by Emily Hahn
Mayling was a plump child. In her own words, “I was so fat when I was a little girl that my nickname, ‘Little Lantern,’ was given to me by one of my whimsical uncles. Mother put me in thickly padded cotton clothes in the wintertime, and I waddled around in them. I remember when I was three or four years old I used to fall after every two or three steps because the clothes were so thick and clumsy, but as I was so well padded, not only with clothes but also with fat, I cannot remember being hurt very much. I had two little queues on top of my head, which were tied with red strings and then rolled into round loops. They were popularly known as ‘crab holes,’ and were quite a la mode for little girls of that period. Mother always dressed me in flowered designs, a short jacket with the two sides closing one over the other and tied in the back, and long trousers. But my shoes were unique. They were made to look like cats’ heads, with two ears sticking out, and embroidered whiskers and eyes. Later when I grew older Mother put me in boys’ clothes, presumably because I was such a tomboy and she thought that since I acted so much like a boy and seemed more natural in my older brother’s clothes than in my older sister’s it killed two birds with one stone. But in reality my brother, T.V., outgrew his clothes so quickly that every two or three months new ones had to be made for him, and I fell heir to his outgrown ones. Up to the time I went to America when I was nine years old [Chinese age] most of the time I wore boys’ clothes.”
As Chingling’s little sister on sufferance, Mayling took her duties seriously. After evening prep Chingling’s friends would return to the dormitory to find that “Siao Mei” had prepared tea for them — for Chingling’s friends only. She waited on them, too.
The passageway between the gaslit building and the electric-lit building was very dark and fearsome for most of the smaller girls, but Mayling was not afraid to walk through it at night, anyway to all outward appearances. “Why can’t you walk through there like Mayling?” the teachers used to say to the others. In reality the child was very nervous and was suffering from nightmares and sleeplessness, but it was some time before this was discovered.
Every Thursday night at McTyeire there were religious “discussions” led by important guests. Sometimes the Soong parents took charge, but more often Pastor Li was the leader. There the little girls were encouraged to ask questions and to thresh out in public their doubts and problems of faith. Each question was considered fairly, without criticism from the authoritative people there: the little doubting Thomases met with careful and gentle handling from everybody — except Mayling. She was badly shocked.
“Why do you ask Pastor Li questions?” she demanded indignantly of Chingling one Thursday night after the discussion. “Don’t you believe?”
It was one of the teachers who found out that the child was waking up at night in fits of trembling. She would get out of bed and stand up straight, repeating her lessons. Even Mrs Soong could not insist upon further hardening, and Mayling went home, there to be tutored until she went abroad a few years later.
It was soon after this that the kindergarten borrowed Chingling to help in the school play that they were giving at the end of term. Chingling was asked to play a part that was too difficult for the small children. The piece was a fairy story, and just before the curtain, when everybody was going to live happily ever after, the princess Chingling was crowned queen.
The audience was all of Chinese parents in brocaded silk, but save for their costumes and their language there was little difference between them, with their proud, anxious expressions, and the parents gathered in any American schoolroom at an end-of-term kindergarten play. Even the uncomfortable little folding chairs were the same, and the preponderance of mothers over fathers. Charles Soong was there. He was a loving father, if a trifle reserved, and he had taken time off from his absorbing business and his still more absorbing friendship with Dr Sun Yat-sen to come and watch his daughter play the lead.
“Aha!” cried Chang Hsu-ho, a friend of his, as, up on the platform, they put a pasteboard crown on Chingling’s head. (“I crown thee queen,” said the Fairy Prince.) “So, Mr Soong, you are the father of the Queen! King’s father-in-law! King’s father-in-law!”
They all turned to him and laughed, pleasant Shanghai burghers, founders of families, comfortable honest folk. They all laughed together, and Charlie Soong laughed harder than any of them, as was seemly, for the joke was on him.
