The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  Madame, who had been the guest of honor at a luncheon before the exhibit, had clearly not lost the ability to charm her hosts. Philippe de Montebello, director of the museum and her luncheon partner, was suitably noncommital with the press: “She is clearly a grande dame and a calm and serene presence,” he said. William Luers, President of the Museum, who described Madame as sitting quietly with her head down, reported that she suddenly came alive when it was her turn to speak, launching into a discussion of the history of Sino-American relations and the importance of this particular exhibit. She was, he said “stunning in the way she spoke. There wasn’t a woman in the room who could have done what she did.”

  Although Madame Chiang was able to rouse herself for the occasional public appearance, by her late nineties she had started to withdraw. According to her friend Eleanor Lambert, “She’s hardly able to walk anymore. She comes in and we have lunch, then we go back and sit down, and then her mind begins to wander and she repeats herself.”

  But the Madame always pulled herself together for her birthday celebration in March, when friends, relations, and guests from Taiwan—mostly ladies from the National Women’s League dressed in celebratory red—gathered for a two-day event, which usually started with a party the night before at her niece Rosamonde’s home and culminated in a “very crowded” dinner in Madame’s own apartment at 10 Gracie Square. She was, in the words of one guest, “always beautifully dressed” when she came downstairs to make her appearance and had “all the children kiss her” before being escorted into the dining room. “Typically,” according to her nephew Leo Soong, “there would be two or three children from the Hua Hsing Children’s Home in Taipei* to sing and dance, along with the principal and some of the teachers. Mme. Chiang, of course, was always very fond of children as my brother and I knew from spending vacations with her in Taiwan when we were growing up.”† When she left her guests to go upstairs, it was always with an “imperial wave” and “Good-bye, everyone!” in a “strong voice, not wimpy.”

  Leo Soong visited his aunt twice a year for the last ten years of her life. Asked if she remained lucid, he replied that “she was lucid in her own way… episodically” as he put it, occasionally mistaking him for someone else. “So we had some slightly unusual conversations,” he said, “but the personality was there, and within that construct she always had important points to make.” According to Leo, she received a daily report from Taiwan, probably from a secretary who culled it from the newspapers, and her favorite magazine was Guideposts, a monthly interfaith publication founded by Norman Vincent Peale in 1945, featuring stories of religious inspiration.

  When she was around ninety-nine, she told Leo, “You know, my sisters are dead, my brothers are dead. I don’t know why God has left me.” He was visiting her for a week, and “every day she would raise the same question. On the last day she kind of came to an answer: I think God has left me here so that I can bring those family members who don’t know Christ to him.” He said that she “was always concerned about her family” and talked about the fact that Ching-ling had not been allowed to go to Taiwan to see Leo’s father, T. A. Soong. He felt that the sisters “missed each other and would have liked to see each other in the later years, but it was not possible.… ‘if only my sister Ching-ling were still alive,’ ” he quoted her as saying.

  In 1998, the Kung home in Lattingtown, a small community of large estates where Madame had lived on and off since her arrival in the United States, was sold to a developer for subdivision. Known as Hillcrest, the thirty-six-acre property and the home where she had her own “suite” was by that time owned in trust by seven descendants of H. H. and Ai-ling Kung. The sale of the property was noted by the odd reporter, but the sale of the contents of the house hit newspapers from the Financial Times to USA Today and was covered by ABC’s World News Tonight. This was because of the crowds—more than ten thousand Chinese who came from as far away as Virginia, Massachusetts, and Ohio to walk up the 500-foot gravel driveway to gaze at, sit on, or consider bidding for the objects remaining in the house after the more valuable things had been removed by the family. Except for a pair of elaborate nineteenth-century French chandeliers ($62,500), a nineteenth-century British cathedral clock ($64,000), a brushwork scroll by Chiang Kai-shek ($21,000), and three of Madame’s own paintings ($11,500),* most of the contents of the home were undistinguished. That, however, did not prevent former residents of Taiwan and even the mainland from coming to gawk. “For the overseas Chinese, she is the first lady,” said a reporter for the Chinese Daily News in New York. “There is only one Madame.”

