The Soong Sisters

by Emily Hahn

  She was the second daughter of our maternal grandfather, Yuin San; his native town was originally Yuyiao [near Ningpo, in Chekiang Province]. He was a scholar and well learned in law. He was a political adviser, which work took him to Chuan Sha; there he settled down and thereafter lived with his family.

  Our maternal grandmother was of the Hsu family, which is very well known in the west part of Shanghai. [The district of “Sikawei” was named after the family; literally, “Hsu’s corner.”] There has been a Hsu in official life in an unbroken line since the illustrious Wen Ting-kung [Hsu Kwang-ki] down to Fu Yuin, our maternal greatgrandfather, who was of the sixteenth generation of Wen Ting-kung’s descendants. He was a commander of the army that protected the districts, and fought at Shanghai, Paoshan, Nan Wei and Chuan Sha, where he was killed in battle. In admiration of his courage and his accomplishments the authorities built a temple dedicated to his honor at his birthplace, and up until today the inhabitants have never stopped paying tribute to him.

  Ever since the end of the Ming Dynasty, after Wen Ting-kung was converted to Christianity and began to respect the new education, the family has maintained this tradition, treating their children in a manner absolutely free of sex prejudice. Our maternal grandmother and our mother were baptized Protestants when they were children, and faithfully obeyed the Ten Commandments. Our mother was very clever and was her parents’ favorite. When she was only three or four years old she began her studies under a private tutor: she entered school at the age of eight; at fourteen, she was promoted to the Pei Wan Girls’ High School at the West Gate and was graduated at seventeen. She was particularly good in mathematics, and she loved the piano. At eighteen she was married to our father, Yao-ju. They gave birth to us six children: Eling, Chingling, Tseven, Mayling, Tseliang, Tsean.

  At that time our father was a resident of Shanghai, a minister of the Southern Methodist Church, but he had entered the industrial world. He was also helping Dr Sun Yat-sen to carry out the Revolution, and he worked day and night at this. Our mother looked after the domestic affairs and managed to make both ends meet, and whatever money she saved from food and clothing she too donated to the revolutionary cause. She also helped the poor and was a patron of schools and churches.

  Although our parents were not very well off, yet she helped us all to live in happiness and comfort, and this she kept up through the most difficult times . . . .

  Hsu Kwang-ki, Mrs Soong’s ancestor, now called by his posthumous title “Wen Ting-kung, Learned and Resolute Duke,” was one of the first Christians in China, an ancestor of Mrs Charles Soong, and so forefather to the Christian Soong sisters.

  Perhaps Mrs Soong’s chief ambition in life was to make her children as self-reliant as possible, by teaching and example. Her method was Spartan. It is the custom among our writers to sentimentalize over the joys of childhood’s freedom, but life for a Chinese child of the past generation was far from being a careless appreciation of this world’s pleasures. His training really began when he could remember and recognize a picture, sometimes at three, sometimes at four years old; then he was started in on his “characters,” the ideographs that form the Chinese words. There are thousands of characters in the Chinese language, and it is an immeasurably bigger task to learn them than to remember our alphabet and its combinations.

  There was also the code of manners. A Chinese child must be versed in this rigid ceremony as soon as possible; it is still the backbone of his social life. Calligraphy must be practiced assiduously. Then there is a strict and thorough training in the Classics, the study of which is the essence of Chinese education, with discussion and composition and rewriting of the text. A certain exercise known as “tui-tui” consists of question and answer; the schoolmaster suggests any word, “Black” for instance, and the student must rejoin immediately with an opposite to that word: “White.” That is a simple “tui-tui” for beginners, but many of them are long quotations in which each word, the form and the meaning must be opposed. An example:

  One explosion firecrackers sends off old [year]:

  Many thousand house-scrolls take on new.