CHAPTER V
Charlie Soong’s Daughters Get an American Education
The summer vacations saw the girls all together again, with their little brothers. Their lessons continued, however. An Englishwoman tutored them in the mornings in her home, teaching them English and Latin (the latter a startling innovation for Chinese girls), and in the afternoon they studied the Classics with the same man who had taught Charlie when he had first returned to China. At noon the three little girls rode home in one ricksha in the sultry blazing sunlight, giggling or slapping one another. After lunch they were supposed to take a nap, but when their mother was asleep they crept out to the back garden to play. Their favorite games were Puss-in-the-Corner and Ricksha Pulling. Eling was playing ricksha puller one day with Chingling as passenger; she pulled badly, her strength failing her, and Chingling was tossed out. She still has a small scar from that accident.
The deep affection that Mayling feels for her eldest sister was born at that time. It is not often that a child so young has any more feeling for the other children of the family than acceptance; sometimes, in fact, large families breed more competition and quarrels among themselves than love. Mayling regarded Eling, however, with a feeling which even today amounts almost to hero worship, because the elder girl was gentle with her baby sister and took her side against the rest of the world, those jeering, nasty little boys and girls who are always ready to bully a baby.
No doubt there was some excuse for them; Mayling was the youngest of the crowd of playmates and was in their way, toddling after them in their games. They vied with one another in thinking of methods to get rid of her. One day her cup of bitterness was filled to overflowing: the children were playing Hide and Seek, and when Mayling clamored for permission to join them they were exasperated. Mayling wasn’t much good at Hide and Seek; she was too eager to be discovered when she was in hiding, and no good at all when it came to discovering others. However, they had a plan. With false smiles and honeyed words they told Mayling she could be “It.” She must stand in the middle of the garden, they said, and count up to one hundred. She was not to look until she had counted to a hundred.
Patiently Mayling counted, doing her best. She didn’t count very well. She went all to pieces, usually, after she had got through the teens, and jumped from twenty to thirty, or even forty, with wild abandon. Naturally she achieved one hundred in record time by this method, but one of the children had lingered to listen and told her she must start all over again. Mayling, her chubby hands clamped over her eyes, obediently started again. This time there was a dead hush, and nobody criticized her counting. “Eighty, sixty, fifty, one hundred!” said Mayling triumphantly and looked up. She was alone.
She was deserted. Not a child remained in that garden. From the first second a foreboding of the truth filled her heart, and a long search left no doubt of the perfidy of those others. They had gone, escaped, found some distant place where they were probably laughing at her at that very moment before throwing themselves into a new game without her. Mayling was all alone in the world. Nobody wanted her. Vain all her most valiant attempts to keep up with them and to count straight; nobody wanted her. Tragedy engulfed Mayling.
It was then, as she stood crying her heart out, that Eling always came along and wiped her eyes and her nose and comforted her and promised her that someday she too would be a big girl. Eling never failed her, then or afterwards.
The afternoon lessons in the Classics were at home, and Charlie’s old teacher felt that he should be particularly strict with the second generation. Eling didn’t like those lessons, sitting
still and droning away. Her attention used to wander, and the teacher would rebuke her, with dignity but with force. Once when this situation had created bad feeling on both sides, Eling made an excuse to walk behind his chair and there quietly tied his long queue to the chair back. Then she went back to her seat, sat down demurely and began to annoy him again. He leaped up to punish her and was jerked back, falling to the floor with the chair on top of him. That time Charlie did not interfere with the family discipline, and Mrs Soong gave her eldest daughter a good spanking.
Alone she taught us to read and to play music. We encountered innumerable hardships, but she bore them all with good humor. At that time people were only beginning to take seriously the question of girls’ education, but our mother had already made up her mind that all of her daughters should go abroad and study in foreign countries . . . . [From the biographical note.]
Eling at fifteen, it was decided, must go abroad, preferably to America. The Soongs were not rich, and in China until this time only the really rich families dreamed of sending their children abroad for their education. Charles Soong, however, had a different reason than theirs for wishing to incur this expense. They looked upon the voyage as something smart, something to be done because the others were doing it: it was an advertisement of their wealth and their up-to-date attitude. Even then, only the sons were sent; it was unheard of that a daughter should go abroad. But Soong dreamed of that foreign education as he dreamed of the liberation of China; to his mind it was a means to that end. He had not forgotten his own struggle to get away from the shop in Boston; the miracle of General Carr’s help was still a miracle to his mind. His children, he had resolved at Eling’s birth, should not have that struggle, at least. Life should spare them one trouble, girls as well as boys.
