The Soong Sisters

by Emily Hahn

  In later years, telling his children about those school days in North Carolina, he was fond of remembering a certain Hallowe’en night soon after he was first entered at Trinity. He came into his room in the dark that evening to encounter a grinning pumpkin head sitting in the corner, a candle flame flickering behind the holes of eyes and mouthful of jagged teeth. Now a Hallowe’en pumpkin head is no novelty to an American boy, but Charlie had never seen one before. At first he had no idea what it could be, and then he had far too many ideas. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared, while his hidden classmates stifled their giggles. It is possible that Charlie Soon thought swiftly of ghosts before he reminded himself that now he was a Christian boy who didn’t believe in such things . . . .

  “He didn’t hesitate more than a second,” said his daughter Eling, telling her father’s story more than fifty years later. “He walked straight up to that pumpkin and punched it in the nose. Of course it smashed. After that the boys never made fun of him any more.”

  A photograph of Charlie in North Carolina shows a sturdy boy in the American clothes of his time, his hair parted almost in the middle and slicked down on each side. The legs are crossed, the hands disposed in a carefully careless position. He is staring straight ahead, an earnest frown on his young brow. His nose turns up, and his mouth and chin are determined. He looks a healthy, hopeful young man, the sort who comes into his convictions early.

  The picture, with its fancy-scrolled chair and background of drapery, is a perfect period piece. It is difficult to believe, while looking at it, in Charlie’s background: the twisted streets, the incense-laden temples, the low green fields of the Orient. This young man’s very watch chain, draped jauntily across his waistcoat, speaks of American classrooms and student church meetings.

  It is bewildering to turn from the daguerreotype and read the legend over it:

  Influence Felt in Modern China

  CHAPTER II

  Shanghai in 1890

  At the risk of being dull, we must pause for a moment to look at the country and the city to which Charlie Jones Soong returned with his message and his young hopes. Those of you who know China will not have to read this chapter.

  A truthful map of the Middle Kingdom about 1890 would be woefully spotted and particolored, every portion of territory under the influence of some greedy foreign power that was biding its time and waiting its chance to grab more land outright. The Imperial Court at Peking depended for its existence on these powers of the Western world: China’s rulers were lulled by international conspiracy into playing a harmless game of independence, and they remained stubbornly blind to the charity on which they leaned. Each day the Court continued to function was one day more granted by the powers, whose diplomats saw their trade increasing satisfactorily enough under these strange conditions. Everybody realized that it would someday be necessary to close down the theater at Peking and take over the last shreds of power, but for the moment there was no need to hurry. Tentative division had already been made. China was in the bag.

  Nominally the ruler was the Emperor Kuang Hsu, second to last of the Ch’ing Dynasty, but the redoubtable dowager Tzu Hsi had taken from his shoulders the chief burdens and responsibility of his station. That amazing woman was tenacious but intelligent, within the boundaries of her universe. She was, however, completely ignorant of the world outside the kingdom, and the contempt which all high-minded Manchus felt for the Western barbarians was her fatal blind spot. It is doubtful if she ever appreciated the true significance of what was happening to China, even at the end of her career; most likely with every concession she made to the powers she told herself that she was outwitting the enemy and paying out land that would of its own accord come back to its rightful owners in good time. Fate and the gods were on her side, because they had always been.

  Tzu Hsi lived to see her domain shrink considerably. The vast collection of races and territories then known as China was being nibbled away swiftly and surely by the foreign marauders. Burma had been annexed by Great Britain; Macao ceded to Portugal; Russia had taken the greatest part of Hi up north; Annam was now a French protectorate. Tzu Hsi wielded Kuang Hsu’s scepter, but it was rotten at the heart, ready to break as soon as she should attempt to brandish it.

  The official machinery too was becoming westernized. Although about the Court the Forbidden City was still splendidly Oriental, and the palaces were full of lacquer and jade treasures, the world outside was changing. The money for this splendor came in great part from the maritime customs, working efficiently on a British system, under British control. The treaty ports at Tientsin, Han-kow, Chinkiang, Kiukiang, Newchwang and Canton contained foreign “concessions” leased in perpetuity to foreigners, and Shanghai had been given up almost completely to the Westerners. These hospitable cities were in immense contrast to the congested Canton “factories” of earlier days, wherein foreigners had lived as prisoners for the privilege of trading with the haughty Chinese.

  Everywhere on the fringe of the hinterland except in the Court itself the new civilization was penetrating, raucous and speedy and redolent of machine oil, like the first railway built in China, between Shanghai and Woosung. It was promptly bought and destroyed by the Chinese, who carried the rails to Formosa and abandoned them there on the beach. But one cannot go on forever buying up the Future and destroying it. . . .

  Step by step with the new science, the spiritual culture of the West was creeping in. Roman Catholic priests from France and Protestant preachers from England and America brought with them doctors who knew how to administer powerful drugs along with their religious teachings. These pioneers found the way fairly open to anybody who did not fear the privations of existence in the Chinese countryside. The year 1890 saw the inception of riots against missions in the Yangtze Valley, but there was no great uprising, no general resentment to hint of the Boxers who were to sweep the country ten years later. The missions flourished, on the whole. In this land of religious tolerance, where Buddhists and the followers of Lao Tze mingled and worshiped together peacefully, sharing the philosophy of Confucius, Christianity spread swiftly.

