbons to her frustrated love for children, and it is only after she has had a baby that the much diapered, bibbed, tuckered and fur-capeleted gibbons begin to "float" out of the text.)

Nevertheless, Sinmay and Miss Hahn, in the great splurge of their early role as "famous lovers," known up and down the coast of China, go through an informal "marriage," reportedly with the approval of Sinmay's Chinese wife and children. Sinmay is thus her Chinese "husband," and in this role serves her doubly well first introducing her to Mme. Kung, who becomes official guardian angel of the biography, and later providing a convenient excuse for resisting internment in Camp Stanley when other Americans are being rounded up in Hong Kong. At the time Miss Hahn is leaning heavily on the excuse of her Chinese "citizenship" she is even more deeply involved in another informal near-marriage arrangement with Charles Boxer, a British major, who is father of her "planned" child. It is Sinmay who is her cultural and political guide to China in the early years of her visit. He begins to make his exit from her affections on their joint trip to Hong Kong to meet Mme. Kung.

Once there, in the British colony, Miss Hahn suffers a sea-change which she is not quite honest about, pretending only that Sinmay is absurdly jealous of her sorties with the British which exclude him because color line is drawn in Hong Kong which does not exist in Shanghai. Although she strikes a pose in favor of Sinmay, the reader feels that she has again felt the fatal susceptibility to whomever is important, and that Sinmay will look a little different to her from that time on. And her men do become increasingly conventional choices: white, British, and even outwardly formal, like Boxer who is unquestionably in the best diplomatic set in Hong Kong. It is curious, though or isn't it? - that once she gives way to the contradictions of her nature and becomes intimately part of the lives of fairly formal gents, they begin to act strangely, with an odd melodrama beautifully suited to her own. In any case, the book on the Soongs is the stabilizing, gravitational force in the nine-year Chinese adventure. For it, Miss Hahn leaves parties and people, clothes, hairdressers and healthful climate. Flown into the interior, to Chungking, she even manages to fall a little in love with the misty, damp city built on rock-but it is more somber and less rhapsodical than her passion for Shanghai. In Chungking she takes her place as official (but not publicly acknowledged) biographer: she follows Mme. Chiang to graduation exercises, country home and assorted celebrations. Then Jap bombs come in earnest, and she moves over to the south side, where the inconvenience of visiting anybody helps to make her sit down and, as she says, work "like mad." She admits that her close connections with the Soong sisters (or at least with two of them, Mme. Kung and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek) predisposes her to write favorably of the Chungking government as well as its leading personalities.

With characteristic definiteness she writes: The average American today, the one who takes a sympathetic interest in China, is full of hooey through no fault of his own. He thinks that the guerrillas are the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in China. He thinks the woods are full of them. Actually the regular soldiers of China can put up a pretty good fight too. Actually, though as a symbol the guerrillas are inspiring and invaluable, the great burden of resistance has rested on the regular army. What else can you expect, considering the small handfuls of guerrillas and the material they haven't got. Much of their efforts is lost, anyway, because of inter-guerrilla arguments and jealousy and hijacking. I am not trying to them down, Agnes Smedley and Ed Snow and General Carlson and the rest of you; I'm only trying to undo some of the harm you have unwittingly done your friends. You have worked people up into a state where they are going to be awfully mad pretty soon. They are heading for a big disappointment. She adds that since most newspaper men in China know next to nothing about the Communists, even if they occasionally are allowed to visit their information offices, "the chances of seeing what really goes on among the Chinese Communists are even less than those of seeing the inside of Russia." Being no fool, Miss Hahn knows that her forte is writing about herself and people, not about "movements." Arriving at natural affections and emotions by a long and sometimes freakish route, by the time she is ready to leave China she has convinced the reader that something real has been experienced in the region of her heart.

