It is therefore not surprising that as soon as Charlie Soong felt it was safe, he took his family back to Shanghai and, after Ching-ling refused to marry a younger, more appropriate man, locked her in her room. But Ching-ling would not have been Charlie’s daughter had she given up. Without her parents’ knowledge she sent Sun a note asking if she should return to Japan. When the answer came back that he needed her, she escaped from the Soong house.
“I didn’t fall in love,” Ching-ling told journalist Edgar Snow. “It was a hero-worship from afar. It was a romantic girl’s idea when I ran away to work for him—but a good one. I wanted to help save China and Dr. Sun was the one man who could do it, so I wanted to help him. On my way home from Wesleyan College I went to see him, in exile in Tokyo, and volunteered my services. He soon sent me word in Shanghai that he needed me in Japan. My parents would never consent and tried to lock me up. I climbed out of the window and escaped with the help of my amah.” She left immediately for Japan—a daring move and a sin against the Methodist religion and the moral integrity of the Soong family. She arrived on October 24, 1915. In the meantime, Dr. Sun, realizing that he was exposing Ching-ling to calumny by getting her back to Japan under questionable circumstances, arranged for a “divorce” from Mrs. Sun.
“I had no knowledge that he had gone through a divorce proceeding and that he intended to marry me until I arrived,” Ching-ling told Snow. “When he explained his fear that I would otherwise be called his concubine and that the scandal would harm the revolution, I agreed. I never regretted it.” They were married the day after her arrival, October 25, 1915, at the house of a prominent Japanese lawyer. No family attended the ceremony or the reception.
News of the marriage did not appear until three months later—first in the Japanese press, then overseas. What Snow called Sun’s “rather vague divorce,” undertaken to blunt criticism, seems to have failed to do so. Chinese Christians refused to accept Ching-ling as Sun’s legitimate wife, and after their marriage, Sun was no longer asked to speak in missions and churches. His name was dropped from missionary journals as a good example of a Chinese Christian.
Needless to say, the reaction within the Soong family was far worse than that of the Christian community at large. Ching-ling’s mother, a fastidious practitioner of the Methodist faith, was appalled; her father simply tried to take her home. “My mother wept and my father who was ill with liver disease pleaded.… Although full of pity for my parents—I cried bitterly also— I refused to leave my husband,” she explained to one biographer. “My father came to Japan and bitterly attacked Dr. Sun,” she told Edgar Snow. “He tried to annul the marriage on grounds that I was under age and lacked my parents’ consent. When he failed he broke all relations with Dr. Sun and disowned me!”
The marriage caused a rift in the Soong family, although it did not last very long. According to one Chinese writer, it was Ai-ling who kept up contact with her sister and eventually patched matters up with her parents. Ever practical, Ai-ling said that it was only a matter of time until Sun would come back into power and the connection would be good for the Soongs. It took some time, but eventually love (on their part) and reason (on Ai-ling’s) won out, and the family accepted the situation. The parents sent the newlyweds a suite of Chinese furniture, and Ching-ling’s mother sent the couple a traditional silk wedding quilt embroidered with one hundred baby boys. In typical Chinese fashion, the Soongs kept their disapproval within the confines of the family, and the only time Charlie seems to have unburdened himself outside his home was to his old friend William Burke. “Bill,” he told Burke, “I was never so hurt in my life. My own daughter and my best friend.”
7
The [Chinese] matrimonial system is the same as a tea set. Who in the world would think of having only one teacup for one teapot?
—ANONYMOUS
THROUGHOUT THE drama surrounding Ching-ling’s marriage to Sun, May-ling and T.V. were still in college, and they did not return to China until nearly two years later. “Just think,” Ching-ling wrote Ai-ling from Sun’s headquarters in Canton, “little May-ling will graduate this June and return to China in July.… She is a popular lassie and enjoys her college life immensely.”
So much so that after her train left Grand Central Station, the new graduate wrote her best friend, Emma Mills, that she “broke down completely.” She was not cheered by the “deadly” train journey across Canada, which made her “nervous and headachey,” and she did not like the Canadians. The women were dowdy, and everyone seemed “so damnably ignorant and narrow-minded.” At one stop, they saw a train of coolie laborers. “If one of them should die,” May-ling wrote Emma, “the family gets $150.00! Such is the price of life to them. If ever I have any influence, I shall see to it that no coolies are being shipped out, for China needs all her own men to develop the mines.”
