May-ling’s working day also started early. “Take that up with Madame” was often the advice given to people with problems to solve, since even government officials often had to wait weeks to get an appointment with Chiang. A troubleshooter for her husband, May-ling spent hours over her correspondence, often working until midnight. According to James McHugh, she did “the work of several men daily, organizing and directing relief work of all kinds and constantly spurring on those around her to action. She and Donald have worn themselves out trying to get Chiang to take drastic action against the inefficiency which surrounds him.” Weekends were spent in a home in the mountains. Chiang, who had always lived and dined simply— ostentatiously so—was angry when someone told him that this home, called the “Eagle’s Nest” because of its location, bore the same name as Hitler’s in Berchtesgaden. He replied that Hitler’s house had cost a fortune, whereas his could have belonged to a prewar, high-level bank clerk. Not exactly. Set high on a hill, the Chiang’s country house was a well-designed one-story structure with a lovely veranda overlooking a garden of ferns, irises, and lilies. It was part of a compound built by a very rich businessman in 1925. Chiang’s office was in a separate two-story building, where he also had a bedroom. Like everyone else in Chungking who could afford it, the Chiangs had their own tunnel-shaped bomb shelter, which was reached via the garden.
Chiang and May-ling were an odd combination—basically an attraction of opposites. “He was a man I learned first to respect and admire, then to pity, then to despise,” said White. Described by a former Oxford professor as a “slim, rather stooping, monkish figure,” Chiang greeted visitors “with the Chinese inclination, hands clasped together” and responded to their remarks with “a courteous grunt.” At this point in his life he seemed to many to remain static—in both body and mind, with no new thoughts and few signs of age aside from the flecks of gray in his hair and his false teeth. “There were no wrinkles, no sagging muscles,” said Payne, who described Chiang’s life as “a calm, sedentary, unexciting existence… little was demanded of him except that he assume the role of symbolic ruler.”
As specific in her own way as Chiang was in his, May-ling was rightly called the most important of Chiang’s advisers. She was certainly the one who best understood the foreign devils. She told him when and how to respond to his allies and enemies, explaining the workings of their minds and governments to her husband, who understood little beyond his own borders. Writing in 1938, Edgar Snow said that “few Chinese except Chiang’s own staff have access to him without Madame’s approval” and told of the time he “had the misfortune to incur her displeasure over a brief sketch I wrote about the generalissimo. The repercussions of this episode lasted more than three years, and were an amazing revelation of the thoroughness with which she follows everything written about him.”
John Carter Vincent, who served in the U.S. Embassy, disliked Madame. “I feel, and others confirm my feeling,” he wrote, “that… she is a hard, shallow, and selfish woman—she certainly looks it, but she can turn on the charm to melt the heart of the most hard boiled foreigner… not so with her own countrymen. They dont [sic] trust her—but the Generalissimo does and that is what counts.” White, who called May-ling “the chief liberalizing element in Chiang Kai-shek’s life,” did not like her much better than Vincent did, but her looks impressed him, her influence on her husband pleased him, and her artifice amused him. “She is a beautiful piece of woman,” White wrote in 1940, “her figure is probably the best in Chungking and she has… the prettiest legs I ever have seen… she looks in the flesh far more attractive than in photographs.… She is personally brave, physically courageous.… By education and training she is equipped as no other woman in modern world politics to take her place in the affairs of state.… She is… sure of self, imperious. ‘The Madame has expressed her will,’ I have heard one of the lesser members of her entourage say (Madame Chiang Kai-shek is usually called ‘Madame’), ‘we cannot ask her again.’” By the 1970s, White had refined his feelings about her: “A beautiful, tart and brittle woman, more American than Chinese, and mistress of every level of the American language from the verses of the hymnal to the most sophisticated bitchery. Madame Chiang, always stunning in her silk gowns, could be as coy and kittenish as a college coed, or as commanding and petty as a dormitory house mother. She swished briskly into any room like a queen.”