About her love for Charles (and his for her) much remains baffling. But she shows the usual marks of devotion during his hospitalization and imprisonment, smuggling him food, running miles through Hong Kong streets during bombing attacks to get to him, trundling Carola in to see daddy on rare permitted visits, dressed in her baby best. OF course she wouldn't be herself if, even in these trying months in occupied Hong Kong, with Charles wounded and distraught by the spectacle of "the end of empire," there were no gossip, intrigue, dinner dates and parties. There are, with high Japanese officers. And they are always made possible by keenly noted "extenuating" circumstances. The Hahn luck holds: she manages to have a little more to wear and to eat, slightly more protection from the Japanese and considerably more gay repartee with them than any other repatriated woman has yet reported. She says she loves to be boss, but she plainly has the knack of simulating deference when necessary. The truth is, Mickey, like "My Last Duchess," tends to like whomever she looks on, and she is not used to lowering her eyes. No. Emily Hahn has not been cut out for martyrdom, for inflexible principle, for anguish, for great roles. Nor, for that matter, good writing. But she's as good as the best over a martini. Nobody will be so dour as to resent her autointoxication.

The writing glamour girl of Emily Hahn, "Mickey" (she hates formalities), has lived and learned from nine years' excited rushing about in China's foreign port cities and in its wartime capital, Chungking. She has crowded more escapades, gossip, parties, personalities and men into her enthusiastic life than the reader can keep successful track of, and cheerfully sets some of it down for her fellow-Americans. Miss Hahn was clearly not in a hurry to get out of Hong Kong, waiting around in busy good humor and occasional enjoyment until the last possible moment for repatriation on the Gripsholm. When news of her imminent return to America preceded her every honest female among the "old China hands" groaned, and the dishonest ones gave themselves over to the prickly joy of tearing her down.

The report goes that Mickey still looks like a humdinger, whooshes about gaily with countless friends, shows disappointingly few signs of weariness or wear, and remains a vital, clever and all-too-independent creature through it all. Lacking a sense of privacy seems to be one of Emily Hahn's failings, although few readers of her "partial autobiography" will complain about it. At one point she resolves: "I would have a lock that worked on my bedroom door." She doesn't.

Like other American expatriates in the Thirties, Mickey takes pride in tweaking Mr. Babbitt's nose, sometimes confusing it with Mr. America's. But she is franker than the Left-Bankers in Paris ever managed to appear in print, and so much less the esthete or littérateur that she naively relishes the veriest trivia of her personal history, and suffers no deletions from a supercritical mental censor. Miss Hann confesses how often she found herself "bemused" by Chinese ladies. She is ever more deliciously bemused by herself, and since she is a good salesman there are infectious times between reader and author, when reader murmurs subvocally, "Atta girl!" or "You've got to hand it to her!" For she possesses not only that impossible energy which is often taken as a symbol for Americans in other countries; she is courageous, generous, intelligently curious about people's drives, their loves, their aches and pains. She is also capable of loyalty, and of directness in speech and action which might seem tactless, unsubtle, or even stupid to Europeans, but which is economical in the long run, and very appealing to American taste.

Since the book is loosely organized, and often not deftly written, there is bound to be some confusion about whom Miss Hahn is talking in the welter of whoms. Only a surgical operation would reveal, for instance, the date of her departure from China. It is worse than that if the reader hopes for light on the complicated maze of economic, political and military events comprising the Japanese war on the Chinese mainland. With a flair for the social and the personal, Mickey manages to provide interesting details about the habits of different "sets," or individuals, in Free and Occupied China, both Chinese and Japanese. But whether it is friend or foe, she has an unfailing attraction to rank, to power, to importance.

It must be said for Mickey that once she finds it she does her best to conquer it, and, if possible later, to diminish its own stuffy belief in itself. But there the attraction is, and that has something to do with her more serious political venture - her book on the Soong sisters. This peculiarly sentimental political project begins, in a way, with the beginning of Miss Hahn's narrative, in Shanghai. She is leading a helter-skelter life, first writing interviews for a local newspaper, then editing her own paper Candid Comment with the substantial help of Sinmay Zau, the aristocratic Chinese intellectual, who is the first of her lovers the reader is rapidly to meet. When we encounter Sinmay, he is all-important to her and wistfully described as wearing traditional, dark Chinese robes, set off by his beautiful, pale face. Later he takes his place in her order of values after her pet gibbons, thus: "Because of the book I had deserted the gibbons and Sinmay." (Incidentally, the attachment for apes and gibbons which fills paragraph after paragraph is a kind of screwy, slightly eccentric background for Mickey's flamboyant career in China. She deliberately ties the gibbons to her frustrated love for children, and it is only after she has had a baby that the much diapered, bibbed, tuckered and fur-capeleted gibbons begin to "float" out of the text.)

