The Soong Sisters

by Emily Hahn

  In Tokyo one day Charlie Soong was introduced to Kung Hsiang-hsi. Kung had returned to the East from Oberlin and was at this time working with the Chinese Y.M.C.A. in Japan; when he met Soong he told him of having made Eling’s acquaintance at a party in New York, and Charlie promptly invited him home to dinner. When Eling consented to give up her work as Sun’s secretary in order to marry Kung, she thought that she was entering upon a completely domestic career. There was nothing about Hsiang-hsi in those days to indicate what a position he was later to hold in the government. He was absorbed in his Y.M.C.A. work.

  The “Y” was having a difficult time in Japan, where the Chinese students were reflecting in miniature the turmoil in China. Dr C. T. Wang was secretary of the organization, and because of some political upset he was attacked by certain of the students, and had to leave. John R. Mott, head of the “Y,” asked Kung Hsiang-hsi to take on the job, which needed a young man with a strong personality. Kung consented, stipulating, however, that he should stay only one year at the work.

  A good deal had happened to this young man since he had gone to America. Like many other Chinese students he came into contact with Sun while he was abroad, first through some of the Doctor’s followers and later through his writings. He did not meet Sun Yat-sen himself until the big student rally in Japan, but long before that he had accepted the new revolutionary dogma in lieu of his youthful loyalty to Kuang Hsu. No Ch’ing whatever would be better for China, after all, than even a fairly good Ch’ing.

  When the Revolution took place, Hsiang-hsi was back in Taiku trying to found a school that would educate people for the job of carrying on a democracy. He had refused all offers of diplomatic posts, though young men with foreign educations were at a premium just then. The uprising did not take him by surprise; owing to his position in the town he was respected by his neighbors, and they asked him to take charge of the Shansi volunteer revolutionary troops. His province had never been very warlike, and these troops were made up mainly of policemen and the bodyguards of business houses. Such as the army was, however, Hsiang-hsi whipped it into shape in his new capacity as Commander-in-Chief, and he insisted against all precedent upon handing it back to Yen Hsi-shan when that leader returned from his wanderings during the war. It was suggested that Hsiang-hsi become governor of the province, but he was stubbornly faithful to his idea of a school.

  “You can’t carry out a revolution overnight,” he insisted. “The military turnover, yes; that can be done all at once. But where are you going to get the men for the government afterwards? It needs training to govern a country, and education is the first and most important step in a revolution.”

  The death of his first wife and the march of events in Peking — he had reason to dislike Yuan Shih-kai — persuaded him to take a year from home, and that is how he happened to be in Japan.

  At the end of this term, the young people were married in Yokohama by Christian ceremony, in a little church on a hill. Eling’s wedding dress was of pale pink satin (a Chinese bride always wears pink or red); it was embroidered in a design of deeper pink plum blossoms and fashioned into a jacket and skirt. Her hair was bound with a fillet of plum blossoms. It was a small wedding, with only the Soongs, Dr Kung’s cousins and a few intimate friends as guests.

  The morning dawned gloomily, with heavy rain, but before the party started for church the sun came out. After a wedding breakfast at the Soongs’ house, the Kungs motored to Kamakura, Eling wearing an apple-green satin dress embroidered with little golden birds. The captious Japanese sun shone all the way to Kamakura, through the branches of trees that lined the road. Just as they entered the Kamakura Hotel the rain fell again, in a torrent, but Eling’s delicate dress had escaped injury. Dr Kung was much pleased by these convenient manifestations of Nature, who had treated their wedding so kindly. “They are very happy omens,” he said.

  When Mayling was left alone after Chingling returned to China at the end of the spring term of 1913, she went to Wellesley and was enrolled there as a freshman. Her brother Tse-ven, known as “T.V.,” had already come to Harvard the year before, and was taking the academic course. Mayling recorded him as her guardian, and at least once she found an opportunity to go over to Cambridge to see him. He was living in a private house there, with three or four other Chinese students; a tall, very quiet, slender young man, he showed the same tranquil disposition he retained during his early success in the financial world of China, when he was the aim and admiration of every marriageable girl in Shanghai.