  The little Soongs, however, were to be spared the less important refinements of the classic education. Shanghai had several foreign-style schools to which Charlie gravitated as naturally as a dove flies home. His Americanism was not diluted during these years; it was the guiding force of his life. Although he had set to earnestly to study Chinese as soon as he returned to Shanghai, his manners and customs did not really undergo much of a change. He was a practical man, and when at last he gave up his career as a missionary and parted without tears from Dr Allen, he found plenty of proselytizing still to do. He had been shocked, as most Americans are shocked, by China’s laborers, the way they were forced to work like beasts of burden and the manner in which they had to live;

  Charlie Soong was not a man to be shocked at conditions and yet refrain from attempting to reform them. His nature and his training sent him straight into the work of industrializing Shanghai. He was the first agent for foreign machinery in the city, and he himself learned to install the equipment for flour and cotton mills. In this way he became connected with a large flour mill belonging to a Sun family (not to be confused with Sun Yat-sen), still leaders among the industrial Chinese of Shanghai. Charlie installed the machinery and worked in the mill and held some of the shares. The Soong family still holds these shares.

  It was at this time that his friendship with Sun Yat-sen began to affect his career. Bereft of the first hope of his life, to help China to redemption by means of the gospel, he must have welcomed the political ideas of the future revolutionist. There is no record, for obvious reasons, of the steps by which the friends came to their ultimate plan, but from this time on Charlie Soong was sworn to the cause, and for the rest of his life he was Sun’s stand-by, organizer, secretary, and cover for the secret activities of the Doctor, who was to be for many years more a fugitive.

  The children looked upon Sun as an uncle, and to Charlie he represented that pure flame of principles without which the Americanized, mission-trained man would have found life rather empty and unsympathetic in China.

  A little later he founded a publishing house. Those of his acquaintances who wondered at the change put it down at last to a hangover of his missionary aspirations, for Bibles were the chief output of his press, or perhaps a few of them thought that Soong foresaw a large demand for literature and was being clever. For years the real reason of the enterprise was kept secret, but students of the life of Dr Sun Yat-sen now know that Charlie Soong’s printing press turned out revolutionary articles and pamphlets for the little doctor. No other printer dared take on the job; the Imperial Court was watchful and its methods bloodthirsty. Dr Sun therefore depended upon his friend and co-worker, who cheerfully risked his life and the welfare of his family for this new dream which had taken the place of the old. He published Bibles and tracts and pamphlets preaching peace on earth and revolution: he gave his Bibles away in the street and then went home to discuss new plans of overthrowing the government with Sun Wen.

  Sun stayed in their house whenever he came to Shanghai. The children took him as much for granted as they did any member of the family. There were for them more important stresses and strains in the home that interested their young minds more than did China’s political future. They were being brought up according to a certain plan, an original medley of Oriental and Western ideas, and there was a sharp division between their parents’ individual interpretations of this plan. In short, their father was genial and hearty and easy to manage, but their mother was none of these.

  In China it is the custom to consider the father in courtesy but the mother in fact as the mainspring of all family communal life, and to pay her elaborate respect accordingly. We hear a good deal about the Chinese mother, and most of it is true: her self-sacrifice, her strict adherence to principle, her executive ability in managing all the complexities of a large, compact family group . . . . One tra
it she often has, however, which is not so praiseworthy: her love of power. The peculiarly narrow and deep limits of her life develop this passion to a dangerous degree. The average old-fashioned Chinese tai-tai is all too often the ruin of her sons. She makes them too dependent upon herself; they turn out to be spoiled darlings, weaklings, cherished creatures who have been so carefully and lovingly swaddled that they are spiritually unable to stand alone.

  Mrs Soong — Charlie now spelled his name with the “g” — was an early example of the new type of Chinese matron. Her education and home training had made her a Christian of the evangelist type, with a strong belief in the efficacy of prayer and the abiding value of “good works” on the small, personal scale, the sort of thing which was soon to develop into social service. If you ask any Shanghai resident today what he remembers of Mrs Soong, he will reply, “She was always going out to give things to poor people.” She held strongly to the forms of her religion, whereas her husband had an easier conscience for detail. She was known as a saint; the outside world considered her the best woman in the world, but . . .