  On December 13, 1999, the Braswell Galleries, an auction house in Norwalk, Connecticut, opened the house to possible bidders at 9:00 A.M., but by 11:00, there was such a crush that the mayor of Lattingtown, the Nassau County police, and the local fire marshals ordered it closed, giving tickets to some of the people in line in order to prevent riots. Two dozen policemen had to be called in to stop the fights that broke out and to display a sign at the appropriate off-ramp of the expressway saying simply “go back” in Chinese. According to one report, the lucky ones who had arrived early seated themselves on May-ling’s bed, “touched her dresser” and “posed for photos before her photograph.” Although the owner of the auction gallery obviously hoped that the frenzy of interest would carry over into the sale that took place the following weekend, adding a number of pots and pillows to the inventory, most of the items sold for approximately what they were worth—except for an ordinary bed of pale green wood with a flowered headboard from the master bedroom. Estimated to bring $300 to $500 but believed to have been slept in by Madame herself, it sold for $8,000.

  Although the generalissimo’s widow avoided the hoopla surrounding the sale of family possessions, she did manage to get herself to Flushing, Queens, on January 1, 2000, for the opening of an exhibit of Chinese paintings sponsored by World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in North America, at a gallery in their office. She arrived a little before 4:00 P.M. with her niece Rosamonde and was welcomed by a contingent of Taiwanese officials from Washington representing President Lee Teng-hui. Once the ribbon-cutting ceremony was over and the forty-odd guests had been placed in two lines, Madame, who had contributed ten paintings (five landscapes and five florals) to the exhibit, was wheeled down the aisle to greet them, followed by a retinue of seven to ten, all Chinese except for one stern-looking lady in a tweed suit, presumably her secretary-companion. Madame’s attendants had made sure that her makeup had been carefully applied; she wore a long black coat with a fur collar, diamond earrings, a big diamond ring, and low-heeled black pumps. She looked well but stayed for only half an hour. Her niece explained to the representative of one local paper that “Madame has not given interviews for many years, but wanted to come to the art exhibit.” She said that her aunt used a wheelchair because she had been in a car accident many years earlier, from which she had never really recovered. Otherwise she was in good health.

  On the day the exhibit opened, it attracted around two thousand visitors, most of whom came to see May-ling’s paintings, and before it closed, it had drawn a total of about thirteen thousand. One Chinese gentleman, a teacher from Brooklyn who dabbled in calligraphy, was surprised to find her work “very good” and, he believed, the work of a person at peace with herself. “When she painted these, she probably forgot about the world,” he commented. For a young man from Long Island, they were the work of “someone who is trying to hold onto tradition.”

  Two months later, when May-ling’s paintings were shown at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, along with calligraphy and paintings by five masters of the genre, she was called “quite a good painter,” by Emily Sano, Director of the Museum, who expanded her assessment for the San Francisco Chronicle: “It takes a marvelous spirit to live through such tumultous periods and become a painter, to pick up the paintbrush and focus on this very aesthetic expression, appreciation of nature, culture in a really deep sense. It’s tru
ly admirable.” But to journalist Ron Gluckman, Madame Chiang was nothing more than “an ambitious dabbler.” He found her work “nondescript, without any memorable style” and noted that the sketch entitled Lotus: A Gentleman among Flowers was “a work that looks just like any of the silk paintings on sale outside temples and tourist traps across China.” The intense interest shown that evening led Gluckman to the conclusion that Madame’s “paintings were less works of art than an emotional link with history” for the viewers, many of whom, he said, “arrived in wheel-chairs and leaning on walkers.” Debilities aside, the evening, “drew a tuxand-gown-crowd,” and it follows that many of the gowns were traditional cheongsams.