  One of the other students caught a glimpse of Mayling once as she was going into the drawing room to wait for T.V. Homesick for China, he stared at the young girl and dreamed romantically for days thereafter. Mayling was plump in those days, with a high healthy color, and her hair was still in a plait down her back.

  “She was at that time,” says a friend, “a graceful, charming young woman with easy manners, a delightful hostess and popular with her college mates. She had been in America so long that some of her friends felt a great deal of apprehension about her return to China, fearing that she would not be happy in her own land.”

  Her career at Wellesley has been described in the college magazine of February, 1938:

  A brilliant student, she majored in English literature and minored in philosophy. It is said that she particularly loved the fiery conflicts of Arthurian Romance, a course then taught by Professor Emeritus Vida Scudder. She studied French and music (theory, violin and piano) all four years, and also took astronomy, history, botany, English composition. Biblical history and elocution. She also received credit for a course in education taken in the summer of 1916 at the University of Vermont.

  In her senior year she was named a “Durant Scholar,” the highest academic distinction conferred by the college.

  She did not go out extensively for athletics, but enjoyed swimming and tennis. During her junior year she was elected a member of Tau Zeta Epsilon, one of the six local Wellesley societies, open only to upper classmen, and devoted to semi-social, semi-serious pursuits, T.Z.E. spends its serious hours studying music and art. Still a loyal “sister,” Meiling recently sent the society a de luxe first edition of her book, Sian a Coup d’Etat, printed in China and autographed by herself and her husband, the Generalissimo.

  She wrote and spoke beautiful, idiomatic English with a flavor which was Southern rather than Oriental. It is told that, not liking Wellesley on her first day, she walked into the office of the late Edith Souther Tufts, then Dean of Residence, and said, “Well, I reckon I shan’t stay raound here much longer.”

  Her Wellesley friends remember her as sometimes vivacious, sometimes sober and sombre, but always an individualist. Professor Annie K. Tuell, who lived with her in Wood Cottage, writes, “She kept up an awful thinking about everything. She was always questioning, asking the nature of ideas, rushing in one day to ask a definition of literature, the next day for a definition of religion. She thought about moral matters and discovered for herself some of the standards which people more conventionally brought up take ready made, without inquiry. She was a stickler for truth, and resented any discovery that she had ever been fed conventional misinformation . . . .

  “We all liked her and took her for granted as one of ourselves, quite forgetting any foreignness in her . . . . She was, of course, much admired, not for beauty in those days, as were her sisters; but there was a fire about her and a genuineness, and always a possibility of interior force . . . .

  “As the years went on, the return to China presented to her very hard problems, as she and TV both felt, and she wondered at difficulties ahead, when she should return to a world and domestic standards from which she had grown away. She was, with all her sociability and considerable popularity, a little remote, watching us, questioning, criticizing or liking, feeling herself a bit of an alien.”

  One alumna confesses that classmate Meiling was responsible for getting her through Wellesley. They sat next to each other in philosophy class taught by
Professor Mary Whiton Calkins, and the American girl found herself hopelessly at sea in the subject. Meiling took her in hand. “Buy Miss Calkins’ book (Persistent Problems of Philosophy),” she said, “study it, and come to me every night with what you do not understand.” The American girl passed the course and got her B A.

  Another classmate remembers that Meiling had a large Oriental scimitar hanging decoratively on the wall of her dormitory room. It was a weapon which so terrified one freshman with notions about the “heathen Chinese” that she was never able to pass the door without breaking into a run.

