http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04garner.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=all
Books of The Times
Wartime China's Elegant Enigma
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: November 3, 2009
"The only thing Oriental about me," Soong Mei-ling once wrote, "is my face."
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Associated Press
Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, right, with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House.
THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Illustrated. 787 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was
exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and
cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time,
no woman in the world was more powerful.
Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in
"The Last Empress," Hannah Pakula's long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms.
Pakula's book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding
against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has
little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as
grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.
The story of Mme. Chiang's life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal,
however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had
gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her
father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and
returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing
Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost
everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion
(Methodist).
Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong
expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong
Mei-ling's two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan
Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10,
studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia
before graduating from Wellesley College.
When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could
lay on a "Scarlett O'Hara accent" she'd picked up in Georgia. ("Ah reckon Ah
shan't stay aroun' much longer," she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She
was also, Ms. Pakula writes, "short, chubby, round-faced and childish in
appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for
her looks."
By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about
Soong Mei-ling. "She had not been given a Western education," Ms. Pakula
observes, "in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table."
The Soong sisters married well. One, Soong Qing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen,
China's first president after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911. In a
lavish ceremony in 1927, Soong Mei-ling married one of Sun's former military
aides, Chiang Kai-shek, a man who would become the head of the Nationalist
government in China from 1928 to 1949, and later its leader while in exile in
Taiwan.
He was a hardened soldier who "dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with
straw sandals," Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang
was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet
tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, "a near-hypnotic effect on men."
Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de
facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote
articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly
in the early '40s. She appeared on "Meet the Press" in 1958. She was Chiang's
closest adviser and she constantly buffed his - and the country's - rough
edges.
The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named
them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang's fame arrived
in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause
against Japan.
During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and
the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed
Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a
romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican
who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Chiang Kai-shek's government, increasingly besieged by China's Communist Party
as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty
man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, "The
manners of the Kuomintang" - the Nationalist Party - "in public were perfect;
its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police
merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the
people of China."
Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang's own dark side when
Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like
John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. "She never said a word," Ms.
Roosevelt wrote, "but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her
throat."
Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the
Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics
from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where
she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her
husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula
writes, and was probably sterile.
"The Last Empress" bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of
China's political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang's own story often recedes far
into the background. But Ms. Pakula's book comes alive in its pepperings of
telling detail about Mme. Chiang's chaotic life.
Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words
("indehiscence," "ochlocracy") in her speeches in English, sending reporters
scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman,
tired of Mme. Chiang's appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as
"Cash My-check."
She details Mme. Chiang's final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment
building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two
bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports
that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her
18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.
Ms. Pakula is also the author of "The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie
of Roumania" (1985) and "An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of
Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm"
(1997). She views Mme. Chiang's life with interest and occasionally, when
warranted, with sympathy. She is clearly in agreement with Eleanor Roosevelt,
who summed up Mme. Chiang's striding performance on the world stage by
remarking that while she could "talk beautifully about democracy," she did "not
know how to live democracy."
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