  The Christian missionaries to China were probably never completely relaxed and off their guard, nor was their life remarkably easy, but the Middle Kingdom as a dwelling place compared favorably with perilous Africa and India. By 1890 there were thousands of Christian communicants in China, and many native preachers.

  Compared to the interior, Shanghai was even then a luxurious metropolis. Its reputation had already created a new verb in the English dictionary, but it was now far more than a harbor wherein sailors made merry or bewailed having been kidnaped. Since 1843 it had been a treaty port. After the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, the British, who had for the most righteous if nebulous reasons stormed the walls of the old fishing village, came back from further triumphs to open a port there, foreseeing the time when this little cluster of houses on the mud flats would be an important center of trade between the Chinese interior and the European marts. They hoped to create a totally foreign city of their own, admitting Chinese only to do necessary work as servants and shopkeepers. Nobody supposed that within the century Shanghai would become the haven of harried refugees, fleeing from the perils of civil war to seek the protection of foreign governments. By the time Charles Soong returned in 1886, Shanghai was one of the world’s cities. Its appearance calls for some description.

  It is not always true that an old fashion is more picturesque than a new. The tourists who leap eagerly from their ships down on the Bund or in Yangtzepoo seldom fail to exclaim bitterly at their first glimpse of China, which apparently consists of crowded tram lines and high brick walls. Except for the rickshas, curio shops and Chinese people, there is nothing about downtown Shanghai that the traveling families and Cook’s tourists could not see in New York or London. Disillusioned, they wander about the streets and stare scornfully at hotels and department stores, telling one another that the white man’s advent has spoiled everything.
There is simply nothing to photograph. In the old days, they muse sadly, Shanghai must have been a paradise of yellow-tiled temples and glittering red houses; dwarf trees and goldfish ponds and carved stone lions have no doubt all been sacrificed in the interests of commerce.

  Before 1937 these pilgrims in search of romance were somewhat appeased by a visit to the “native city”; in Nantao was a bazaar of the most delightful shops, full of ivory and jade carvings, pictures and scrolls, embroidery, lacquer. In the center of the twisted street system a real old temple could be entered by anybody; there were painted gods there and burning incense, and always one or two old women kowtowing and praying aloud. This, said the tourists happily, was more like it. This was a fragment of the real old Shanghai. This was China. The long trip across the Pacific or around the Suez Canal had not after all been in vain, even if they did not have the time or the money to go on to Peking. Thomas Burke and Ernest Bramah would always mean more, now that one had a genuine memory of Old China — before the white man came.

  Today, though Nantao and the Chinese city of Shanghai are smoking ruins, no valuable landmark of China’s history, none of her real beauty has vanished from this place. It is just as well for the dreams of the travelers that they cannot see a real old Chinese city of the past century. Peking is open today, but Peking was the capital of the empire, and even there the famous beauty spots were hidden from the public. The Forbidden City guarded its treasures behind wall after wall. In Soochow, in Hangchow, in Yangchow, in Nanking, in all the beloved cities of China the common people have always lived in dismal-looking low-lying houses, and those rich men and the recluses who had gardens kept them jealously hidden from everybody save the hallowed family and a few friends of the clan. Old Shanghai had no open bazaar in the Chinese city for many years; the market place where the country people came in for holidays was a workaday place, nothing like Nantao’s glittering streets. The few jade merchants and picture dealers hid their wares within dark houses. The pawnshops of China, where the greatest treasures on the market are still to be found, were then, as they are now, dingy houses as carefully locked and guarded as bank strong-rooms.

  Ancient Chinese city streets were narrow and dirty; for fresh air and fountains and the trees celebrated in the old poems one must have permission to pass through the small, lowering doors set in the high gray walls on either side of the street. It was small wonder that even China’s rich men and their children were eager to move to the wide streets of Shanghai, where even in the middle of the city the air was not fetid and the public highways were clear of filth. They moved in by the hundred, abandoning their villas in the country and their little huts near the ditches. The rich men began playing with the toys of the foreigners; the poor men looked for city work.

  By 1890 Shanghai was on the eve of a great industrialization that was to place cotton mills on the fringe of the slums and attract thousands more of the country people. Until the advent of the mills Shanghai’s aspect had been that of a small town, or rather of a conglomeration of towns, for already the nationals were herding themselves into cliques. The French Concession and the Settlement made a natural division between two grounds, although the French had not as yet built up to their first limits, and stayed down near the middle of town, which was marked by Soochow Creek. People still lived for the most part near the British consulate.

  Their houses were built in solid blocks, with deep verandas all along the fronts. The new buildings were uncompromisingly foreign in style, as though the invading Westerners were already homesick and wished to obliterate any reminder of the Orient. In their nostalgia they sacrificed every chance of comfort that Chinese houses would have afforded; they froze in the winter and baked in the summer, sheltered by ugly red brick. Otherwise their lives underwent an inevitable change; tempo slowed down, and little by little the insidious effect of cheap labor had its way. A man grew so used to being lazy out in China that he dreaded going home, and Shanghai filled up with coolies, servants and Chinese clerks.