  Meiling was very popular with the Oriental students at Harvard and other colleges throughout the East. As one friend put it, “there always seems to be some nice Chinese boy or other on the doorstep of Wood.” Apprehensive of a family-made marriage when she returned home, she became engaged at one time while she was in Wellesley. It was later, of course, broken off.

  As a college girl she wore the sturdy American shoes and skirts common to her fellow students, but often had a bright silken Oriental touch about her blouse or jacket.

  A former teacher of music. Miss Hetty Wheeler, who taught Mayling for two years, said that she had been most impressed by her pupil’s consciousness of Oriental culture and its heritage. This feeling seemed to grow stronger in Mayling as she grew older, as it usually does: at first, says Miss Wheeler, she seemed completely Westernized, but gradually she became more and more proud of China’s art and literature. Miss Elizabeth Mainwaring of the English department agrees with this; she did not teach Mayling herself, but once had a talk with her. Mayling at that time was eloquent about China’s contributions to civilization, and expressed regret that the Western world should neglect them.

  The emotions of an exiled student must at all times be very complex. Mayling had come to America while she was still a young child, and it is a child’s impulse always to imitate as closely as possible his near companions. There are children who are afraid to admit that they know more than their playmates do, and some who deny that they speak any language but the one of the country where they live. As she grew up, she probably felt drawn to her own land, especially after her sisters had left her to go back. That yearning, however, must have been mingled with fears as she thought of the codes and traditions that held China so firmly in thrall, and from which she had escaped for so many years. Even those of us who do not go abroad for our schooling are conscious of misgivings when the time comes to go home. It was perhaps some such feeling, a sudden resentment against the fate that was to call for another great effort on her part, another major feat of adaptation, that caused the young girl to write to a friend,

  “The only thing oriental about me is my face.”

  Certainly she told the truth — for that time. According to a photograph of herself taken with two other Wellesley students, in sailor blouses and soft coiffures, not even her face was very Oriental. She looked the perfect type of pre-war American college girl back in the days of banjos and fudge, pennants on the wall, and pride in the privilege of being still a lady, although learned.

  CHAPTER X

  Chingling Weds Her Hero

  Sun yat-sen made Japan his headquarters in the ensuing two years, but he again adopted his old habits as a refugee and traveled incognito, slipping into China when his presence was needed for the new plans. Canton and Hongkong were the safest places for him now. With Chen Chi-mei and Chiang Kai-shek he discussed ways and means for the new campaign; Chiang was by this time very close to the Doctor. On one occasion, in 1914, he was entrusted with a trip to Manchuria to spread the revolutionary gospel and to see what chances there were for an uprising in that district; after a journey full of danger he returned to Tokyo to report that there was small chance of success for such an enterprise.

  In the meantime, Eling’s marriage and departure had left Sun without a secretary, and he took her advice and asked Chingling to do the work. The younger girl was thus thrown into the daily company of her hero, and matters took the course that was to disturb her family so greatly. One day to the horror of the Soongs she announced her intention of marrying Sun Yat-sen. Nothing could possibly have shocked her mother more. Both Sun and his wife were Christian; there was no chance to excuse the suggestion on the ground that Chinese marriage ties are not necessarily binding. Besides, the first Madame Sun was a woman of the Doctor’s own age, having married him in his youth and borne him three children; she was his rightful wife, according to every tenet of Mrs Soong’s Spartan philosophy. Any proposal on the part of the Doctor to abandon a faithful spouse, and for a young girl’s sake, would have met with the sternest disapproval from Mrs Soong, but that the young girl should be her own daughter was the cruelest blow of all.

  Chingling was determined, and she needed all her determination. She had taken on a difficult task. Not only was she opposing her mother’s strong will, but she was going against the conventions of both the Christianized and the non-Christianized society of China. According to the old-fashioned customs of China it may be proper for a girl to become a second wife, but only when the arrangement has been approved by her elders of both families: indeed, the convention is that such a marriage is proposed by the family leaders; she herself according to the rules of propriety must pretend only to submit to their decision. Certainly she is not supposed to arrange her disposition for herself — and against the will of her people.