  On March 25, 2002, Madame Chiang celebrated her 105th birthday at the usual party in her New York apartment. She wrote a purple brocade gown with jade jewelry. “She was in very good spirits,” said the director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York. “She didn’t say a word last year. I was told only now that last year, she didn’t feel well— a fever. This year, she was marvelous.”

  The following year, however, she was unable to join her friends and family for the annual celebration. She had come down with pneumonia, for which she had been hospitalized, and had just returned to her apartment. A few months later, she is said to have caught cold, which apparently developed once again into “minor symptoms of pneumonia,” and on October 23, 2003, Soong May-ling Chiang died “very peacefully” at 11:17 P.M. in her own bed. Her niece Rosamonde, her niece’s husband, and an unidentified younger member of the family were with her. At the headquarters of the Nationalist Party in Taipei, it was announced that Madame Chiang, “beloved by the people of Taiwan, who bridged the turbulence of three centuries,” had passed away during the night.

  According to Susan Braddock, another resident of 10 Gracie Square who happened to arrive home at the time Madame’s body was being removed, the scene was “very solemn, very beautiful, and dignified.” An “honor guard of young Chinese” was standing in the driveway of the building, “protecting Madame Chiang all the way as her body was brought out wrapped in a tartan wool blanket” and put into a hearse. It was apparently not so peaceful on the street, however, where photographers were trying to get by the police, called in by the family to keep them from taking pictures.

  Her body was taken to a nondenominational funeral chapel in Manhattan, where it was placed in a closed coffin, banked with flowers. Above the coffin was a huge painting of Madame as a younger woman. According to The New York Times, “those who came to pay their respects… were mostly… people whose lives she had intimately touched, like the orphans of Nanjing, children whose fathers died fighting the Japanese in World War II. Now well into their sixties and beyond, half a dozen waited their turn in line, bowed their heads several times to the dark bronze coffin, then bowed their heads to Madame Chiang’s niece, nephew and other relatives.” Later on, outside the building, they told the Times reporter

  how Madame Chiang had set up a school for more than 300 of the dead soldiers’ children in Nanjing and visited them regularly, taking them to church services and sometimes tucking them in at night. When the Communists sent her husband… and the Nationalists into exile on Taiwan in 1949, she moved the school there and kept in touch with many of the orphans for the rest of her life. “We called her Mama, and she always tells everybody, ‘These are my kids,’ ” said Flora Lee, speaking for her husband, Gien-Feng Lee, 68, a retired businessman.… Another orphan, Dr. Howard Shiang, 65, a cardiac researcher… wept as he told how he had planned to show Madame Chiang a scientific paper he had delivered at a conference in Seattle, wanting her to be proud of him as a parent might, but then learned she had died.”

  It is said that Alden Whitman of The New York Times, a famous obituary writer who used to travel in search of the great and near great, had gone to Taipei to interview May-ling back in the summer of 1968. After he turned on his tape recorder, she told him that she really had not wanted to speak with him but had finally decided to do so out of kindness. Then, for the next fifteen minutes, she read him an article that she had written for the interview, lambasting the Times for ignoring the Communist infiltration of the labor unions, which, she claimed, had led to Chiang’s loss of the mainland. After this, she spoke with Whitman for a few minutes, and he left. It was only later, when he tried to transcribe his tape, that he discovered there was nothing on it and that she must have unplugged it from the wall without his noticing.

  Other obituary writers were mostly evenhanded, but even the most laudatory tempered their articles with references to money apparently siphoned off by the family. One former China correspondent, Seth Faison of The New York Times, who referred to Madame as “a dazzling and imperious politician” whose “skill… alternately charming and vicious, made her a formidable presence,” added that it “became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.” Bart Barnes of The Washington Post put it this way: “Supporters of the Chiangs tended to see them as the embodiment of all that was good in China and as the leaders in a valiant struggle against the forces of evil.… To their enemies, the Chiangs were the opportunistic overseers of a corrupt and decadent political apparatus that had little or no regard for human life or the well-being of China. Madame Chiang was the ‘Dragon Lady,’ imperious, hard-boiled and calculating.”