  For foreigners the Astor House was the center of social activity, although churches and meeting houses also held secondary places of importance. At the Astor House bar tradespeople gathered every morning for an eleven-o’clock drink. It was at the Astor House that the important foreign balls were always held, in the banquet hall, but the Chinese at that time did not join in these revels. They had their own restaurants and clubs when the menfolk wished to seek amusement; they seldom entertained in their homes. These were surrounded by walls, as if their owners still lived in bandit-haunted country. One sees these walls today enclosing large tracts of land that has become of fabulous value, along Bubbling Well Road and the busy streets of Frenchtown. Great iron gates guard the outer courtyards, and while the limousines of the owners wait for admission, a half-dozen servants must scurry about inside, unlocking and drawing back the bolts. We catch glimpses, when this happens, of bamboo pavilions and elaborate mazes of artificial craggy rocks between a series of small sagging-roofed houses. Then the gate clangs shut, cutting off that secret world, and the traffic of a modern city rushes past on oil-stained concrete.

  Pidgin English was a real language then, and one had to be able to use it fluently. It was just beginning to be fashionable among the higher-class Chinese to teach proper English to their children. On the whole it was only the Christian Chinese and the “compradores” who were at all friendly with the foreigners. The only social contact between the races was an occasional chilly banquet given by a Chinese man in honor of a foreigner, or vice versa. In either case the banquet was a “stag” affair; nobody dreamed of inviting respectable women to help entertain the guests. Chinese women of the higher class were simply invisible. They went out only to temple on state occasions, or on long visits to their relations’ houses.

  Their husbands and sons, on the contrary, took the air in state every day, riding in their carriages in full panoply, with elaborately dressed grooms escorting them on ponies, one in front, one on each side, and several coming along in the rear. It was a regular little parade, very gay and bright with fluttering silks and jingling bells. Bells were everywhere, on the harness and the carriage. Through the sober streets they trotted, while the foreigners in their dull clothes stood and gaped from the pavements and called them all, with a happy disregard for exactitude, “mandarins.”

  CHAPTER III

  Charlie Soong’s Family

  Charlie returned to China — or, rather, he went to Shanghai — in 1886. It was the one place on that side of the world that he could have borne to live in during the first difficult period of readjustment, and he always felt more at home in the bustling, sprawling Western city than he did in the interior. He wrote to his American friends that he was preaching at Woosung, the village at the mouth of the Whangpoo, and at Soochow, and Kiensan. At Woosung, which was his first center of activity, he also taught at the denominational school, and in one of his classes was a student who was to become China’s ambassador and leading educationalist, Dr Hu Shih. Dr Hu remembers that when the new teacher first “stalked on the platform,” his square body and homely face made all the students giggle. They were accustomed to the traditional professor of China, grave and delicate and slender, with conventionalized mannerisms. Hu Shih expected that Soong would leave the room for shame; instead he began to speak, and the boys immediately fell silent and respected him. He was a good teacher.

  In those days all the Chinese missions of the Southern Methodist Church were under the jurisdiction of Dr Young J. Allen, who, judging from all reports, did not find the burden too heavy for his taste. He was a bit of a dictator in his way, which was a stern one, and Charlie speaks in one letter of three men who had themselves appointed to posts in Japan because “none of these missionaries could stand the ‘one man power’ at Shanghai.” Charlie upon his return was naturally anxious to visit his parents in the South, and Dr Allen wouldn’t let him. In a letter to Mr Southgate he writes,

  No. I haven’t been to see my parents as yet. Dr Alle
n said I may go during the coming Chinese New Year and not before then. I am very much displeased with this sort of authority; but I must bear it patiently. If I were to take a rash action the people at home (my Durham friends especially) might think that I am an unloyal Methodist and a lawbreaker; so I have kept as silent as a mouse. But when the fullness of time has come, I will shake off all the assuming authority of the present superintendent in spite of all his protestation, assuming authority and his detestation of native ministry. The great “Chogul” [?] was the man who wanted to dismiss all the native ministers from preaching a year ago. And he is the man who ignores my privileges and equality which I am entitled to. I don’t like to work under him — I will apply for transmission to Japan.

  He did not succeed in his application and had to remain under Dr Allen. Even so he stayed with the Church as preacher for a few years more, learning a bitter lesson after the happy school days in North Carolina. Note that Charlie Soong reversed the usual process: he met with unpleasantness from foreigners only after he returned to China, and he looked upon America as home. That is one reason some of his children today are so very much Americanized. Like any fond father, Charlie wanted them all to be educated at “home,” and they were.

  Oh yes, the children. Charlie had returned at the age of twenty-three, and in a year or so he married Miss Nyi, named Kwei Tseng. From the biography that is sent out, according to tradition, by his heirs upon the death of an important person in China, we learn of Mrs Soong,