Chiang’s personal pleasures are simple. On Sunday, there are household church services; the Generalissimo, like his wife, is a staunch Methodist. His elder son by a previous marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo, brings his wife and children over for the day. The Old Man is fond of the family and permits himself to relax when nobody from outside is looking. He always retains his severe manner, however, and it impresses most people who come in contact with him. “He has never said we mustn’t smoke in his presence,” one of his oldest friends, normally a chain smoker, said to me. “The servants even put cigarettes and matches near your hand when you’re there, but somehow nobody ever uses them. Just the same, the Old Man is letting up a little. I can see it. He used to drink only hot water. Now, I have observed, he lets his people put a few tea leaves in it.”
· · ·
Taiwan has not been kind to Mme. Chiang. She suffers from allergies, and shortly after she and her husband took up residence on the island, she developed a severe case of an unpleasant skin disease called disseminated neurodermatitis. One of the new miracle drugs was prescribed for her, and it had a disastrous effect. She went first to Hawaii and then to the United States for treatments, and it was several months before she recovered. During the worst of the attack, her face and body were swollen and her skin turned dark. Now she lives very quietly and follows the latest diet ordained by the specialists—no eggs, no milk, no butter, and so on. Her chief interest outside her home is in the Women’s Anti-Aggression League, of which she is chairman. When she goes downtown to its headquarters, the back windows of her car are shrouded with brown curtains, so that she can’t be seen. This wish to escape the public eye also accounts for the parasol she carries on her evening walks with the Generalissimo. And when Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Taiwan recently with his wife, Madame’s car, with its curtains drawn, drove onto the airport field, where the island’s other dignitaries were waiting, at the last minute before the plane landed. Madame appeared as briefly as possible. Mrs. Radford was whisked into the car to share her hostess’s obscurity, and driven away in record time. Doubtless, this rather Victoria-like attitude to the public gaze is a hangover from the anxious days when Madame thought she was permanently disfigured. Actually, there is no good reason for her lack of confidence. She was always a pretty woman, but now, even seen at close quarters, she is more than that. At fifty-five, she is, with her thin, graceful figure and her enormous eyes, beautiful.
The Women’s Anti-Aggression League is a volunteer organization, but there are few wives of Nationalist officials who would dare not volunteer. Every Chinese lady in Taipei, from the Prime Minister’s wife on down, spends one day a week at a sewing machine in the League building, working on clothes for the soldiers and linen for the hospitals. It is a sewing bee that never ends. Women who cannot leave their children at home—and in Taipei, as in New York, baby-sitters are a problem—put them in a nursery next to the sewing-machine room, where a nurse looks after them. In another building, close by, is a nursery school Madame has organized for soldiers’ children. The League doesn’t publicize its other efforts, such as providing small comforts for wounded guerrillas from outlying islands and training nurses’ aides to take care of them. Guerrilla operations are not included in the American-aid program, and they aren’t supposed to benefit from American defense funds, so nobody talks about them. But the guerrillas fight a battle now and then, and when the wounded arrive by junk or plane, they are greeted by giggling girls who carry welcoming signs and hand out flowers, cookies, and cigarettes. These ceremonies are never given publicity, and the wounded are quietly hurried off to a hospital.
Like the war lords and generals stranded in Taiwan, Madame used to be much busier than she is now, and, like some of them, she has turned to intellectual pursuits to fill in the time. She has taken up painting. It is not the type of painting that has given solace to Western kings, presidents, premiers, and Führers. Mme. Chiang was educated in America, but she doesn’t use water colors or oils; she paints in the Chinese style, with inks. She was late in coming to it. Chinese girls who are brought up at home, instead of being sent abroad—she was sent abroad at the age of ten—take painting lessons as a matter of course, and as they grow older the writing of characters gives them great facility with the brush, but most of them paint a few landscapes in the classic manner and then lose interest, just as elegant English girls in Victorian or Edwardian days used to sketch churches and pretty views but forgot the pastime as soon as they married. It was not like that with Mme. Chiang. Only lately, when illness made her idle, did she think of trying to paint. At first, it is said, her husband was skeptical of the venture. “If you were any good at painting, you would have discovered it before,” he is reported to have said. “It’s a specialized thing. You’ll never be any good at it at your age.” However, Madame persisted. At Taiwan Normal College here, she found a teacher from the mainland, a famous painter named Huang Chun-pi. Under his guidance, she studied the methods of the old Chinese masters and started work. Soon she was surprising Huang, as well as the Generalissimo, with the results. She is really good. Painting has become her chief interest, and she spends hours at it, doing scenes she remembers from the mainland, and a few local landscapes. Chiang has long since admitted that he was mistaken. “I thought you could do it,” he is said to have told her, using a time-honored face-saving formula, “but I knew if it sounded too easy, you’d never go ahead with it. I discouraged you on purpose.”