There is little question that May-ling, her sisters, brothers, and their spouses conducted themselves much like the Chinese dynasties that had preceded them, making important decisions for the country and making sure that those decisions were financially beneficial to their family. Like the Manchus and their predecessors for centuries past, who believed that the best of what belonged to China automatically belonged to them, the Soongs apparently saw little or nothing wrong in skimming the family cream off the country’s milk. Wisely, they tried to keep their money and treasures out of sight. During the war, however, it became impossible to keep their jealousies and quarrels from seeping through the walls of their various homes and estates nestled comfortably in the hills in and around Chungking.
THE PERSON WHO originally broke through the solidarity of the family corporation was Ching-ling—first when she married Sun Yat-sen and later when she took up the Communist banner. Considered the family beauty, she was described by writer Pearl Buck as “a great lady… slender but not thin,” blessed with “exquisite skin, large, frank, fine eyes, a lovely profile” and “shining black hair.” Up until the Japanese invasions, Ching-ling had stayed apart—at least publicly—from the rest of the Soongs. The difference in politics or economic circumstances, however, does not seem to have lessened her relationship with her sisters. Randall Gould, a correspondent for The Nation, described a scene he observed in the early 1930s: “I was waiting in Dr. Sun’s house in Rue Molière… suddenly the door opened and in trooped the three sisters… laughing and chattering like schoolgirls. This was at a period when Madame Sun was being watched by plainclothes agents of the Nanking regime… it was a time when the sound of her typewriter clacking away by night was reported to the Government as ‘a secret radio set communication with Moscow.’ Yet here was Madame Sun bringing home… the wives of two of the highest officials of the National Government against which she had set her face.”
It was about this time that Ching-ling started working with a friend (some say lover), General Teng Yen-ta, to establish an alternative to the Nationalists and the Communists, neither of whom she trusted. After Teng was arrested, tortured, and executed,* Ching-ling issued a statement condemning her brother-in-law and his government. But when the young journalist Harold Isaacs came to a “parting of ways” with the Communists and went to say good-bye to her, she told him “to be careful. I thought she meant to be careful of Kuomintang thuggery. But no, she said, she meant our Communist friends. I looked at her incredulously. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, ‘be careful. You don’t really know these people. They are capable of anything.’”
Nevertheless, to quote Edgar Snow, Ching-ling “embraced all revolutionaries as her own, and through her personal intervention saved many lives.” She was, however, unable to save Teng or six young leftist writers led by Lu Hsun. Lu Hsun was, according to Snow, “China’s greatest contemporary writer” and definitely not a Communist. Even so, he and his five followers were forced to dig a large pit, bound by their hands and feet, thrown into the muck, and buried alive. “That,” Ching-ling said, “is our Christian Generalissimo—burying our best young people alive. Evidently in his Bible studies he has not yet reached the Corinthians.”†
For minimally more fortunate prisoners, there was Zhazidong Prison, a small building, once a coal pit, lying about an hour out of Chungking. With sixteen cells for men and two for women, it still has emblazoned on its walls the four virtues of the New Life Movement and other exhortations commanding those who have strayed to change their ways. To encourage this, there remain the vestiges of a torture room with one huge chair, a device
for hanging, a brazier for heating, and various tools like mallets and hooks.
As a sister-in-law of Chiang, Ching-ling always remained untouchable, although she continued to issue statements against her brother-in-law’s government. She moved to a small flat in Hong Kong and in 1938 founded the China Defense League, a relief organization that became the major outside supply source for the areas under Communist control. “Among the things she sent us were materials and directions for making penicillin—at that time new in the world,” said a grateful American doctor. According to her biographer Jung Chang, Ching-ling sold the jewelry left to her by her mother to pay for her relief work. “Luxury to her was criminal in a poor country at war like China,” said Chang. “In this she set herself off decisively from the insensitive extravagance of her sister Mme. Chiang.” It was not until Pearl Harbor that Ching-ling rejoined the family, began to be seen and photographed with her sisters, and, although she never changed her opinion of Chiang Kai-shek, even allowed herself to appear occasionally in pictures with him as well.