Nevertheless, Sinmay and Miss Hahn, in the great splurge of their early role as "famous lovers," known up and down the coast of China, go through an informal "marriage," reportedly with the approval of Sinmay's Chinese wife and children. Sinmay is thus her Chinese "husband," and in this role serves her doubly well first introducing her to Mme. Kung, who becomes official guardian angel of the biography, and later providing a convenient excuse for resisting internment in Camp Stanley when other Americans are being rounded up in Hong Kong. At the time Miss Hahn is leaning heavily on the excuse of her Chinese "citizenship" she is even more deeply involved in another informal near-marriage arrangement with Charles Boxer, a British major, who is father of her "planned" child. It is Sinmay who is her cultural and political guide to China in the early years of her visit. He begins to make his exit from her affections on their joint trip to Hong Kong to meet Mme. Kung.

Once there, in the British colony, Miss Hahn suffers a sea-change which she is not quite honest about, pretending only that Sinmay is absurdly jealous of her sorties with the British which exclude him because color line is drawn in Hong Kong which does not exist in Shanghai. Although she strikes a pose in favor of Sinmay, the reader feels that she has again felt the fatal susceptibility to whomever is important, and that Sinmay will look a little different to her from that time on. And her men do become increasingly conventional choices: white, British, and even outwardly formal, like Boxer who is unquestionably in the best diplomatic set in Hong Kong. It is curious, though or isn't it? - that once she gives way to the contradictions of her nature and becomes intimately part of the lives of fairly formal gents, they begin to act strangely, with an odd melodrama beautifully suited to her own. In any case, the book on the Soongs is the stabilizing, gravitational force in the nine-year Chinese adventure. For it, Miss Hahn leaves parties and people, clothes, hairdressers and healthful climate. Flown into the interior, to Chungking, she even manages to fall a little in love with the misty, damp city built on rock-but it is more somber and less rhapsodical than her passion for Shanghai. In Chungking she takes her place as official (but not publicly acknowledged) biographer: she follows Mme. Chiang to graduation exercises, country home and assorted celebrations. Then Jap bombs come in earnest, and she moves over to the south side, where the inconvenience of visiting anybody helps to make her sit down and, as she says, work "like mad." She admits that her close connections with the Soong sisters (or at least with two of them, Mme. Kung and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek) predisposes her to write favorably of the Chungking government as well as its leading personalities.

With characteristic definiteness she writes: The average American today, the one who takes a sympathetic interest in China, is full of hooey through no fault of his own. He thinks that the guerrillas are the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in China. He thinks the woods are full of them. Actually the regular soldiers of China can put up a pretty good fight too. Actually, though as a symbol the guerrillas are inspiring and invaluable, the great burden of resistance has rested on the regular army. What else can you expect, considering the small handfuls of guerrillas and the material they haven't got. Much of their efforts is lost, anyway, because of inter-guerrilla arguments and jealousy and hijacking. I am not trying to them down, Agnes Smedley and Ed Snow and General Carlson and the rest of you; I'm only trying to undo some of the harm you have unwittingly done your friends. You have worked people up into a state where they are going to be awfully mad pretty soon. They are heading for a big disappointment. She adds that since most newspaper men in China know next to nothing about the Communists, even if they occasionally are allowed to visit their information offices, "the chances of seeing what really goes on among the Chinese Communists are even less than those of seeing the inside of Russia." Being no fool, Miss Hahn knows that her forte is writing about herself and people, not about "movements." Arriving at natural affections and emotions by a long and sometimes freakish route, by the time she is ready to leave China she has convinced the reader that something real has been experienced in the region of her heart.

About her love for Charles (and his for her) much remains baffling. But she shows the usual marks of devotion during his hospitalization and imprisonment, smuggling him food, running miles through Hong Kong streets during bombing attacks to get to him, trundling Carola in to see daddy on rare permitted visits, dressed in her baby best. OF course she wouldn't be herself if, even in these trying months in occupied Hong Kong, with Charles wounded and distraught by the spectacle of "the end of empire," there were no gossip, intrigue, dinner dates and parties. There are, with high Japanese officers. And they are always made possible by keenly noted "extenuating" circumstances. The Hahn luck holds: she manages to have a little more to wear and to eat, slightly more protection from the Japanese and considerably more gay repartee with them than any other repatriated woman has yet reported. She says she loves to be boss, but she plainly has the knack of simulating deference when necessary. The truth is, Mickey, like "My Last Duchess," tends to like whomever she looks on, and she is not used to lowering her eyes. No. Emily Hahn has not been cut out for martyrdom, for inflexible principle, for anguish, for great roles. Nor, for that matter, good writing. But she's as good as the best over a martini. Nobody will be so dour as to resent her autointoxication.

