The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  Realizing that she had been under a strain since Ai-ling and her children had taken up residence in the family home, May-ling wrote Emma that her “idea of paradise is a place where as few people as possible ever step in there, and those few people would have to be quite careful to disappear occasionally so that I could be by myself… one type of person… that I would rule out of my Utopia… is the sort that… is always right, the sort that is always giving other people advice.” Six weeks later, in the summer of 1919, Ai-ling moved her family to a house nearby. “I am going to regain freedom and have a little privacy of the mind,” May-ling wrote. “…I have been getting my own things in order as things were rather in a chaos when they were here.… I think it is absolutely essential that one should have a sense of privacy, a feeling impossible when there are too many around.”

  It was clear that their correspondence served both young women as a sounding board for their frustrations, discoveries, and evolving ideas—some touching, some humorous. In July, May-ling received a letter from Emma about a sexual encounter that had clearly disturbed her. “I think… you may just consider that incident as a beastly unpleasant one… that… awakened in you the knowledge of brutal passion… which we in our college days knew absolutely nothing about,” May-ling wrote back.

  … I think the best way for you to become normal in your attitude towards men would be to ignore the question of sex entirely. Of course, that is difficult, for almost without exception when a man becomes interested in a girl, he becomes sentimental.… Love is partly sexual in its composition, and there is nothing disgusting about it if you consider it in conjunction with the other elements which make up love in the real sense. For instance, physical love is like certain parts of Bach’s or Beethoven’s works which if considered by themselves are discords but which if combined with the parts the authors meant to have them considered, they become harmonious and beautiful. In all probability, the man who looked at you so disgustingly was only attracted to you by your physical attractions, and a man who is that sort is certainly a beast, a brute and an animal.… But, Dada, not all men are like that.… Do not begin to think that you are disgusted with love, for you aren’t. You are only disgusted with a certain element [in] it, an attitude quite natural to all pure-minded girls who are what you are.

  May-ling was also having problems where men were concerned—but of a different sort. “The town of Shanghai is at present full of rumors about my being engaged,” she wrote Emma, adding that her friends were

  not sure which one it is but they are sure it is somebody. What makes the situation so funny is that none of the men are either denying or acknowledging the rumors. I am quite put out, for Mother of course thinks that I must have done something or another to have justified the rumors. The result is she has made me stop seeing any of my men friends for the last month, and because she told me not to let any one call, I believe that I am almost willing to be engaged out of revenge, a perfectly childish attitude, I quite realize. She is quite worried about me because for the last months I seem to have taken a craze to be gadding about all over town. The truth is, I am dreadfully bored, outrageously so. I have even had teas unchaperoned a couple of times, just because… I feel so wretchedly oppressed. And the funny part is I do not care a snap about any of the men.

  She was nonetheless flattered when an old beau resurfaced in her life, although her mother disapproved of him because he was divorced:

  He is different in that he is a man now instead of a headstrong jealous boy… but to tell you the truth I am bored, horribly and unspeakably so. I have begged Mother to let me leave home and do something. Volunteer work is not real work.… I have a position offered to me on a newspaper, but I need not tell you that if I were to take it, the family would be so furious that I shall never be able to live thru the fuss, especially as the Celestials can not get into their nutty domes that a girl can be decent morally if she works with men.… Damn it all, I think that if I had my way, I could amount to something.

  Another ego boost came in the form of an extremely wealthy man fifteen years her senior. Dangling before her an opportunity to improve the education and social development of the “many hundreds of labourers in his factories,” he asked May-ling to marry him in spite of the fact that she told him she did not love him. There was also a married man, whom she “had the misfortune to care about… more than words can tell” but whom she refused since “neither one of us would do what is not honorable.”

  With sister Ai-ling giving birth to a new baby and sending her other children to live in the family home with May-ling and her mother, brother T.V. heading for America on business, T.L. off to college in the United States, and T.A. at boarding school, May-ling wrote Emma that “all my fine plans of getting a position and really amounting to something worth while will have to be put off again. Well,” she added, “that comes of being the youngest daughter.” She was pleased at being elected vice president of the American College Women’s Club of Shanghai. She was also secretary of the McTyeire Sorority, and, although sister Ai-ling was the president, it was May-ling who was pictured in The Shanghai Gazette in connection with the school’s building campaign. At the time she was doing “a great deal of writing” for the Gazette—mostly old Chinese stories translated into idiomatic English in which she tried to keep what she called “the original flavor without making a chop-suey out of the whole.” She turned down a number of offers to teach school but, when asked to give a series of lectures on philosophy, was tempted to try to write them, although she refused to take herself or her qualifications too seriously. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to laugh at myself,” she wrote Emma, “because it seems ludicrous for me to lecture on Philosophy, I who am a veritable scatter-brain.”