AI-LING, THE ELDEST and most powerful of the Soong siblings—even Chiang hesitated to cross her—did her part for the war effort, but in the manner of a grande dame. Ever since 1932, when a Red Cross worker had told her that there were not enough hospital beds for soldiers wounded in the defense of Shanghai, she had worked to fill the need, turning the Lido Cabaret into a modern hospital with three hundred beds. When soldiers were released from treatment, Ai-ling gave them clothes, food, and money. She also established a hospital for children on the border of the International Settlement, and it was said that she started both these institutions mostly with her own money.
Although Ai-ling insisted that she “devoted her time exclusively to her family and to welfare work,” according to Edgar Snow, her “chief interests” were “finance, commerce and jewelry. It is through Madame Kung that most of the family’s wealth has been amassed.” Three years later, Snow saw no reason to change his mind. “Though few dispute the greatness of Mme. Chiang and Mme. Sun, there is less agreement as to the eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling… Perhaps she has been less sympathetically regarded because of her immense wealth, amassed especially since her husband, Dr. H. H. Kung, became the generalissimo’s finance minister. Yet nobody knows the exact extent of this wealth, nor how much of it is held only in proxy for other members of the family.”
While one social contemporary* remembered Ai-ling as “very bossy” and “very stubborn,” there were those who found her fascinating. “To her must go the leadership of this clan,” said George Sokolsky, who contended that she was “the most brilliant of all” the Soongs. “Less strikingly pretty than her youngest sister, Soong Ai-ling was equally impressive,” wrote Edgar Ansel Mowrer, a British journalist who visited China in the late thirties. “There was about her anything but tall figure, something so authoritative, so personally powerful, so penetratingly keen, that one would have been struck with her anywhere. Here was authority, conscious of itself, conscious of power, but withal wonderfully good-natured, resourceful, helpful in need.… I suspected a mind that forgot nothing and forgave little, but that knew how to repay affection richly.” Whether one admired or disliked Ai-ling, she and her husband were clearly the favorite topic of gossip in Chungking, about which it was said that “90 percent is untrue but ten percent is even worse than the gossip.”
Chiang’s political adviser Owen Lattimore was “amazed by the almost universal dislike for Madame Kung,” which he blamed on the fact that everyone “believed that she controlled one particular bank, through which she bought American dollars just before each new steep decline in the value of the Chinese dollar.” After attending a family Christmas dinner, Lattimore gave his opinion of all three. “Madame Kung,” he said, “had an extremely shrewd but unscrupulous pecuniary mind. Madame Chiang was interested in power and influence and had a talent for intrigue. Madame Sun was the least clever… but a woman of complete integrity and simple honesty.” Others simply repeated the well-known saying that Ai-ling loved money, May-ling loved power, and Ching-ling loved China.
During the war, Ai-ling maintained a fine home in what journalist Sheen called “purse-proud and contented Hong Kong”—an elegant refuge that May-ling, pleading ill health and claiming that her doctor “had told her she would acquire cancer if she did not rest,” visited fairly often. She was there in March of 1939 when Chiang wired, “When will the dentist cure your illness? I hope you can return to Chungking as soon as possible.” To which she replied, “The problem with my teeth is still not cured, so I don’t know when I can come back to Chungking. I am so sorry. I will be back as soon as the dentist finishes with me.” Chiang was not happy. “I read your telegram,” he wired back. “I hope you can get back soon. There is a lot of work waiting for you to do, and all of it is urgent.”
May-ling returned to Chungking but was back in Hong Kong a year later for an operation on her sinuses, which, she complained, were aggravated by the climate of Chungking. “I am feeling very uncomfortable,” she wired Chiang in February 1940. “Things were even worse yesterday. I vomited six times, and my heartbeat was too slow. I’m a little better today. I think I will be okay.” Her husband was, as usual, lonely and concerned. “How do you feel now?” he wired. “I am so worried about you. It would be better for you to go to the hospital and have a thorough rest there.” Four days later, she answered that she was “much better now. I don’t like the British hospital here and I prefer to convalesce at home. Please don’t worry about me.”