Emily Hahn, an early feminist and a prolific author who wrote 54 books and more than 200 articles for The New Yorker, died yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 92, said her daughter, Carola Boxer Vecchio.

Ms. Hahn was known for her writings about her adventurous life in the Far East before World War II and for her books on such diverse subjects as Africa, D. H. Lawrence and apes. (Ms. Hahn kept gibbons.) She also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter during the 1920's.

Over the course of her career, Ms. Hahn wrote about Chinese cooking, about feminism (''Once Upon a Pedestal: An Informal History of Women's Lib,'' 1974) and about diamonds (''Diamond: The Spectacular Story of Earth's Rarest Treasure and Man's Greatest Greed,'' 1956). Another work was ''The Islands: America's Imperial Adventures in the Philippines'' (1981). In her later years, Ms. Hahn wrote several books about animals, including ''Eve and the Apes'' (1988), about women who owned apes. In ''Look Who's Talking'' (1988), she examined communication between beasts, and between beasts and humans.

Emily Hahn was born in St. Louis, where her father, Isaac Newton Hahn, was a salesman. At a time when few middle-class women had careers, she was determined to be a mining engineer. But her adviser at the University of Wisconsin told her, she once said, that the female mind was ''incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics.'' That remark only hardened her resolve, and she stayed on, graduating in 1926. She is believed to be the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering at the university. She worked for a year for the Deko Oil Company of St. Louis but grew bored with the work.

Her career as an author began in 1924, when she took a trip across the country in a Model T Ford, and her letters home so captivated her brother-in-law that he sent them to The New Yorker, which bought some of them. In 1930, her first book, ''Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction -- A Beginner's Handbook,'' was published.

Inspired by Charles A. Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic, Ms. Hahn decided she wanted to be ''free,'' she said, and in 1930 she embarked on a journey to Africa, where she worked in a hospital and lived with a tribe of Pygmies.

In 1935, The New Yorker hired her to be its China correspondent. China was the place, Ms. Hahn once said, that had the greatest impact on her life. She arrived during the period of the Communist revolution and the war against the Japanese, and made the acquaintance of Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai. She also became a confidante of the Soong sisters, one of whom married Sun Yat-sen, another Chiang Kai-shek, and in 1941 published ''The Soong Sisters,'' a biography.

While in China, Ms. Hahn had an affair with Sinmay Zau, an aristocratic intellectual whom she described as her ''cultural and political guide to China.'' She also spent time in opium dens, eventually becoming addicted to the drug, she said.

''I was young and I thought it was romantic to smoke opium,'' she told The Washington Post. ''I was quite determined. It took me a year or so to become addicted, but I kept at it.'' Later, she said, ''I went to a man who hypnotized me and sure enough, I didn't want it any more.''

In Hong Kong, Ms. Hahn met Maj. Charles Boxer, a British intelligence officer in the Far East. He was already married, but they began an affair. In 1940 she became pregnant. At a time when such pregnancies were often kept secret, she chose not only to keep her baby daughter, Carola, but to proclaim her birth proudly.

Soon after their daughter's birth, Major Boxer was captured by the Japanese and put in a prison camp. For some months, Ms. Hahn brought food to him there, avoiding repatriation by claiming to be Eurasian. But fearing for the safety of her daughter, she fled Hong Kong in 1943. Major Boxer survived his captivity. Ms. Hahn married him in 1945, and they had a second child, Amanda. Ms. Hahn described her wartime romance in her 1944 book, ''China to Me: A Partial Autobiography.''

At The New Yorker, Ms. Hahn became one of the few writers to work for all four of its editors, Harold Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. She and her husband often lived an ocean apart, with Ms. Hahn, because of British tax laws, spending no more than 91 days a year in England while Major Boxer remained at their home in Little Gaddesden, Hertfordshire.