· · ·
Only a few days after I arrived in Taipei, I began to hear strangely familiar stories. I remember when similar stories centered on the two Chen brothers, who held the imagination of the foreign public in China from the early 1930s until about 1950. They were corrupt, the public agreed—corrupt, cruel, and tremendously powerful. Pro-Communist American journalists had nicknamed them the C-C Clique, and since they stood high in Chiang’s council, they came to symbolize the faults people found with his methods. Chiang stands by his friends—it is a Chinese custom—and the Chen brothers were nephews of an old revolutionary companion of his. In spite of American advice, he not only kept them near him but gave them increasingly important posts, which redoubled the gossip about them. The stories I heard might well have concerned them, but one Chen is dead and the other is in America, deeply involved in Moral Re-Armament. The subject of these anecdotes was not a Chen at all but the Generalissimo’s son General Chiang Ching-kuo.
“Ching-kuo is a sinister figure,” I was told. “He has great influence with the Gimo.” Ching-kuo spent much of his life in Russia, people told me, and came back with a Russian wife. There were any number of rumors about him—that he uses Russian methods (what those methods are, no one could say), that he runs the secret police, that he was most corrupt in Shanghai after the war, and that he executed many innocent people at the time of the inflation, which he was supposed to stop. He is in charge of the education of the troops now and, the story goes, isn’t doing it democratically. Moreover, they declared, he is Chiang Kai-shek’s heir and will no doubt turn the Nationalists over to Russia as soon as he comes into power.
“But how can he be his father’s heir?” I asked. “China isn’t a kingdom. He’s the President’s son, that’s all. He’d have to be elected. He’s no more an heir than James Roosevelt.”
As I said, they were the same sort of tales one used to hear about the Chens—full of innuendoes and hints, with nothing very substantial to go on. Chiang Ching-kuo evidently came along in time to fill a conversational vacuum. There was one specific horror story, however. A young American couple employed by the State Department had the misfortune to live across the street from a public radio loudspeaker, which blared all day, much to their distress. To make it worse, the young woman had once recorded a few English lessons for the benefit of the Chinese, and these records were broadcast time after time. “Imagine what it feels like to hear your own voice, stepped up to millions of decibels, all day long,�
�� she said in agitated tones. “When we couldn’t bear it any longer, we went over to the station and asked them to turn it down, but the man in charge said he couldn’t. He said he was playing it loud like that on Chiang Ching-kuo’s orders. Well, of course, as soon as we heard that name, we knew it was hopeless.”
The Generalissimo’s younger son, Chiang Wei-kuo, is a very different character, it seems—a good boy, and one of the pillars of the local Rotary Club. He is fond of a party and a drink, and he likes America. He is there now, on a training mission at Fort Leavenworth.
I decided I would try to meet Chiang Ching-kuo, but I didn’t expect I’d be able to manage it. My request was immediately granted, however, perhaps because his advisers had been telling him he was suffering from a bad press and should do something about it. Chiang Ching-kuo occupies a Japanese-style house behind a bamboo fence, as many other generals do. There is a tree in the garden, and attached to it by a long cord when I arrived was a young monkey, who seemed to be spending his time doing setting-up exercises on the edge of the roof. A portrait of Chiang Kai-shek hung on the wall of his son’s study—one of the recent ones, in which the Generalissimo is white-haired and smiling. Like his father, the General is not very tall, but he is stocky rather than thin, and his face is not stern or bony. It is a pleasant, open sort of face, and he has a dimple in one cheek.