  May-ling had always been a big reader and was particularly excited when a large box of schoolbooks reached her in the spring of 1919, almost two years after it was sent from Wellesley. A few months later, she wrote Emma that H. G. Wells’s Outline of History put her in an “ecstatic mood,” while the works of Guy de Maupassant disgusted her. Since her return, she had asked Emma to subscribe for her to The Nation, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Women’s Home Companion, Harper’s, Scribner’s, House Beautiful, The New Republic, and The Atlantic, which she had read in freshman English at Wellesley and which, she said, she had “become so accustomed to having… by my side that I invariably keep a copy near to fill in spare moments between engagements.” She also returned to her Chinese lessons. This time, she worked with a “terribly strict” scholar, T.V.’s Chinese secretary, who not only was conversant with the new terms brought into the language by China’s contacts with Japan and the West but expected her to memorize long passages in the old-fashioned way. She studied with him for three hours every morning and after some months wrote Emma, who wanted to be a writer, that “I am planning on a time when I shall have sufficient grasp on [sic] the language to translate beautiful quaint & colorful Chinese gems into English Fiction for you to work on. Won’t it be fun for you… to collaborate in turning out versions of… our Chinese literature? I could translate the essence and spirit of the masterpieces, and you could shape them into form! How would works of ‘Mills & Soong’ strike you!”

  Age twenty-three and still living at home with her mother and brothers, May-ling longed to run her own life. In the winter of 1920, she admitted that she had been “as irritable as an uncovered electric wire… very unsociable and snappy, and contrary.” Three weeks later she said that she was better, “especially after I made my family understand that a part of my time belongs to me exclusively and cannot be tampered with by anyone else.” By breaking dates “right and left” that had been made without consulting her, she said that she thought “the family finally understood that I was all in physically and stopped expecting me to be merry sunshine under all circumstances.”

  One day she went too far. “As you know,” she wrote,

  my mother is very conservative and never lets me
dance altho she thinks that I should go to the dances my friends gave [sic]. If you remember, I like dancing and enjoyed it very much while I was at college. And so one day when I went to a dance and the men began asking for dances, out of recklessness, I danced and later I went home and told Mother about it. Well, I wish you had been here.… You would think that I was the most disgraceful creature on the face of the earth because I had danced, and that the only thing that I could do to show my repentance and to wipe out this stain of disgrace from the Soong name would be to sit in sack cloth and ashes the rest of [my] natural life and to turn my eyes away in pious disgust at all others who ask me to dance with them. Mercy, it was some scene, old dear.

  It would seem from the following that Madame Soong did not put the same pressure on her sons as on her daughters—or that T.V., unlike his sister, did not feel he had to report his transgressions to his mother. George Sokolsky, a Communist turned right-wing journalist, who was in Shanghai at the time and knew the whole family quite well, wrote that “he [T.V.] and I and the lady who was to become my first wife… arranged the first dance at which Chinese and foreigners danced with each other—and it was a deed to be talked about! Mrs. Soong, the mother, disapproved of dancing, as she disapproved of all the vices enumerated by Southern Methodist preachers. Hers was a Spartan code, and the children were expected to live by it.”

  At the next dance to which May-ling was invited, her mother tried to make her promise not to dance. “I had decided not to dance anyway,” May-ling wrote Emma, “but when she tried to make me promise, I became very much provoked and told her that I certainly intended to dance and to dance a lot too. She was so upset though about it that finally I weakened and promised her that as long as I bear the name of Soong I shall not dance in CHINA. Please notice the last word, for if ever I get back to America, I am going to kick my heels off.”

  A few months later, May-ling started talking about going back to America to study medicine—a calling that had attracted her father as well—but her mother vetoed the idea. After having her tonsils removed, however, she wrote Emma about “a thing which I have learned since I have been home. That is this: friends are very nice, but remember when you actually really get to a hard fix, the family is the one that will stand by you.” Ailments and illnesses were always hard on May-ling—far more than circumstances warranted. “I have been desperate and most miserably ill these past two weeks,” she wrote. “… The doctors found the tonsils terribly infected, and they have come to the conclusion that bad tonsils have been the cause of the break-outs on my face. Did you know that I am of an exceedingly nervous temperament? Well, it seems that I am; although I never knew it. The operation went hard with me, as I was on the verge of a nervous break-down. I am still resting, and not taking an active part in anything socially or in my social service work. I am well on the road to being pampered to death by the family.”

  After an extended recuperation May-ling traveled to Canton to visit sister Ching-ling and Ching-ling’s husband, Sun Yat-sen. Having bested the local warlords and abolished the military government, Sun was currently establishing his revolutionary government in opposition to the government in Peking, and Ching-ling had apparently asked May-ling to come help her for a month or so. After explaining to Emma that Canton was “not nearly so foreignized as Shanghai,” May-ling wrote that the Suns’ mountain house looked down on

  soldiers’ barracks, my brother-in-law’s soldiers. I think 5,000 of them are stationed below. We can hear bugle calls all day long, and can see them practising and drilling on the marching grounds.… In going to town, we are obliged to pass all the barracks and the Government House where many many people are patiently waiting to get an interview with Dr. Sun.… From the Gov’t house to our house is a private covered passage something like an elevated bridge.… At either end are guards, whom one can only pass if he has a pass from Doctor Sun! This passageway is only used by us, and by our callers.