Ms. Hahn continued writing until the end of her life, including an article about Amanda's dog published this month in a British magazine. In December, Ms. Hahn had her first poem published in The New Yorker, ''Wind Blowing.''

Ms. Hahn is survived by her husband; her daughters, Carola, of Jackson Heights, Queens, and Amanda, of London; two grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

''My younger daughter once rebuked me for not being the kind of mother one reads about,'' Ms. Hahn once told an interviewer. ''I asked her what kind that was, and she said, the kind who sits home and bakes cakes. I told her to go and find anybody who sits at home and bakes cakes.''

"I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice.... A more important freedom was that which made it possible to travel," wrote Emily Hahn in China to Me (1944).

In 1930, after making some money from her first book, Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction (1930), Hahn went to Africa, "young and impulsive, because I'd always wanted to". She was in the Belgian Congo, living with the pygmies in the Itari Forest, when she discovered that Britain had gone off the gold standard and the money she was expecting from England had become devalued. Undeterred she remained in Africa, staying with an anthropologist and reading his library which was limited to African exploration, until one day the Encyclopaedia Britannica arrived, by canoe, in two huge packing cases. This enforced stay suited her. "I have always preferred reading to work."

She wrote out her Congo experiences as fact in Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North (1933) and as fiction in With Naked Foot (1934). She returned to Africa in the 1950s and again in the 1960s drawn by the same feeling expressed by Pliny: "There is always something new from Africa."

"Mickey" Hahn was born in 1905 in St Louis, Missouri; her father was a hardware salesman and her mother a suffragette. She and her siblings were brought up to be independent and to think for themselves and she became the first woman to take a degree in mining engineering from the University of Wisconsin. She went on to study mineralogy at Columbia and anthropology at Oxford, working in between as an oil geologist, a teacher and a guide in New Mexico before she arrived in New York where she took up writing seriously. Letters that she had written to her brother-in-law were published in the New Yorker in 1929 and she continued to write for the magazine, under four different editors, on a variety of topics until a few weeks before her death.

In 1935 she travelled to China for a short visit and ended up by staying nine years in the Far East. She loved living in Shanghai and met both Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, eventually writing a biography of the Soong sisters, published in 1941. She became the lover of Zau Sinmay, an intellectual, whom she particularly liked for his overwhelming curiosity about everything, she felt it rubbed off on her, and together they founded the English-language magazine Candid Comment.

She maintained that where she lived was unimportant to her: "I don't pay attention to my surroundings. I really don't. I don't bother." Perhaps it was to satisfy her maternal instinct that one day when she saw a gibbon, Mr Mills, in the Shanghai Pet Store she went home, having bought him, in a state of "hysterical happiness". During her time in China she learned to smoke opium, persisting for two years until, inevitably, she became addicted; she was then cured by a hypnotist. China to Me is candid, readable and a fascinating social document of the time. Hahn wrote it in just five weeks.

In Hong Kong Hahn met Major Charles R. Boxer, a married British intelligence officer; in 1940 she became pregnant and they had a daughter, Carola. Boxer was captured by the Japanese after being wounded in the attack on Hong Kong; Hahn visited him as much as possible in his prisoner-of-war camp, until she and Carola were repatriated to the United States in 1943. On his release they got married and in 1946 they arrived in Dorset where she called herself a "bad housewife" since, in reply to his concern about money, she said: "Then let's not spend money on anything else, except books."

Although Boxer continued to live in England, where he became Professor of Portuguese at London University, Hahn lived mostly in America as a tax exile. This remarkable woman wrote about 60 books on a wide range of subjects: biographies of people as diverse as Mary Queen of Scots, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, Mabel Dodge Luhan, James Brooke of Sarawak, the Soong sisters, Raffles of Singapore and Chiang Kai-shek and books about cookery, zoos, diamonds, natural history and travel as well as novels and books for children.

Emily Hahn, traveller and writer: born St Louis, Missouri 14 January 1905; married Charles Boxer (two daughters); died New York 18 February 1997.

Charles R. Boxer, who was Britain's chief spy in Hong Kong in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II; a prominent historian of colonial empires although he never earned a college degree and a lead player in one of the most flamboyantly public love stories of the 1940's, died April 27 in a nursing home near his country residence northwest of London. He was 96.