Charles’s standing as a Methodist preacher gave him contact with the Southern Methodists in China, and they helped him to arrange the trip. Eling was to attend the Wesleyan College for Women, at Macon in Georgia; incidentally it is the oldest chartered woman’s college in the world. Her father, not at all abashed by the criticism he had incurred among his friends by thus indulging a young girl in a mere luxury, went even further: he gave a farewell dinner for her! To us it seems the most natural thing in the world for a father to do. To Shanghai it was a fresh shock. The honest merchants discussed it among themselves and agreed that Soong, always somewhat eccentric, was definitely going mad, or if not he was certainly bringing ruin deliberately into his house. Since he was not a millionaire, he should keep his daughter at home and save this money he was lavishing on farewell dinners, trips abroad and such foolishness that only spoiled her anyway. Thus when she married he would be able to give her a dowry of — let’s see, said the merchants, who liked to count every penny belonging to their friends as if it were their own — Soong, a fairly warm man when he kept his mind on business, should be able to settle at least ten thousand dollars on Miss Soong by the time she married. Ten thousand was a huge sum when the Shanghai dollar was at a respectable level. The good men of Shanghai felt as grieved as if Charlie had robbed his daughter outright of her dowry when he persisted in going his own crazy way. Besides, what man would marry the poor child if she went to America and ruined herself with a lot of dangerous progressive ideas?
Meantime it was settled, and Eling started out. She was placed in the care of a missionary family, friends of Charlie, named Burke: Mr Burke had been a classmate of Soong’s at Vanderbilt. For this voyage Eling was dressed in foreign clothes, with an enormous ribbon bow on the end of her plait; the dresses had been designed and executed according to the advice of certain kindly missionary ladies and were probably not the last word in chic. Anyway they were foreign.
On the way to Yokohama, Mrs Burke died, and the family disembarked in Japan. There was little time for rearrangement, but the fifteen-year-old girl could not be sent on without somebody to look after her, and Mr Burke, hastily but conscientiously, found the necessary chaperone. This was another missionary, a Korean woman of the Burkes’s acquaintance, who took her trust so much to heart that she became involved in an unexpected quandary. At San Francisco the immigration authorities noticed that Eling’s passport was made out as if she were traveling with an American family; her association with a Korean threw them into typical departmental confusion, and for a time all traffic was stopped. Until this involved and suspicious matter was cleared up, Eling could not come into America. She was, however, permitted to remain aboard ship — any ship, evidently, for as time went on, her own ship had to sail away and she was transferred to another. After a few weeks she became quite accustomed to moving from one boat to another, and as a matter of fact she was lucky that they did not put her into the detention house.
The Korean chaperone refused to abandon the child, though she was at liberty to do so and though her father was ill, which was why she had made the trip. She stood by from day to day, from ship to ship. The memory of her kindness and that of Miss Richardson is Madame Kung’s chief reason for respecting missionaries today.
When at last things were satisfactorily settled and Eling was set at liberty, she journeyed safely to Macon. She had been courteously treated, in comparison with other Chinese girls, but the memory rankled, naturally. When she visited Washington the next year to see her uncle, Wan Bing-chung, who was heading a committee to investigate educational methods, she mentioned the matter to President Theodore Roosevelt. The future Madame Kung even in those days had a forthright, straight-from-the-shoulder nature that warred with the accepted rules of Chinese politeness, J^utchee. That word means, literally, “the manner of a guest,” but it means much more, actually, than politeness. It is a symbol for all the elaborate ceremony which in old China preceded any discussion of importance; the confusing euphemisms that fill the language; the allusions to poems that are in their turn full of allusions to earlier poems; the intrigue, layer upon layer of subtlety, which is an integral part of the simplest transaction. Charles Soong’s reaction to kutchee was always that of a blunt, honest American; it was a red rag to his bullish spirit. Eling, from her association with him, had always been incorrigibly sincere.