At some point after May-ling’s recuperation, the three sisters attended a party in the ballroom of a hotel. “My sisters have persuaded me to come out to dinner,” she informed their biographer Emily Hahn. “We are going to dine at the Hong Kong Hotel tonight, and I thought that it would be worth seeing us all together.” It was, as Hahn put it, “a bombshell: Word went around quickly and in a few moments the dance floor looked something like the crowd at Wimbledon as couples danced past the long table, their heads turning as if they had owls’ necks, staring as hard as British courtesy allowed.… I’ll believe two of them are there,’ protested a newspaperman, but I won’t believe that’s Madame Sun. She would never, never be with the other two—and in this outpost of Empire!”
The war correspondent Martha Gellhorn met the Kungs in Chungking in 1941. H.H. had taken what Gellhorn called an “avuncular shine” to her, presenting her with a large box of chocolates, from which he had already eaten his favorites, and a red satin Chinese dress, embroidered in yellow and purple flowers that her traveling companion* said looked like the “latest model they were wearing in the Chungking whorehouses.” Dr. Kung gave a dinner for her, seating her to his right and placing in her bowl “choise morsels… sea slugs, bits of black rubber with creepers, thousand-year-old eggs, oily black outside with blood-red yolks.” It was Ai-ling, however, who bothered Gellhorn. “She reminded me of stout rich vulgar matrons in Miami Beach hotels,” the journalist wrote. “The CNAC pilots were down on her for demanding that they offload passengers to make room for her trunks, whenever she flew to Hongkong. She was good at clothes. I remember her dress as one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It was the classical Chinese model… of black velvet. The… buttons that close these gowns from collar to knee are usually made of silk braid, hers were button-size diamonds. She said she had ruby and emerald buttons too.”
Gellhorn also wrote about Chiang and May-ling, who invited the Hemingways to lunch in an “intimate foursome,” so that Chiang could hear news of the Canton front, where the journalists had just been. “Their house was modest” Gellhorn wrote, “… furnished by Grand Rapids including doilies but clean and thug-free. Display in Chungking was useless. Madame Chiang did not stint herself when abroad.… Madame Chiang, still a beauty and a famous vamp, was charming to U.C. and civil to me.” During lunch Chiang apparently delivered his usual vitriol on the CCP four separate times. “With thirty-five years’ hindsight, I see that the Chiangs were pumping propaganda into us, as eff
ective as pouring water in sand,” Gellhorn wrote later.
We had no idea of what was really going on in China, nor that the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, to whom power was all, feared the Chinese Communists not the Japanese. They were not fools. The Japanese would disappear some day.… The true threat to the Chiangs’ power lay in the people of China and therefore in the Communists.… I didn’t need political expertise to decide, in a few hours, that these two stony rulers could care nothing for the miserable hordes of their people and in turn their people had no reason to love them.… I asked Madame Chiang why they didn’t take care of the lepers, why force the poor creatures to roam the streets begging. She blew up. The Chinese were humane and civilized unlike Westerners; they would never lock lepers away out of contact with other mortals. ‘China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue.’… I was furious and sulked. To appease me, Madame Chiang gave me a peasant’s straw hat which I thought pretty and a brooch of jade set in silver filigree which I thought tacky.… U.C. behaved with decorum until we had done our bowing and scraping and departed. Then he said, laughing like a hyena, ‘I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China.
Gellhorn must have been in a bad mood during that lunch, because her description of May-ling when she and Hemingway went back the next day, is of a woman “who can charm the birds off the trees, and she knows exactly what appeals to each kind of bird.… She is as beautifully constructed as the newest and brightest movie star and she has lovely legs. Her face is oval, with cream-colored skin, a round chin and a smooth throat.… Every pose of her hands, her head or her body is pretty to see. She is so delightful to look at, and her low voice, speaking English with a charming, somewhat slurred accent, is so entrancing, that you forget you are talking to the second ruler of China.”
The Last Empress Page 42