In July of 1972, Chiang Kai-shek suffered cardiac arrest, leaving him an invalid for the remainder of his life. Not wanting to move him to a hospital, May-ling had an emergency medical station set up in the Chung Hsing Hotel, where he lapsed into a coma and she, Jeanette Kung, and Ching-kuo all took rooms near him. According to a member of the household, Madame Chiang was “very calm” and directed the operation like “the commander on a battlefield.” She ordered doctors and nurses from the veterans’ hospital brought in to attend him at the hotel. All their days off and vacations were canceled, and no one either from the hospital or the hotel was allowed to contact members of their families; if their families inquired, they were told that their relatives had gone south on a business trip and would be back in a few days, leading the wives of various doctors to believe that their husbands had disappeared. Six months later Chiang came out of the coma but remained an invalid and was moved back and forth between the hospital and his home, where he stayed in bed or in a wheelchair and received visits from his son Ching-kuo in the mornings and evenings.
In spite of all May-ling’s precautions and prevarications, stories about the G-mo’s ill health began to circulate around the island. To prove that her husband was all right, Madame set up several phony photo opportunities— the generalissimo at home offering his youngest grandson and bride a traditional cup of tea during their wedding (Chiang had been far too ill to attend the ceremony); Chiang speaking with ten officials who visited him in the hospital during the Eleventh Congress of the KMT (his right arm had to be taped to the armrest of his chair, as he could not control the movements of his hand); and a family visit in which Chiang was photographed with his youngest great-grandson in his arms (the child was placed there just long enough to snap the picture).
It was during this difficult period that May-ling lost her favorite sister, Ai-ling. She had gone to New York in September of 1973 to see Ai-ling, who was seriously ill, but left four days before Ai-ling died. One of May-ling’s friends said that neither she nor Ching-ling attended Ai-ling’s funeral, since both were afraid of running into the other.
Among the younger members of the Soong and Chiang families, May-ling’s favorite remained Jeanette Kung, H. H. and Ai-ling’s daughter. Madame had asked Jeanette to come to Taiwan to run some of her charitable and noncharitable enterprises, including the Grand Hotel in Taipei, the Women’s League, the orphanage schools like those she had established on the mainland, and a new center for children with polio. When it was decided to expand the hotel to accommodate the foreigners who were coming to Taiwan, Chiang himself had asked Jeanette to take charge of the project. “Under Miss Kung’s management, the construction costs were all used for the building, and not one cent was put into private pockets,” according to a member of the household. At the same time, however, most of the competent people on the project could not get along with Jeanette. It was the same story in the Chiang residence. She was “troublesome,” and “a lot of people did not like her.”
Madame Chiang had always felt guilty about Jeanette, because when she was a little girl with eczema, Madame had suggested that Ai-ling put her in boys’ clothes—loose pants and long-sleeved shirts—to protect her skin, and from that time on, Jeanette had refused to dress like a girl. Whether it was or was not guilt that had originally created the relationship, May-ling and her niece were extremely close. When she was not living with her aunt, Jeanette had what Chiang’s personal physician referred to as “two women who called themselves Miss Kung’s wives.” They were about Jeanette’s age, and one had a husband and children.*
Jeanette often ran the Madame’s homes for her. Although May-ling spoke in the Shanghai dialect to her husband and the household, she spoke English to Jeanette in order to keep the servants from understanding. Described by Chiang’s doctor as “slim and short… not pretty and… overbearing,” Jeanette made sure never to offend the G-mo or the Madame, but “as to the rest [of the household], she ordered them about in a very rude way.” Very smart, Jeanette was May-ling’s one-woman “FBI,” reporting errors, scandals, and bribes back to the mistress of the house. This trait, however useful in a large Chinese household, apparently backfired when Chiang began to suffer from his heart condition. Jeanette, who was very interested in medicine, bought a lot of books on the subject, including some on diet and medicine, and began to harass the doctors, insisting that their methods and medications were wrong. Because of her position in the Chiang household, they were afraid of her, and it took some time before May-ling could convince her niece to stop second-guessing the medical team in charge of her husband.
The year before Chiang’s death, May-ling engineered a minor triumph when U.S. Ambassador Walter McConaughy, who had asked for and been refused visits to the G-mo, requested an audience to say good-bye before returning to the States. Madame was concerned about Taiwan’s relationship with the United States, since mainland China was now in the United Nations and Japan had just cut diplomatic ties with the island. She invited the ambassador for dinner and had Chiang placed in his chair to greet McConaughy. Although he wheezed and gasped for air, May-ling smoothed things over, performing her usual job of interpretation during the visit. Meanwhile, the doctors, who had warned her against removing the G-mo’s heart monitor for too long, waited anxiously with oxygen behind the dining room doors.