The highlight of the trip west was apparently a stay in the Hotel Vancouver. She and Brother, as she referred to T.V., had decided to splurge during their travels, and they reveled in the luxury of the hotel. “The tips [sic] to the waiter at each meal,” she wrote Emma, “is more than a month’s allowance for me at college!” May-ling rationalized their extravagance by saying that once they got home, they would no longer be able to be “as irresponsible as we are now.”
Given her determination to have a good time, it is not surprising that there was the inevitable shipboard romance on the long sea journey to China. “I lost my head over a man whose father is Dutch and mother is French,” she wrote her friend three weeks after she returned home. The man, an architect on his way to Sumatra, asked May-ling to marry him and came to see her in Shanghai; her family, who would never have allowed her to marry a foreigner, was “greatly wrought up” by his appearance, and she ended up “having a rather uncomfortable time.” Once home, she was also courted by someone she referred to as “H.K.,” who often came from Peking with a friend to see her. “I like them, but that’s all,” she wrote Emma. Another suitor—despite his wife and family—was Eugene Chen, the editor of The Shanghai Gazette, who had been born in Trinidad. “He is very clever, and brilliant, but horribly egoistic and vain.… He is coming to call on me this week, and I hope I won’t be rude,” she wrote, adding the information that she had been attending “a great many dinners, and teas, & other affairs” since her return. A month later, she said that there had been only one evening when she was neither entertaining at home nor attending a dinner somewhere else.
As soon as she moved back, May-ling was put in charge of the family house, a large home that she described as “one of the loveliest in Shanghai.” Her duties included managing twelve household servants—seven men and five women. “Let me tell you it is no joke!” she wrote Emma. Four stories high, the house had sixteen large rooms plus kitchen and baths, verandas and sleeping porches. Located on Avenue Joffre, the longest street in Shanghai, it was very far from the center of town, which made it more fashionable but also less convenient, at some distance from the shopping district, theaters, and restaurants. The servants’ quarters in their home, she noted, were better than the students’ rooms at college.
May-ling’s mother did not like living so far away from her charities and board meetings and had suggested that the family move back into their old home in the Hongkew section of Shanghai, where they had lived before May-ling was born. Since the area was getting crowded and the prices were the highest in Shanghai, May-ling advised selling it. Her mother, she wrote her friend, was “shocked and grieved at my callousness towards our old home,” and May-ling did not bring the subject up again. For a while, the family considered buying a new home with all the modern conveniences, one that Charlie Soong thought would increase in value. “With the house in Honkew, & one on Ave Joffre, and… [the new one]… we have pretty good land securities,” May-ling wrote her friend, “not to mention our land on the Bund which is valuable.” As to transportation: “We have a lovely carriage and two coachmen, but horses are such bother. One can only use them just so much.
Next week we are going to get an automobile for running around town, and let Mother keep the carriage for her private use.”
The Soongs eventually decided not to move, and May-ling and T.V. were given four large rooms for themselves on the fourth floor of the family home. “We… enjoy our freedom greatly,” she wrote Emma, adding that since T.V. was away working during the days, she had the space all to herself. “There is a servant up here whose only duty is to keep these rooms in order, and answer my bells.… I have dismissed my maid. I have found that I simply did not need her, as Mother’s maid does all my mending and picks up my clothes for me, and it grated on me to have my maid around when I could execute my own orders in less time than it took for me to explain to her what I wanted done. You see, all the years in democratic America have their effect on me. I am quite contented with this one servant who attends to brother’s and my wants. He polishes our shoes, dusts, sweeps and make[s] up the beds, etc., and is of infinitely less trouble than my maid who used to quarrel with him all the time.”
Along with running the house, May-ling had also taken over much of the responsibility for her two younger brothers, both of whom had flunked school the previous year. The family, she wrote, was “furious. The poor kids have two tutors (one English & a Chinese) to come every day.… The fact that the two kids flunked enhances the value of my Demarest Scholarship [an academic award from Wellesley] in the eyes of the family. They think I am a wonder.… I have complete control over the boys, as mother is so disgusted that she handed them over to me bodily. They are hard to manage because they are deucedly clever and lazy at the same time. I have whipped the younger one several times, & they both are afraid of me. You don’t know what a good disciplinarian I can be!”