“Of course I’ve heard those stories they tell about me,” he said readily when I asked him. “Probably I’m better acquainted with them than you are. It’s part of my job.” He smiled, and then gave me an alert, intelligent look. “You must not think these things are always said behind my back. Some people criticize to my face. When officials say that my way of doing things is too Russian, I ask them in what way I’m so Russian and they can’t reply. After all, I’m the only man here who knows about Russia and has seen the methods of Moscow.”
Ching-kuo was sent to Russia as a young boy, in 1925, two years after Sun Yat-sen sent Chiang to Moscow on his famous good-will tour. Chiang wanted his son to study Russian military methods. It was a logical idea; Chiang himself had had four years of training abroad in Japanese military schools. Unfortunately, the Generalissimo’s relations with the Soviet took a bad turn, and young Ching-kuo remained a lot longer than anyone had intended—as a hostage. He was there twelve years, and was only returned in 1937, after the Japanese invaded China and relations between Russia and China grew warmer.
“Yes, I know Communism, and the Communists know me,” he went on. “When they took over the municipality of Shanghai, they thought of me. They put my picture up in Jessfield Park, as a target for people to throw stones at.”
I asked if the game had been popular.
“On the first day, nobody threw anything,” he said, grinning. “The second day, they put a few agents in the crowd to encourage the others, and the people followed their lead and began enjoying it. By the third day, everybody was throwing things at my face.” He crossed his booted legs, looking thoughtful. “No, rumors don’t bother me. People have got to have a scapegoat. There’s a Chinese proverb that says good gold doesn’t tarnish. My reputation doesn’t matter as long as I do my job.”
I said the usual things about the importance of publicity: he did not agree. “I’m not fond of publicity,” he said. “I don’t see the use of it; it looks to me like a sheer waste of time. Still, I know your people think of it in another way. They tell me it’s all a part of winning the war. If so, I suppose I ought to take their advice.”
“About your American advisers, General,” I said. “What do you honestly think of Americans? You’ve met a lot of them lately.”
“Americans are young and vital,” he said, “and that’s a good thing—that’s an excellent thing. I like that liveliness and eagerness for new ideas. We need it in China. There are other things about America that don’t seem so attractive. I haven’t been there yet myself, but to my mind the American way of life, with its washing machines and big cars and a lot of food, isn’t at all the kind of thing we want or need in China. All that luxury, the deep freezes and soft beds—” He broke off and shook his head. “It’s bad for people,” he said flatly. “I don’t admire it. But it doesn’t seem to have spoiled your soldiers. They are capable of genuine discipline. I have seen that for myself, and it surprises me, but it is true.” He paused and looked at me for a minute. “Don’t worry,” he said in a kindly voice. “America’s all right.” Not long after I saw him, he left for a five weeks’ tour of the United States, at the joint invitation of the Defense and State Departments.
· · ·
It occurred to me that since there are many historical figures here in Taiwan who are fading into the background, I should take the opportunity to meet and talk to some of them. One of the most restless of the lot is Yolobass Khan, the Governor in Exile of Sinkiang, who would not thank me if I referred to him as an old-timer, although he is sixty-five. He is a great, burly, bearded man, and recently he married a girl of nineteen. This is not his first marriage, by a long shot, but then Yolobass is a Moslem. Chiang appointed him Governor after the Communists overran Sinkiang, and his people here call him Governor, but there have always been more powerful leaders in his province and he is really little more than a chieftain. Sinkiang is a wild country, geographically more a part of Mongolia than of China, and peopled with Mongols, Kazaks, Uigurs, Kirghiz, Manchus, Uzbeks, Tatars, Chinese, and White Russians. Yolobass is a Kazak, and he led thousands of troops on horseback to war against the Reds, both the Chinese and the Russian varieties. He left China by way of the southwestern border in the spring of 1951, and emerged in Kashmir with a band of men, women, and children. He has no desire whatever to remain in Taiwan; he intends to go back home as soon as he can.
