The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  Business success enabled Charlie to build a new home, located on the outskirts of the city’s International Settlement. Standing in the middle of fields, surrounded by exotic trees, it was designed in a common Shanghai style, half Chinese, half foreign. The first courtyard was surrounded by a wall, erected to keep the Soong children from falling into a stream that ran by. But the children soon learned to scale the wall and climb the trees, and Charlie had to bribe the nearby villagers to allow them free rein of the neighborhood. The house itself was divided into four large, airy rooms downstairs: a Chinese parlor, a Western-style parlor with a piano, a dining room, and Charlie’s study. Behind these public spaces were smaller rooms with a bathroom and a staircase, both of which were highly unusual in Chinese homes of the period. The staircase led to four bedrooms—one for the parents, one for the girls, one for the boys, and one for guests. There were two bathrooms with green-glazed bathtubs, painted on the outside with yellow dragons. Another unusual feature was the use of Western-style beds with mattresses instead of the decorative hard wood couches used by most Chinese. Neighbors who came to examine them stuck their fingers into the soft mattresses and declared them unhealthy for children.

  There was a second house in back of the family quarters. Situated behind a small courtyard, it contained servants’ quarters, storerooms, and the kitchen. Since her husband could never really get used to Chinese cuisine, Kwei-tseng had learned to prepare Western dishes for him on a stove in a pantry behind the dining room. It was in this pantry that her daughters also learned about American cooking. The main kitchen was the province of the family chef, a man who would not have tolerated girls in his workplace.

  One of the interests the Soong parents shared was music. Madame Soong had studied piano, and her husband had a passion for singing. He was apparently blessed with a rather nice voice, as was Ai-ling, to whom he taught songs he had learned in the United States. As the eldest child in the family, Ai-ling was particularly close to her father. On her tenth birthday, he gave her a bicycle. They biked together regularly, and their outings included trips to Charlie’s publishing office and the flour mill, where Ai-ling, wily beyond her years, stood silently, observing the workings of the business world.

  Charlie was the parent who encouraged his children to learn, to dare, to believe in themselves. Taught by their father that they could do anything they wanted to do—hadn’t he raised himself from peasant to entrepreneur?—they were kept in tow by their mother, who was less of a dreamer and more of a disciplinarian. Card playing was forbidden in the household. As was dancing. Pious and severe in her piety, Kwei-tseng spent hours in a room on the upper floor of their house that she kept solely for the purpose of prayer. These sessions often began before dawn. When one of her children asked for advice, she would inevitably answer, “I must ask God first.” As Madame Chiang later recalled, “we could not hurry her. Asking God was not a matter of spending five minutes to ask him to bless her child and grant the request. It meant waiting upon God until she felt his leading.”

  Religion had made Charlie Soong’s life. The Methodist Church had educated him and given him a place in the world. This was not necessarily the case with his third daughter. Required to live up to the behavior of her three older siblings, May-ling found daily prayers “tiresome” and “hated the long sermons” in church on Sunday. Family prayers were little better, and she often pled thirst in order to slip out of the room. “I used to think Faith, Belief, Immortality were more or less imaginary,” she wrote in 1934. “I believed in the world seen, not the world unseen. I could not accept things just because they had always been accepted. In other words, a religion good enough for my fathers did not necessarily appeal to me.”

  2

  The only thing Oriental about me is my face.

  —SOONG MAY-LING

  WHEN SHE was five years old, Ai-ling, the eldest of the Soong children, told her parents that she wanted to go to boarding school. A childish whim, it set high standards of independence for her two younger sisters, who were expected to venture bravely into unknown territory at a young age.

