Ariel Levy in Emily Hahn’s “The Big Smoke.”

“Although I have always wanted to be an opium addict, I cannot claim that is the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Han’s account of her journey from lively traveler to pale lotus eater (and back again) in 1930s Shanghai. This indifferent beginning of course makes you curious about why Han went to China, and why she was so eager to become an opium addict. More urgently, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What will this mischievous adventurer do?

a lot. Besides fifty-two books, Hahn has written more than two hundred articles The New YorkerSpread over eight decades, the film revolves around what happens in places as diverse as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell, in his 1997 obituary, described her as “the peripatetic heroine of this magazine” and “a woman who feels at home, almost locally, at home in the world.” (Angel’s mother, Katherine White, was Hahn’s editor, and when he was a twelve-year-old “naturalist” on East Ninety-Third Street, Hahn gave him a macaque. “Don’t let it bite you,” she advised him. “And if it does, bite it right on the back.”)

There was never an emergency when Han was driving. (She was beautiful, never hurtful, and came from a well-to-do family of German Jews in St. Louis.) Her writing made great use of improvisation. She was on her way to the Congo in 1935 “to forget that my heart was broken; it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.” In “Letter from Brazil” from 1960, she casually noted that her host “woke up one morning to find his pajamas stained with blood; he had been bitten by a vampire bat.” She traveled the world, seemingly without restrictions. “It became clear to me on the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time,” she wrote in her book “The Big Smoke.”

At first, she walked around Shanghai, “stopping here and there to let the rickshaw or rickshaw move,” and was vaguely aware of the smell of “something like burning caramel,” which announced the use of opium, in the same way that the smell of marijuana now signals its use in New York. Han personally identified the material in the home of a man she called Pan Hei-fen, who was later revealed to be her lover, the married Chinese artist and poet Zhao Sinmai. Time passed away as the circle of opium smokers talked and talked about Chinese art, literature, and politics. (“Not knowing anything about politics didn’t deter me at all,” Hahn recalls.)

Unperturbed, Han descends into dependence: her eyes water, her skin becomes jaundiced, and she stops going to “the nightclubs, cocktail parties and dinners popular with foreign residents of Shanghai.” Inevitably, she finds herself reciting the addict’s creed: “I can stop at any time.” But she doesn’t want to stop, because “behind my drooping eyes, my mind is boiling with exciting thoughts.”

The problem arises when opium begins to interfere with Han’s journey: he has become anchored. “I could not walk away from my box of opium, or my box of heh-vin, without feeling homesick,” she writes, an unfamiliar and unwelcome feeling. She kicked things with the help of a friend who hypnotized her and then kept her away from her drug addict boyfriend. Hahn’s description of the detox: “I felt so guilty about everything in the world, but it wasn’t torture. It was supportable.”

A child is another kind of anchor, and Han eventually had two children, with British officer Charles Boxer, who remained in Japanese detention in occupied Hong Kong when Han fled the island in 1943. Motherhood apparently didn’t slow her down much. After returning to the United States with her 2-year-old daughter—who speaks only Cantonese—Hahn discussed childhood anxiety with her pediatrician, a young doctor named Benjamin Spock. He asked if her daughter was happy at all. “When we go to Chinese restaurants, where the waiters gather to watch her eat with chopsticks,” Han replied. “They talk to her, and she talks to them. Oh, she’s fine in Chinese restaurants.” Spock suggested that the girl might reflect the mother’s mood. Han dismissed him, saying, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m just waiting for the war to end, that’s all. Her father is in a prison camp.” ♦

Although I have always wanted to be an opium addict, I cannot claim that this is the reason I went to China.