  Living with Ching-ling, who had thrown herself into her husband’s crusade, made May-ling feel more useless than ever. “I think you are about the only one among my friends and family that I can face to review my thoughts, and to confess that the last four years have been absolutely barren of results so far as accomplishing anything worth while,” she wrote Emma in April 1921.

  … If I really had something in me, I could have overcome all the obstacles, swept them aside, left the comfortable homeside, and gone into the interior and done some work “on my own,” away from people who know my family—and particularly away from Shanghai where because of my family, anything I choose to do in the way of Social Service has the approval of the public.… I am well and favorably known as being public-spirited and with some claim to executive ability.… I am also known as being “intellectual” and “brainy,” rather proud but pleasant… a good sport but somewhat apart from the “common herd” because of my family position… I dress very well, and in foreign clothes, ride around in a motor and does [sic] not have to teach to get my living.… Oh, Dada, what is the matter with me? I have had moments when I feel that the one way to solve my problems is by a life of self-abnegation, to become either a Catholic nun, to renounce all… and to live a life of… selflessness. At moments, too, I have had the temptation of getting married, and be done with the whole thing, and then just drift along and keep myself from thinking.… You know, of course, that no men really view life as we women do. If they have not already had liaisons, they will eventually have them. I have seen so many instances of this in men whom I thought were absolutely reliable.… Especially is this true in China, where the standard of morality is so different from that of America.

  Nevertheless, a month later, May-ling, who said she was “literally dragged” home from the South by her brother, sent a letter of introduction to Emma for “a very good friend of mine, a Mr. B____.* I want to tell you a secret,” she continued.

  I like him tremendously, and he does me too. I only met him the night before I sailed from Hongkong at a friend’s house, and altho we were on board ship together only three days, we became very good friends. The day we arrived in Shanghai was his birthday; and so in spite of the fact that I had been away from home three weeks, I spent the day with him as the boat sailed that afternoon. We had a beautiful time together and I am glad I was so rash for once in my life. Needless to say, the family was furious with me.… They were also furious because he is a foreigner.… Since he left Saturday afternoon, I have received two wireless messages from him saying how much he misses me. The family tried to keep the wireless away from me, but did not succeed… you know our family is so conservative and puffed up with family pride over keeping “pure” the family blood that they would rather see me dead than marry a foreigner. Ordinarily I would too—but—Now I am thinking seriously of accepting another man. I like him; he is one of the most brilliant younger men, has excellent family, morals, educated etc. But I am still debating the question. You know lots of time, one may [be] reasonably convinced and yet not emotionally convinced about a certain course of action as being advisable.… But do not tell anyone, please, because I have to work this out myself. In the meanwhile when Mr. B comes to call, be awfully nice to him; but do not let on that I have told you anything at all.

  In the summer, when the heat always got her down, May-ling hit another low. “I know friends, relatives & acquaintances all envy me,” she wrote Emma,

  because they say I seem to have everything good in life, everything worth having!… I do seem to have the richest life of any one of my friends or acquaintances. Then why… am I such an ingrate, and feel so tired of life?… I have tried “Social Service,” “self-improvement,” “butterflying,” in fact all the possible ways which seemed to promise a richer, fuller life. And I have failed!! Now I am trying something new, new at least for me.…

  You know Dada, I am not a religious person. I am too darned independent and pert to be meek or humble or submissive. As you probably know too, my sister Mrs. Kung was even more independent than I
. She is very much keener than I, a really brilliant woman, and very social—always has been the leading Social light up to two or three years ago, she even denied the existence of a God, and whenever religion was mentioned in her presence, she either shunned the topic or else plainly said that it was all old women’s nonsense etc. But now she is very religious, and she told me that the reason why she is so changed is because she has seen the error of her former manner and attitude towards God. She told me she has gone through periods of agony far worse than any I have been through, and that because of her misery and sufferings she turned to God—and now she has found solace in life and faith in living. I wish you could know her, for she is undoubtably [sic] the most brilliant miss in the family, and is unusually keen & quick witted, vivacious, quick and energetic. She is not the sort I would consider at all fanatical, and yet she is deeply religious, and now prays to God to help the solution of her problems. More than this, she has found peace, such peace as she has never known…

  She told me that the only way for me to conquer this lassitude of mine is to become religious, and to really commune with God. You know, she has been telling me this for a long time now up to the present. I used to get furious just because her words irritated me, and used to tell her to keep still. But now I am trying her advice, and so far I cannot say how it will work out. I will say this, though, since I tried her advice, I feel a great deal happier, as though I no longer am carrying a heavy burden alone when I pray. Now, I am in a receptive mood, so to speak. I cannot explain this to you; but I wish you were here for Mrs. Kung to talk to you. You know becoming more religious has not changed her outward mode of living, because she is just as gay, and goes out to parties etc. just as much as before, but somehow or another, there is a difference in her. She is great deal less critical, more thoughtful, and not so intolerant of the shortcomings of others.