  In her home she was a Spartan disciplinarian. She had the best authority in the world for her inflexible decrees; the Church itself was the basis for her energetic rule. The children must behave because of God. They could not dance or engage in other unseemly relaxations because God wouldn’t like it. Her own affection she disciplined and suppressed; the children were more difficult to manage. Chingling, a dreamy and pretty child, was her favorite, probably because she was quiet and obedient. Eling, the eldest, was a tomboy and distressingly ebullient, and Mrs Soong’s task of bringing her up was not made any the easier by Charlie’s obvious preference for this little limb of Satan. Still she persevered, stifling her own feelings to the point of sending the children away to school at an earlier age than even the English do. Remember that this action was the more iconoclastic because she treated the girls just as she did the boys. Her daughters were the first to go abroad.

  Their very early years, however, they spent at home, and that home was a concrete symbol of Charlie’s existence. As one might expect, he had never conformed to the manners and ideas of his Shanghai business contemporaries. China simply made him impatient, and he had a way of tearing along on his own affairs, along his own lines, without waiting for China. One of his chief fetishes, for example, was punctuality, and he could never reconcile himself to the Chinese idea of time, which is vague to the point of oblivion. In a land where it is considered quite good form to be two hours early or three hours late, Soong had plenty of opportunity to criticize bitterly and frankly those compatriots of his who made no attempt to emulate his virtues — and he never neglected an opportunity of the kind. It is not surprising that he failed at first to achieve universal popularity among the merchants of Shanghai, but he stuck to his guns. Today he has almost won the battle, though it is too late for his comfort. To be late or early in modern Shanghai business circles is enough to brand a man as passe.

  Otherwise also Charlie was uncomfortably American. He was very frank and outspoken at a time when all polite people practiced the art of evasion, and courtesy consisted of long-winded, elaborate and beautifully insincere compliments. Nobody expected sincerity — nobody, that is, except Charles Soong. He could not have shocked the gentlefolk of China more if he had gone naked to his work every morning. Indeed his truthfulness, his impatience of Chinese convention, was a sort of nakedness, and his contemporaries had to avert their eyes. Yet he won his way. They first feared, then watched, then imitated Charlie Soong.

  The house in Hongkew was branded just another Soong eccentricity, because it was out in the wilderness. Friends of the Soongs gasped at their daring and secretly admired them for it. Today the house is surrounded for miles by close-packed city, and until the Japanese took Hongkew in 1937 the family was still collecting rent on it. In those days it stood in green fields and was surrounded by date palms and other trees rare in Shanghai. A stream ran by the front. The architecture was of the half-Chinese, half-foreign type that most Shanghai residents chose, and thus set off their city from the other treaty ports, where Chinese residences are still for the most part of the old style. A front wall enclosed the first courtyard, designed to cut off the stream from the nursery, but the children soon learned to climb it and play in the fields. They clambered up and down the trees and disturbed the villagers of the neighborhood so much that the prudent Charlie gave the country people small sums of money to bribe them into leaving his babies alone. After that the small Soongs had the run of the countryside.

  In front the house stretched in a straight line behind the courtyard and was divided into four big, high rooms — Charlie’s study, the dining room, a Chinese parlor furnished with redwood tables and stiff little chairs, and a foreign-style parlor with piano and comfortable chairs and sofas. The rooms faced south, as all good Shanghai rooms do, to a wide veranda where the family often ate out-of-doors. Behind were smaller rooms with staircase and lavatory. Both were unusual, the staircase because it meant an upper story. The four upstairs rooms were bedrooms: parents’, girls’, boys’ and guests’. Two small rooms and two bathrooms were behind these, the bathrooms fitted with pretty Soochow tubs, with yellow dragons coiling around the outside and green glaze inside. Cold water was laid on; hot water prepared downstairs and carried up. Until electricity came out Hongkew way, the heating was furnished by gas radiators, a refinement that many foreigners in Shanghai did without. The beds, instead of the hard, flat, wooden structures still used by most Chinese, were good, comfortable, mattressed American couches. The neighbors would come in just to peer at those beds, to feel them with critical jabbing fingers, and to agree with each other that they were most unhealthy and dangerous for the children.