  The Soong family attended Moore Methodist Church, a brick structure with a bell tower, where Sundays were spent listening to what May-ling called “tedious sermons and prayers.” A pillar of the congregation, Charlie Soong was also head of the church Sunday school. Music for Sunday services was often provided by students from the expensive and fashionable McTyeire School, named for the bishop who had refused Charlie Soong’s request to study medicine. Little Ai-ling, observing the special places accorded the McTyeire girls in church, decided that she wanted to go there—and as soon as possible. Although McTyeire was really for older girls, the principal, observing the child’s determination, agreed to tutor her for two years. A few days later, dressed in a Scotch plaid jacket and green pants, Ai-ling climbed into a rickshaw with her father and set off for school, followed by a second rickshaw carrying a shiny new black trunk filled with her clothes. Not until her father had deposited her in the principal’s study and left for home did the five-year-old break down in tears.

  The Soongs’ second daughter, Ching-ling, waited until seven before entering McTyeire, but May-ling started at five like Ai-ling, whom she adored and tried to emulate. Everyone liked May-ling, and classes were easy for her. Unlike the quieter and more thoughtful Ching-ling, she was determined to fit in. “Why do you ask Pastor Li questions?” May-ling demanded of her older sister during one of the school’s weekly religious discussions. “Don’t you believe?” Spoiled at home, she continued to get her way at school.

  McTyeire was housed in two buildings with a passageway in between—a dark, unlit walk that frightened most of the younger girls. “Why can’t you walk through there like May-ling?” the teachers asked her classmates. But May-ling, who put on a brave show, began to have nightmares at night, from which she would awaken in spasms of trembling. Standing by her bed, she would straighten her back and repeat her lessons for the day. She also broke out all over her body in little red bumps called wheals that itched and burned. She was finally sent home to study with a tutor. It must have been a dispiriting defeat for the anxiety-ridden five-year-old, unable to live up to the example of her older sister.

  The youngest of a group of boys and girls who played together, May-ling, who was fat, was nicknamed “Little Lantern” by one of her uncles. Puffing along behind her older sisters and brother, dressed in flowered jackets tied around her ample middle, long trousers, and shoes embroidered to look like cats’ heads (complete with whiskers and ears that stuck out), she was the baby whom all the other children tried to get rid of. She was particularly poor at hide-and-seek, anxious to be discovered when hiding and never able to find anyone when she was “it.” One day the children told her that she could be “it” if she stood in the middle of the garden and didn’t open her eyes until she had counted to one hundred. This was not easy for May-ling. She had learned to count to twenty, but after that, she jumped through the rest of the count, often by tens. When she finished in record time, one of the other children told her she must do it all over again. After she finished the second time, she looked around, but the others had disappeared, having gone off to play without her. It was Ai-ling who came back and told her that she too would one day be big enough to laugh at the older children, just as they now laughed at her.

  If Ai-ling was an attentive older sister to May-ling, the combination of Ai-ling and Ching-ling scared off the younger McTyeire students, who thought them far too sophisticated to approach. The eldest Soong sister was, in fact, so mature that when she was fifteen, her parents decided to send her to school in the United States. It was fashionable in turn-of-the-century Shanghai for the sons of the very rich to be sent abroad, and Charlie Soong wanted the world to know that he had prospered. There was another reason as well: Charlie had never forgotten how his well-to-do brothers-in-law, Wen and New, had been schooled while he toiled in his uncle’s shop. Neither Charlie’s sons nor his daughters would ever have to
struggle as he had for an education.

  After consulting with his old classmate and friend William Burke, Charlie decided to send Ai-ling to Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, Burke’s home. The president of the school, Judge Guerry, wrote Burke to say that he would be very interested in having a Chinese girl at Wesleyan; he had educated several American Indians in the past but never a Chinese. Wesleyan, or Wesleyan Female College as it was called then, was the earliest chartered women’s college in the world.

  In deciding to educate their daughters, the Soongs were in the forefront of the Chinese Reform Movement, putting them at odds with most other well-to-do families. When Charlie let it be known that his eldest daughter was going to America to school, the Shanghai community was shocked. How could a father be so foolish as to waste the money he would need to marry his daughter off in educating her? Not only was Charlie Soong endangering what would have been a handsome dowry, but no man in his right mind would want to take on a wife whose head had been filled with progressive ideas from the West. Ignoring the criticism, Charlie gave his eldest daughter a good-bye party and entrusted her to his old pal William Burke for the long journey to the United States.