  According to the China Times, published in Taipei, it was Madame Chiang’s ability to speak English and familiarity with Western culture that had breached the gulf between China and the West. “There is no doubt that no other first lady in the history of the modern world could be compared with our Madame Chiang with the exception of Eleanor Roosevelt.… It was her efforts that changed the Big Three into the Big Four.” The Union, the second largest newspaper in Taiwan, gave the Chiangs credit for hanging on to their island. “If they had decided to flee overseas,” it said, “Taiwan would have fallen into the hands of the People’s Republic of China.”

  From the mainland the Communists, who tend to be generous at the time of death, “offered deep condolences and extended sincere sympathy” to her relatives. Although they criticized the Madame for representing Chiang’s regime, “which betrayed the will… of our Chinese nation,” she was, in the words of the chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a “noted and influential person in the modern era of Chinese history, who had been dedicated to the Chinese people’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, opposed to separating the nation, and hoped for the peaceful reunification across the Taiwan Straits.” This set the tone for other mainland testimonials, which latched onto May-ling’s efforts during World War II and her supposed belief in the peaceful unification of China. No one, of course, mentioned the fact that her blueprint for unification would have been at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the one proposed by the Communists.

  Only one obituary* was downright nasty. An editorial from the Taipei Times,* entitled “So Long and Good Riddance,” labeled Madame Chiang “perhaps the most evil woman to wield any kind of power” in the twentieth century; claimed that it was “Luce’s power and T. V. Soong’s bribery” that had “bought Congress in 1943”; stated that “Chiang and his cronies” had sold “most of the materiel that the US supplied” during World War II to the Japanese; and said that the Chiangs in Taiwan were guilty of “depriving Taiwanese of political power and suppressing dissent with great brutality.” Although the last salvo was fair, the editorial was an obvious polemic based on exaggeration and rumor and motivated solely by political partisanship.

  While the opposition ranted in Taiwan, Madame’s body was interred in a family plot in Ferncliff Cemetery in upstate New York. Like her husband, she had wanted to be buried on the mainland, and they had both hoped to be moved there in the future. A representative of the Taiwanese government in New York said that only members of her family attended the interment. The president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian of the De
mocratic Progressive Party, whose election in 2000 had ended fifty years of Kuomintang rule, paid his respects to Madame during a two-day visit to New York. According to the press release, written before the event, President Chen was expected to bow before a portrait of Madame Chiang, then present a flag of Taiwan and a citation of her contributions to the nation to her family.

  A memorial was held for Soong May-ling Chiang on November 5, 2003. In spite of the fact that she was a strong Methodist, the service took place at St. Bart’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, considered one of the most elegant and chic houses of worship in the city of New York. More than seventy-five bouquets of white roses, lilies, hydrangeas, and scarlet orchids were placed at the bases of the pews, and a large picture of Madame was set on an easel in front of the congregation with huge white arrangements on either side and more white flowers on the floor. Almost everyone dressed in black, a nod to the traditional color of mourning in America.

  The service itself, conducted in Chinese and English, was mostly a religious one with the singing of hymns and the recital or singing of psalms. The invocation was given by the rector of the church, and the message was delivered by the Reverend Lien Hwa Chow, who came from Taiwan for the service. A large program, written in English and Chinese, presented a picture of Madame Chiang on the cover and a lengthy biography of her inside. “The whole world is in mourning for this outstanding lady of modern China,” it read. “… Madame Chiang’s wisdom, determination and elegance will be remembered by all.” Although remarks were given by two gentlemen from Taiwan and Senator Paul Simon, it was the Reverend Chow, the Chiangs’ minister for forty years, who summed up the sentiments of the congregation with his words “We are all God’s creatures, but May-ling Soong was God’s masterpiece.”