During Chiang’s last illness, May-ling assumed his role, along with her own, of outraged spokesperson against the Communists. Four months after he was taken ill, she spewed out her anger and frustration at the British in an address to the Twenty-seventh World Congress of the Junior Chamber International in Taipei. Filled with arcane words she must have thought would impress her youthful audience—supererogatory, correlational, fugacious, quodlibet, troke—she contended that Great Britain’s recognition of the Chinese Communist regime on the mainland reminded her of “the remarkable similarity of a festival of complacency, lulled by auto-hypnosis, which pervaded the British leadership prior to World War I.” She also offered the following sentence on the French: “I have made some mention of history to show that although in her excitable Gallic affinity for bungling, half-efficient and half-inefficient, committing cataclysmic blunders and undergoing many terrible and dark hours, France, pitched against the proverbial methodic furor Teutonicus, was able to ultimately survive.”
As the G-mo’s wife grew more outspoken, she had also become more unreadable, due to her insistent use of unusual words and long, convoluted sentences. The best explanation this author can find for these self-defeating literary tics is May-ling’s awareness of her own intellect in a society in which women’s minds were not highly regarded and her understandable if unfortunate need to exhibit that intelligence to the world. This was certainly the case with a long article written in the spring of 1975, entitled “We Do Beshrei It.” The title, she explained, came from Yiddish and meant “Don’t talk about it, don’t tempt it and it will go away.” Furious at the “much touted U.S. Soviet and the U.S.-Chinese Communist renewed effort at detente during the latter part of 1974,” she suggested looking at “some of the current endogenous [internal] socio-economic problems as well as some of the exogenous [external] international political problems that beset and ineffectuate [not in the dictionary] the United States.” These were listed, in no particular order, as the inability of American children to read, the acceptance of obscenity, widespread violence, the availability of drugs, welfare fraud, dreadful nursing homes, dishonesty in government, permissiveness in raising children, strikes, long hair, economic depression, and an “energy crunch.” She complained that detente between the United States and the USSR and the United States and the PRC had given the Chinese Communists time to catch up in nuclear weaponry while “protecting them against the U.S.S.R.” Or, as she put it, “Chou [En-lai] has maneuvered the U.S. into being a policy bodyguard to give protection to him gratis while Chou the predator plots future predations [robberies, plundering] with assurance and impunity… he is far and away ahead of both superpo
wers in his subtle brilliant strategy.” But the Madame concluded, “I have faith that certain ineludible and fundamental principles are again emerging regnant and that self-interest, I repeat self-interest, of the superpowers will insure wiser and thought-out decisions. Fictive reality ensconced in transitory emotions and psychological complexes seated in shallow arrogance and vanity, are in essence all exercises in futility.” (At this point, it must be admitted that this author was tempted to try to read the article, printed in both languages, in Chinese.)
APRIL 5, 1975, was the last day for a devoted Chinese to engage in his annual ritual of sweeping his ancestors’ tombs. According to tradition, the Chinese soul is divided into three parts: one part remains hovering in or around the body, a second enters the holy tablets placed in the family ancestral hall, while the third ascends to the spiritual realm, where it receives rewards or punishments for its life on Earth. On this night ancestral ghosts rise, walk around, and prepare to return to their places. It was a particularly clear night when the doctor on duty called Chiang’s physician to say that the generalissimo’s heart had stopped. The physician rushed into Chiang’s bedroom, where he injected a stimulant into the patient’s heart, which started beating again.
May-ling came in and was seated at her husband’s bedside when his heart stopped for a second time. The doctor gave Chiang another injection and was preparing to give him a third when May-ling said, “Just stop.” It was shortly before midnight, and a huge storm suddenly erupted over the island, complete with thunder and lightning. According to Ching-kuo, “As Father lay dying, the rain poured down and the wind howled as though the whole universe were changing its coloration in order to mourn him.” To which Ching-kuo’s biographer added, “Even Harvard-educated officials in the city thought this was more than a coincidence.”
In spite of the explosion of the elements, Chiang’s death, according to The New York Times, was “not expected to have any significant impact on the politics of the Nationalist Chinese Government or on the political morale of the people here.” This the Times ascribed to the fact that Ching-kuo had emerged “as a strong leader who has seemed to gain the confidence of most of the population.” Newsweek went further: “The fact of the matter is that Chiang’s death made very little political difference at all.” Asked how he felt about Ching-kuo succeeding his father, one member of the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Taipei replied, “It was a very good feeling. A feeling that here’s a good pragmatic business-like Chinese who was going to take over from the doddering old man.”*
As was traditional, Ching-kuo and Wei-kuo wrapped their father’s body in a white cloth for burial. Chiang had left a political testament calling on his supporters to continue to fight the Communists and regain the mainland. He also left a will asking that his body not be placed in the grand memorial that was to be built in his memory but kept in a mausoleum by the Lake of Mercy in the mountains, so that his bones could be transported home one day to the mainland.