  Some years earlier, Burke had married Addie Gordon, and they were now the parents of four sons, whom they were taking back to the States on home leave. The previous winter Addie had suffered from typhoid fever, and it was thought that the three-week voyage in bracing ocean air would help her over the final stages of recuperation. Burke had booked passage on the Pacific Mail steamer Korea, leaving on May 28, 1904, and Charlie had arranged for Ai-ling to travel in the cabin next to the Burkes. (The Korea had only two classes of passengers: cabin and steerage.) Once he had purchased Ai-ling’s ticket, Charlie paid a visit to the Portuguese Consulate, where he bought his daughter a Portuguese passport.

  In an effort to stop the immigration of Chinese, Congress had passed an Exclusion Law in 1882, prohibiting Chinese laborers from entering the United States. Although students, teachers, merchants, and tourists were still accepted, the law nearly eliminated the number of immigrants; whereas forty thousand Chinese had entered the United States in 1881, by 1887 the number had plummeted to ten.* Under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law, extended as the Geary Act, Chinese living in America were required to carry a passport with their photo on it, which they could be required to produce at any time—a proviso that resulted in the frequent detention and harassment of highly respectable people. Legislation passed in 1904, the year Ai-ling traveled with the Burkes, extended this law indefinitely. With the Shanghai papers full of stories detailing humiliations and arrests, it is easy to see why Charlie, who carried a Portuguese passport stating that he had been born in the Portuguese colony of Macao, purchased the same protection for his daughter.

  Charlie accompanied Ai-ling to the Korea on the day of her departure, boarded the ship with her, and remained for the three hours it took for medical inspections to take place. When the gong sounded and he finally left her, they said their good-byes calmly and matter-of-factly. Ailing displayed no emotion at all until the ship let out a piercing blast of its whistle, at which point Burke noticed that she began to cry quietly to herself. The only Chinese girl in cabin (upper) class, Ai-ling attracted a certain amount of curiosity and attention. At fifteen, she looked older and more serious than her age. This may have been partly due to her attire. Dressed in Western-style dresses, designed and sewn by kindly missionary ladies who had forgotten everything about fashion they had never known, she wore her hair in one long plait down her back, tied with black ribbons at the top and bottom. On the night before their arrival at Kobe, Japan, one of the ship’s officers, trying to be nice, came over to ask her to dance.

  “No, thank you, I cannot,” she said.

  “Well, there’s no better time to learn. Come, I’ll teach you,” said the young officer.

  “No, it is not right for me to dance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am a Christian and Christians do not dance.”

  When the Korea docked at Kobe, Addie Burke was running a slight fever but was afraid that if she stayed in her cabin, the Japanese medical officers, famous for detaining ships, might think she was ill. A Chinese passenger had died the day before in steerage, and although the ship’s doctor said that the death was due to pneumonia, the Japanese medic, alleging that it looked “like suspiciously plague,” insisted that all the passengers be taken ashore and immersed in disinfectant while the ship was being fumigated, and that their clothes be treated for germs. Addie Burke returned from the station bathhouse with a high fever. Ten days later, when the Korea was finally released from quarantine, she was desperately ill. Burke and the ship’s doctor decided to take her off the ship and put her in the hospital in Yokohama. Not knowing how long she would be there, Burke took his children and their baggage as well; he left Ai-ling, who wanted to continue her trip, in the care of another Southern Methodist missionary named Anna Lanius, whom he had alerted to Ai-ling’s plight before he disembarked. They arrived in San Francisco on the Korea, along with 7,000 tons of cargo, most of which was opium, expected to yield some $250,000 in duty; $2 million in gold that the Japanese, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, were sending to the United States for safekeeping; and the famous writer Jack London, who had been covering the war. On that day, Addie Burke died in Yokohama.