When she was introduced to President Roosevelt, in spite of her awe of him and the admiration her father had instilled in her for this great man, she felt a burning need to tell him how badly his country was being run. Certain cherished ideals had been rudely broken; the hospitable country that Charlie Soong so loved, of which he had told so many homesick stories to his children, had let her down. Not only her dignity as a Chinese but her sense of right was offended.
“America is very beautiful, and I am very happy here, but why do you call it a free country?” she demanded of the President. “Why should a Chinese girl be kept out of a country if it is so free? We would never treat visitors to China like that. America is supposed to be the Land of Liberty!”
The President said he was sorry.
The younger sisters followed her in 1908. They sailed in the Pacific Mail steamer Manchuria in a party of Chinese students bound for America, all under the protection of their uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Wan Bing-chung. It was of course too early for Mayling to attend college, but she insisted upon accompanying her sister, blackmailing her parents with the reminder of a promise they had made to her, during an illness, that she could have whatever she wanted. Perhaps her parents thought that since the children had been through McTyeire together, it would be easier for both of them to leave home at the same time.
Chingling, or Rosamond as she was to call herself during the American phase, was at this time a very sober, plain child, the most studious of the three. She gave evidence even then of an interest in moral and philosophical questions; her ideals were high. She was more of a dreamer than were her sisters. Mayling at nine was still the charming child who had been a pet at McTyeire, full of eager questions as to the country where they were going and very sure of her plans for the future. A young Englishwoman traveling home from Shanghai amused herself one day, walking about the deck wit
h Mayling, with asking the child, as one always does:
“And what are you going to be when you grow up?”
Mayling replied promptly, “I want to be a doctor.” Amazing ambition for a little Chinese girl at the beginning of the century! The Soongs had assuredly been modern in their training.
The reply shocked the English girl, and she said involuntarily, “A doctor! Oh, my dear, I shouldn’t think you would like that, you know. You would have to cut off people’s legs, did you know that?”
“Should I?” said Mayling in surprise. “Oh.” She thought a minute. “Then I don’t want to be a doctor,” she decided. “It would be too dirty.”
It will be seen that the Soong girls spoke English perfectly fluently at that time; the McTyeire standard was high then, as it is now, but the little Soongs had the added advantage of constant practice with their father. Living for several years in Georgia had a charming influence upon their accents. Today all three of them still bear traces of their Southern training in their speech and particularly in their well-modulated voices. Too many Chinese girls of Shanghai speak English with a raucous Middle West American twang: the pretty speech of Madame Chiang, the liquid low voice of Madame Kung, the gentle sweetness of Madame Sun’s words, are due to Wesleyan and the Southern Methodists. Even those who refuse to see good in the Christian missionaries of China should be grateful for this.
The first years of Eling’s college life would have been lonely, homesick ones if she had not come abroad very young. She made friends among the American girls, who were vastly interested in this exotic child. For most of them she was the first Chinese they had ever seen, and she fascinated them with her clothes. Now and then a chest of silks would come from her mother in Shanghai, and the whole dormitory would crowd in to admire and envy as Eling unfolded the gorgeous fabrics — supple satin, stiff brocade, heavy poplinlike stuff from the Hangchow looms. In those pleasant days before the invention of rayon, all the silk of China was exquisite, and the American girls of Wesleyan clamored for favor with Eling in hopes that she would “swap” a few yards of the coveted stuff. Sometimes she would exchange a piece for a real American dress: she wore American clothes while she lived in Macon, and with her best friend she divided a certain bolt of blue silk; they made identical party dresses with it. She has not forgotten that blue dress to this day. Those packages from China maintained the Soong girls’ prestige at school as nothing else could have done. Other girls, nearer home, received “boxes” every week full of food, cake and sweets and the special tinned foods that schoolgirls used to like. Classmates shared boxes with their Chinese friends who were too far away from home to get such delightful packages, and demanded their company during the holidays when the little Soongs could not go home for a visit.