  In spite of everything, however, that could be said to dissuade her, Chingling persisted. In the end she ran away and formally joined Sun. It was the first sign of her strength of character, that strength which has held her to the pathways she has chosen and has governed her slightest action.

  She wrote an American school friend of her wedding:

  It was the simplest possible, for we both hate surplus ceremonies and the like. I am happy and try to help my husband as much as possible with his English correspondence. My French has greatly improved and I am now able to read French papers and translate by sight easily. So you see marriage for me is like going to school except that there are no “exams” to trouble me.

  Marriage to the busy Sun must have been very much “like going to school” for a twenty-year-old girl. The fact that she worked so hard at foreign languages in order to help her husband accounts for one notable difference between herself and her sisters. Madame Kung did not leave Shanghai for America until she was fourteen years old; her Chinese is fluent. Madame Chiang set to work earnestly to learn Chinese as soon as she returned to Shanghai, as we will see later. Chingling speaks English by choice, even with Chinese people.

  It is interesting to compare the attitude of Chingling’s family after she had made her decision with the behavior of a Western clan in similar circumstances. Americanized as the Soongs were, their Chinese background had an effect on this situation. An American father and mother might have cast their daughter out of their lives; they would certainly have blamed the man, and cut off relations with him. The Soongs were unhappy about it, but made no public sign of their feelings. If the sisters did not see one another for a period of time, if Mrs Soong continued to disapprove, nobody outside the intimate family circle knew of this. Nor did Charlie Soong allow his lifetime’s devotion to be affected by his daughter’s action. He continued to work as before for Sun and for the China for whose future he had given his life.

  Japan’s presentation to Yuan of the Twenty-one Demands in January 1915 was at once a blow and a stimulus to the revolutionists. At the same time that it stirred them to greater efforts, it proved to Sun that this ally was one that would bear watching in future, even when the present Northern government was overthrown. Any bargains made by a dispossessed ruler would not be binding to his successor, but Japan was an embarrassingly near neighbor, and the threat would remain.

  Toward the end of 1915 the exiles struck again in Shanghai, managing to win over to their cause the commander of one of the warships in the Whangpoo, the Chaohu. Chiang was with Chen Chi-mei at the time, and they made an unavailing attac
k on Nantao, outside the Settlement. Later Chiang captured Kiangyin fortress near Nanking and held it for several days, but the troops rebelled and the revolutionists were forced to retire.

  It was fairly obvious that Sun’s followers needed firmer organization. To this end the Doctor made a tour of the Southern provinces of Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan, speaking wherever he went and cementing the Kuomintang by strengthening the spirit of the people against Yuan Shih-kai. He then transferred his headquarters to Shanghai, where within the Settlement he was reasonably safe from Yuan, though several attempts were made on him and his lieutenants by assassins, Chiang Kai-shek was very nearly killed in one of these incidents.

  Up in Peking, Yuan’s ambition had been growing, and in December of 1915 he had himself declared Emperor. The prompt protest that came from Yunnan, Kwangtung, Kweichow and Kwangsi, which provinces immediately declared independence, frightened him into canceling the project, but he could not quiet the turbulent South. His supporters deserted him, and he chose this appropriate moment to die. The figurehead of Sun’s opponents thus disappeared, but his work remained; China was once more plunged into civil war.

  It was possible, however, for Charles Soong to return to Shanghai, and he came back, bringing his family with him. Kung Hsiang-hsi went to Shansi to prepare his home for his bride; he felt free, now, to realize a long-cherished ambition and to found a school in his own province. What is now Oberlin-in-China Junior College was begun with nine students; the school today has spread into a chain across the entire province, and numbers thousands of students of all ages. Dr Kung is still president. At that time, however, all of this had still to be started. Madame Kung stayed with her parents in Shanghai until he came back for her.