  The second house behind, separated by a smaller courtyard, contained in similar arrangement the servants’ quarters, the kitchen and stores. Behind this again was a large vegetable garden where Charlie Soong loved to work, and thus enhance his reputation, if such a thing were possible, for eccentricity. An educated man, a scholar and teacher, working like a farmer? What next?

  Charlie in all his life could not settle down to Chinese cuisine, and Mrs Soong became perforce an excellent foreign-style cook. A pantry behind the dining room contained a stove where she did her baking and roasting, though in the kitchen proper the family servants had their own way; she taught her daughters the mysteries of American cooking in that pantry. Chingling and Mayling are accomplished cooks today, and many of Madame Chiang’s friends can vouch for her ginger cookies and Christmas cakes, but Eling, the wild one, never cared for those lessons. Her one accomplishment in the kitchen is roast chicken, and she can still roast a chicken as well as any American housewife. As to the Chinese food, the Soong cook was of course a man, and the girls did not think of entering his domain. Their mother taught them what a young girl should know of such things — noodles, small cakes and so forth.

  Good girls in those days knew how to embroider pictures on silk, to make the oddly shaped little designs that were to be sewn into slippers, and to reproduce characters in silken thread so delicately that you would swear they were brushed in ink. Mrs Soong herself did not care for needlework; she read and studied too much to spare the time for it. Nevertheless she was eager that her daughters should become proficient in the art, and she hired a teacher of the conventional type — a decayed gentlewoman, a widow with enough education to write characters. The Chinese word for “needlework” sounds very much like the word “beggarwoman.” (The Chinese language is the best in the world for punning, since almost every word in it sounds like something else.) Eling, already bored with the prospect of sitting still long enough to sew a fine seam, pounced on that pun and used it to avenge her tortured spirit by way of the widow. Naturally her little sisters followed her example.

  It was a long time before the teacher discovered why her pupils giggled so much when they addressed her, but when she did she immediately went to Mrs Soong and complained. The m
other’s reaction was direct; she felt that Eling had outraged the proprieties of the Chinese jeune fille and had been un-Christian besides. She scolded her daughter sharply, and would have gone on to further punishment if her husband had not stepped in and taken Eling’s part. He himself liked to see the children independent and outspoken, and he sympathized with the little girl’s hatred of sewing, but he knew better than to say so. Instead he reminded his wife that it was after all unnecessary and wasteful to spoil the child’s eyes with such delicate work when the best embroidery cost only a few dollars to buy. Eyes were better employed in reading — Little Women, for example. Mrs Soong may have been convinced; at any rate she let Eling, but only Eling, off embroidery from that day on, and Madame Kung herself bears witness, without regret, that she cannot even today sew three straight stitches.

  Charlie loved to sing. He had a fine, resonant voice, and the little Soongs became accustomed to the music of the West rather than to Chinese melody. Eling showed a similar talent and often sang duets with him during the evenings of the summer vacation; she learned from him the songs that he had picked up in North Carolina and in Tennessee. She spent a good deal of time with her father; her position as eldest and her nature made them especially congenial. Charlie was fond of bicycling and was one of the first in Shanghai to acquire a wheel. On Eling’s tenth birthday he gave her a bicycle; she was the first Chinese girl to own one. She often went out riding with Charlie; when they came to the end of Nanking Road at the Bund, she would circle round and round the huge Sikh traffic policeman who stood there, while her terrified father commanded her in vain to stop.

  Long before this, however, Eling’s formal education had begun, and she started a fashion in the Soong family, in all innocence, of beginning school at an extraordinary early age. Charlie by this time was becoming popular among the Shanghai burghers, and his interest in the West, his knowledge of America, were assets. Already, before the Revolution of 1911, these dwellers in Halfway House were looking across the sea. The small Christian community accepted the Soongs among their leaders, and a Y.M.C.A. atmosphere began to permeate their modest revels. Charlie even took part in a charity performance at the town hall, acting in the mock new cabinet as “Minister of War.” He would naturally want Methodist schooling for his children, and he found it for the girls in McTyeire School. This institution was then on Hankow Road; it had been founded by Southern Methodists and was named for the bishop who had allowed Charlie to be ordained, out of the regular order because of the peculiar circumstances, back in ’85.