“We people of Sinkiang like to fight,” Yolobass declared when I went to see him. He has a big, deep voice, and as he talks, he strokes his long gray whiskers, which are parted in the middle. If his beard were only half as long, I reflected, he would look like a Wild West Charles Evans Hughes. Yolobass talked about his horsemen, and their longing to get back into the fight. “Mongols don’t fear death,” he said in his booming voice, and drew his finger across his throat. I did not doubt him. I could easily think of him on horseback, leading a shrieking troop of his countrymen into battle, but our surroundings interfered with the picture. Yolobass, who should have been giving me an audience in a desert tent, had received me in the sitting room of his Japanese house in a suburb of Taipei. Its once sparsely furnished interior had been transformed by someone, perhaps his young wife. He talked of valor and death while around him were delicate chairs, plants in pots, and a chubby settee adorned with a lace antimacassar.
Yolobass and his wife graciously gave me a chance to find out what Kazak food is like by asking me to dinner a few nights later. I arrived in some apprehension, for what I had read about Mongols led me to expect that I would have to eat with my fingers. I was so sure of this that I felt rather disappointed when I saw the long table set with knives and forks and spoons. My disappointment did not last long, for it was a most unusual dinner. Yolobass had invited a large number of guests from Sinkiang—enormous, broad-shouldered men all, who didn’t look like the Chinese I knew. Another guest, though he is not a Sinkiang man, was General Pai Chung-hsi, of Kwangsi, whose name has figured in Chinese history ever since I can remember. He looked young to be so famous.
Dinner was served. There was a huge plate of cabbage and beef, stewed together. There was a platter of hors d’oeuvres that resembled Russian zakuska, and another of flaps of flat bread. We had bowls of soup, and more cabbage and beef, cooked a slightly different way. Then curry, and another kind of soup. At the beginning of dinner I noticed a wine cup at each plate and wondered what it was doing there. Surely we would not drink wine in this Moslem house? Mare’s milk? But there are few horses in Taiwan. Actually, we drank lemon pop. We drank lots of lemon pop. The Chinese custom of draining one’s glass with every single guest at the party was carefully observed. Each ti
me, I stood up in my place and my drinking companion stood up in his. We bowed, holding out our glasses, we quaffed, and we sat down. Then a servant would spring out of the shadows and fill the glasses with yet more beaded bubbles, and the ceremony continued with the next guest. We went through bottles and bottles.
The meal ended with fried rice. Then we all followed dainty Mrs. Yolobass into the hot, still, mosquito-filled garden. The Khan’s house is on a quiet street of Japanese-style houses, each with its little back yard. It struck me as a cozy, bourgeois, fantastically un-Mongol block. What with the temperature, the lightning bugs that flickered in the telephone wires overhead, and the generally cheerful back-yard-on-a-summer-evening atmosphere, I almost fancied myself back in my native St. Louis. Looking around at the strong, swarthy faces of the Sinkiang gentlemen, however, I forgot St. Louis. We sat in a row of chairs forming a sort of horseshoe. I was at the top center. At one end were Mrs. Yolobass and two friends of hers, waving fans of painted, scented wood. At my right was General Pai Chung-hsi. Slices of red watermelon were handed out, and then hot, damp facecloths. After a little desultory chat about the weather, the biggest, fiercest-looking guest began asking me questions. What did the United States think of England’s attitude toward Red China? Of the Nationalist future? Of the world situation? His companions chimed in with even more difficult queries, and I stumbled through the catechism as best I could. They nodded politely, if a trifle glumly, at my faltering replies. “What—you don’t speak Russian?” one of them asked in simple amazement. “We all speak Russian.” The light from a lamp inside gleamed on their puzzled faces. Finally, they arrived at the sixty-four-dollar question: Why, since Russia is now patently at her weakest from internal dissension, do we Americans not attack? What are we waiting for? There will never be a better chance, they assured me.
“Well, you see,” I began carefully, “fighting is not in the American tradition, as it is in yours. In America, we think, we hope there might be other ways…” My voice trailed off, leaving the Sinkiang men in midair, their faces eager, their eyebrows raised.
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