  Ai-ling’s new friend, Miss Lanius, described her as a “well-behaved young girl with a correct knowledge of English and a good vocabulary.” When they docked and began unloading, Ai-ling, who was surprised to see “white men doing coolies’ work,” presented her passport for inspection in the lounge.

  “Trying to get by on one of these things, are you?” the immigration officer said. “That’s been tried by a lot of other Chinese, little sister. It won’t work. You just stay here until we’re ready to take you to the detention home.”

  “You cannot put me in a detention home,” Ai-ling snapped back. “I am a cabin-class passenger, not from the steerage.”

  “You certainly won’t put her in a detention home,” added Anna Lanius. “I’m staying right here with her to see that you don’t.” One of the immigration officers agreed, referring to the detention house in question—a cell block on the waterfront—as “not fit for a self-respecting animal.” Ai-ling, he said, should remain on the Korea until a ship could be found in which to send her back to China. The ladies were kept on board, confined to one small cabin, and fed steak, potatoes, and bread three times a day. Finally, on their third day of confinement, Lanius was allowed to go ashore and use a telephone. She called Dr. Reid, the missionary who had married Ai-ling’s parents and was working in San Francisco at the time. He arrived the next day with a nurse, who took Lanius’s place. Ai-ling remained in custody for another two weeks, transferred from one ship to another, until Reid finally reached Washington and arranged for her to enter the United States.*

  Three days later, Burke arrived on another ship after burying Addie in Yokohama. When they reached Macon, there was quite a crowd at the railway station. Some were waiting to welcome Burke home; others came out of curiosity. Next morning, the Macon Telegraph reported the arrival of “the Chinese girl who was detained aboard ship at San Francisco while on her way to Wesleyan College,” adding, “The girl is said to be quite a bright one.” Judge Guerry, president of Wesleyan, who had once characterized the Chinese as an “immoral, degraded and worthless race,” was quoted in the same article: “Of course she [Ai-ling] will not force herself or be forced upon any of the other young ladies as an associate. They will be free and conduct themselves as they see fit. I have no misgivings as to her kind and respectful treatment.” One of the few southern colleges to remain open during the Civil War, Wesleyan, founded just sixteen years after Macon itself, could not help but mirror the prejudices of an insular, privileged student body. But none of this seems to have daunted Ai-ling. Hardly a pretty girl—short, inclined to be plump—she posed no visible threat to the daughters of respectable Macon
families, who pronounced her “charming.”

  In 1907, when Ai-ling was a junior, the Soongs decided to send Ching-ling to join her at Wesleyan. May-ling announced to her parents that she wanted to go too. When they said she was too young, she reminded them of a promise they had given her during a recent illness, that if she would not fight the treatment, they would grant her anything she wanted. Ten years old at the time, she got her way. Escorted by an aunt and uncle, the two younger Soong girls started their American education with a year at a boarding school in Summit, New Jersey, arriving at Wesleyan in 1908. Ching-ling was old enough to pursue the regular curriculum and take care of herself when they got to the college, but Wesleyan was at a loss to know what to do with her little sister. May-ling was finally assigned to be tutored by the daughter of an English professor, who also took over the role of mothering the child. The ten-year-old apparently needed a lot of steadying. Plump, saucy, and smart, she was known for a certain degree of childish wit. Caught with makeup on her face in an era when cosmetics were a symbol of wickedness, she faced her accuser boldly:

  “Why, May-ling, I believe your face is painted!” said one of the older girls.

  “Yes,” she answered, “China-painted!”

  During May-ling’s years in Macon, the presidency of Wesleyan passed from Judge Guerry to Dr. W. N. Ainsworth. Ainsworth had a young daughter about May-ling’s age, and the two became friends. When May-ling and Eloise Ainsworth had an argument, Mrs. Ainsworth thought it was necessary to lecture May-ling, who became easily enraged, on the evils of fighting and the joys of forgiving:

  “Aren’t you ashamed,” Eloise’s mother asked, “to storm around like this?”