His achievements ranged from writing 330 books and articles about the origins and growth of the Dutch and Portuguese to holding professorial chairs at five universities on both sides of the Atlantic to collecting a celebrated library of rare books. Always, he came at things his own way: as a boy, he taught himself Portuguese and Dutch in order to satisfy his curiosity about how Japan, his initial and principal fascination, was first affected by Europeans.

But it was Mr. Boxer's breathtakingly public romance with Emily Hahn, the author of 52 books and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, that accounts for most of the yellowing clips in newspaper morgues. He was married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch, a woman commonly called the most beautiful in Hong Kong, when he met and had an affair with Ms. Hahn, The New Yorker's China correspondent, who herself was involved with one of China's leading intellectuals, Sinmay Zau.

Ms. Hahn made the new romance -- not to mention her avid opium addiction -- a topic of discussion in her 1944 best seller, ''China to Me.'' She told how she fell for Mr. Boxer immediately, even though she was on friendly terms with his wife.

Today, the Great American Road Trip is a common rite of passage for college students and graduates. But in 1924, before there was an Interstate Highway System, interstate automobile travel was a rare adventure. That year, two Badgers undertook a special cross-country drive that made headlines and history - and forever altered the trajectories of both travelers' lives.

In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker took 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes to complete the first-ever American cross-country car trip, driving from San Francisco to New York. Twenty years later, most travelers were still unaccustomed to moving long distances by car. Most American roads were still unpaved, highways were not yet numbered, and the country's first "motor hotels" wouldn't open until 1925.

Yet the concept of Hahn and Miller's driving trip wasn't quite as radical or treacherous as it seemed to Hahn's sophomore date. Before the roommates' quest, Luella Bates had already gained a modicum of fame in Wisconsin as the "first girl truck driver" after she was hired by the Four Wheel Drive Auto Company in Clintonville. And Jazz Age Americans were far more captivated by airplanes than automobiles, anyway; female pilots like Bessie Coleman and Lillian Boyer were barrel-rolling their biplanes and walking on the wings (literally) when Hahn and Miller let their boyfriends haul the last of their luggage into the Model T. However, none of this is to say that what Hahn and Miller did in 1924 was simple or easy. In fact, what interests me most about their adventure is that it was encouraged and financially supported by their parents - and yet was still considered audacious enough to attract newspaper coverage in the Albuquerque Morning Journal.

The roommates departed Madison on June 19, 1924, and made their way first to Chicago and then Saint Louis to see their families. They'd converted the back of the Model T into a fold-down bed - complete with a mosquito net - and as they tried to sleep in a relative's yard, Hahn's young cousins kept peeking in through the windows to spy on them. Finally, the women broke free of their required visits and got out on the open road and headed south.

"On our way, on our own, on the road," Hahn recounted saying to Miller as they skidded along rain-soaked country lanes, taking more than a few curves too fast through rural Missouri. When they didn't sleep in the car, they stayed at "tourist camps," which were just gated fields with outhouses. Once, a local sheriff tapped on their car window as they slept and insisted they relocate in front of his own house where he could keep an eye on them. In the morning, Hahn and Miller woke up with a crowd of locals staring at them.

They pressed on, navigating bumpy roads and regularly quieting the Model T's hissing radiator with buckets of water. The roommates named the Model T "O-O" in honor of all the times the car made an odd noise and prompted them to exclaim, "Oh-oh!" After negotiating a mountain pass and testing the limits of O-O's radiator and brakes, Miller and Hahn finally arrived in New Mexico on July 6 in mixed spirits. "I must be wrong to recall the tour as long," Hahn wrote. "Even in 1924 it was not a matter of months to drive to Albuquerque from Saint Louis. Nevertheless, that is the impression I have kept."

After six days in Albuquerque, the roommates pressed onward to Los Angeles to briefly glimpse the ocean as planned, driving through the desert mostly by night. But the trip finale was anticlimactic, wrote Hahn. By then, Miller was homesick and O-O was developing mechanical problems. "Might as well start back to Albuquerque," Hahn recounted Miller saying as they watched blue-green waves crash against the rocky shore. "We've seen the Pacific."