Chiang’s body lay in state during the week before the funeral, which followed eleven days after his death. The long delay was explained by the fact that little had been done to prepare for the funeral beforehand, since such preparations were considered to be in bad taste. The hiatus gave citizens from around Taiwan time to view the open casket, and it was estimated that one out of every six islanders came to Taipei to pay homage. The television network, “closely supervised” by the government, showed officials, soldiers, factory workers, children, businessmen, and housewives crying before altars with pictures of Chiang draped in black.
A state funeral was held on April 16. More than three hundred foreign dignitaries were in attendance. Members of the staff of the U.S. Embassy had been carefully coached as to the proper behavior. “He [Chiang] had a vast, very fancy state funeral which the entire diplomatic corps had to attend. We were taught how to go up by threes to the podium and bow from the hips to his portrait in a gesture of sympathy or respect. The whole diplomatic corps was lined up and had to go through this: click, click, bend at the hips, bend twice and move off.” No VIPs came from any of the countries allied with China in World War II except Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who attended with a six-person delegation named by President Gerald Ford.* According to Anna Chennault, it was she who “persuaded the vice-president to go,” probably because Madame Chiang had been at her husband’s rites. The service, according to the Taiwan Missionary Fellowship, was “very Christian,” and Chiang’s body was entombed with a Bible and a copy of the devotional classic Streams in the Desert. The service was televised for the islanders. The coffin was then put on a flatbed truck, covered in yellow and white flowers, and taken to its “temporary” resting place—which had been built into the side of the tree-covered mountain overlooking the lake.
A memorial service, attended by more than 1,100 people, was also held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the speakers were what the reporter for The Washington Post called “two of the most prominent anti-communists in the United States,” the Reverend Billy Graham and retired Army General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Graham spoke of May-ling as “one of the world’s most intelligent and beautiful women” and of Chiang himself as “a true believer” whose faith was “personal,” “genuine,” and “quiet.” He claimed that it was “public knowledge among the leadership in Taiwan” that a few hours before he died, the generalissimo had “called together his wife, his son, and a five or six of the leading men of the Government… [and] spoke to them about his last wishes, ending with the phrase, ‘These things and my Christian faith I have never departed from.’”† A more believable tribute came from General Wedemeyer, who said that during his two years as chief of staff to the generalissimo, his “respect and esteem” for Chiang “as a gentleman, as a patriot, and as a dedicated leader steadily grew.” The service, which ended with the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” was, according to the Post reporter, “studded with biblical references to steadfastness in the face of adversity.”
While obituary writers around the world blamed Chiang for losing China, the residents of the island of Taiwan settled into official mourning. Movie theaters and other houses of entertainment closed down for a month; games like golf and billiards were forbidden; television stations were limited to black-and-white films on the G-mo’s life or his funeral; and bars were closed, although it was said that some of their more enterprising employees stood outside these establishments in the street in order to lure customers inside.
“The President’s departure from this world was very hard for me to quite accept as reality,” May-ling wrote Emma a month later. “… It was actually the people’s undescribably intense and inconcolable [sic] grief which forced me to regain something like routine life. Literally millions of them were out of their homes, many riding buses, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and their own cars overnight from one end of the island to the other to pay their respects to the President, tearful, kneeling, wailing, prostrate, stricken respect.… Because of their sorrow, somehow my own sorrow became less important. My heart went out to them, to these generous, magnificent people whom I must serve as I have always served.… And on the whole route to Tsu Hou [Lake of Mercy]… over two million people were lined up solid, some places ten deep.… Emma, unless you have seen this with your own eyes, I cannot quite describe the feeling and ethos to you.”
BUT MAY-LING’S WISHFUL descriptions of the grief of the Taiwanese will never compete with the scene that took place in the home of Mao Tse-tung, the man who had driven Chiang Kai-shek into his island exile. According to the most recent biography of Mao, the chairman took an entire day off to privately mourn the passing of his old enemy. It is said that he neither ate nor spoke during that day but listened to the same tape of stirring music over and over again, beating time on his bed and “wearing a solemn expression.” The music had been composed for Mao to a twelfth-century poem, written to say good-bye to another rival “who bore an uncanny resemblance to Chiang” and had been exile
d to a remote part of China. The poem read as follows:
You and I are men of history
No little men chattering about minor affairs!
Go, let go, my honoured friend
Do not look back.
Mao himself died seventeen months later.
PART NINE
1975–2003
56
The storm center of the world has gradually shifted to China. Whoever understands that mighty empire socially, politically, economically and religiously, has a key to politics for the next five hundred years.
—JOHN HAY, SECRETARY OF STATE, 1898–1905
IN SEPTEMBER 1975, five months after Chiang died, May-ling left for the United States with more than a dozen personal aides and nurses. From then on, except for specific occasions, she made her home in New York.
On leaving Taipei, she said that she had been sick for the past two years but “was unable to attend to my own illness as the President was not well.” Diagnosed with breast cancer the year her husband died, she had already undergone the first of two mastectomies in Taiwan. According to DeLong, she “mustered strength to fly to New York for further medical care.”
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