The Year of the Ox Reading 10: "Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn"

Chiang Mai has some great used bookstores. I found this amazing book about Hemingway last week. It tells of his adventures with his third wife in China behind the Japanese lines in 1941. It talks a lot about the inconveniences that come from being in China (something you can appreciate if you have lived there). I learned a lot from this one. For instance, did you know that Hong Kong had no sewage pipes even as late at 1941. Hemingway and his wife said the main conversation in Hong Kong was the disposal of night soil. At one point a man who collects night soil complains about how thin it is and starts sucking it into a straw just to see its consistency. Disgusting.
There is also an interesting encounter between Martha Gelhorn and Zhou En Lai, the future foreign minister of the People's Republic of China. He was very sophisticated and quite the charmer. Gelhorn says she would follow him to the ends of the earth if he would ask, but says that first she needed to know that the ends of the earth wasn't in China, which she took a real disliking to, because she felt it was terribly unclean.
One of my favorite stories is about Hemingway and three prostitutes who are sent to his room when his wife is in Singapore and he is in Hong Kong. The author feels that the story might be true. Hemingway joked later that what is the difference between two women and three women? Three women is a lot of women, he answered.
The author was thoroughly impressed with the amount of analysis that Hemingway accomplished while in China. The author, Peter Moreira writes: "Considering that Hemingway was a novice in Asia; he was only in Asia for two months; he was travelling during a war when half the country was occupied and the rest divided between warring factions; and he was drunk much of the time; his grasp of the situation was impressive.
The problem with buying used books on the trip is that I don't neccessarily want to keep them forever. This is probably the case with this one, though I guess I could be tempted to keep it. We'll see.