ABSTRACT
The “besotted aesthete” “obsessed moralist,” and “zealot of seriousness,” as Sontag thinks of herself, was conceived in China where her mother and father negotiated in the trade of animal skins in Tien-tsin (Tianjin). She carries images of them in her mind as the glittering and least concerned of foreigners, “playing Gatsby and Daisy at the British Concession.” Her grandparents’ house was filled with the Chinese jades and porcelains of the kind “colonialists collect.” Her mother returned to New York City to deliver Sontag, January 16, 1933, and then went back to China leaving the baby behind in the grandparents’ care. (She was raised “mostly by aunts.”) Whether these were her maternal or paternal grandparents Sontag has not yet revealed. Nor has she ever given her mother’s maiden name or her father’s name, though one or the other is probably Jacobson. People magazine published a photograph of Sontag and her younger sister Judith standing on either side of grandfather Charles Jacobson. Sontag was her stepfather’s name.