Among the things May-ling had loved in the United States were milk shakes and ice cream sodas, and when she returned to Shanghai, she weighed between 127 and 130 pounds. Her mother immediately put her on a diet and kept her on it until she was down to 100 pounds, a weight she proudly maintained into old age.
A more difficult adjustment was learning to be part of her family and her country. “Two letters from you just came!” she wrote Emma. “They were like an oasis to a stranger lost in the desert! Now do not think from this that I am unhappy or dissatisfied with my home life. Far from that. Only… I haven’t quite found exactly where I am. Your good advice to lose myself in the lives of my people here is well timed, for you know I am a very independent soul, who for ten years has lived only according to her own will. It is hard, therefore, to remember that I must think of others. And I am afraid too that I am not so patient as I should be.”
Her impatience could also be traced to the young man known as H.K., who kept returning to Shanghai. “He has been here quite often,” she wrote Emma in the middle of August. “I fear, however that I care nothing for him.… Of course with him it is as it used to be.” Two months later, H.K. gave a dinner for May-ling, during which a friend of his also decided he liked her.
She was furious because H.K. apparently told his rival that he and May-ling were engaged: “he always acts as though I belong to him… and… I have no opportunity to deny it.” She also claimed that she was “rather indifferent” when it came to men in general. “At dinners, I meet mostly prominent men who are already married,” she wrote Emma. “…Mother and Father object to my seeing men very much as they don’t want me to get married for the next three years. As I myself am quite contented at home, I do not want to marry either,—especially as I told you, that I met ‘my fate’ on the boat. Since I cannot marry someone I really care for, I shall not marry for anything else except fame & money. I know you think I am mercenary, but after all, Dada* dear, now all men are alike to me. I know I sound world-weary, but isn’t it just my luck though not to meet him until on my way home! The way the family scorns him because he is a foreigner would make you think that he is a Barbarian!”
Eager to find work—something to keep her “busy & interested”— May-ling complained to Emma that she was not contributing to either the welfare of her family or her own intellect. Nor was she permitted to go places unchaperoned. “And the curious fact is that I am not resentful in the least. I am just passively acquiescing. You cannot believe this of the little vehement spitfire, can you?… I just feel my mental powers getting more and more dulled every day.”
On October 10, May-ling and her brothers asked their mother to give the servants the day off, and the family visited the largest marketplace in the city, where, as she wrote Emma, “we actually bought our vegetables etc. from the stands. We even prevailed on Father and Mother to go with us, and we all wore the oldest clothes we had. You can well imagine what my aristocratic mother thought of the whole business.” The Shanghai marketplace, “a large tent-like structure covering some five acres,” had a cement floor, a blackened brick roof, and stalls rented by the farmers. After their excursion, the family gathered in the kitchen and cooked their favorite dishes. May-ling made fudge, the only thing she knew how to prepare. After lunch, the children wanted to go to the horse races, but, “as Dad & Mother are looked upon as ‘The Pillars’ of the Church,” they went for a ride instead. “When we returned the servants had prepared dinner which we all ate with zest. After dinner, we found out that some of the ungrateful wretches of servants had again gone out to the theatres without permission. Dad was furious; so he ordered all the doors to be locked. The poor knaves therefore had to spend the cold night out in the stable! I guess they won’t steal out again!”
Like overprivileged young women all over the world, May-ling had returned home from college to a life of social fun and charitable good works. But she also seemed to seek out activities that made it clear she was not bound by convention. An atypical young member of the monied class, she rather enjoyed shocking Shanghai society with her American ways and ideas. Her first job—teaching Sunday school—was hardly unusual for a girl of her station, although she was the only female teaching a class of boys and her favorite student called her “Sir.” Her next job was more fun: “Like your honorable lazy self,” she wrote another friend in October 1917, “I am not doing anything at home except amusing myself.… I can go to movies free of charge. How do you suppose I work it? Simply because I am a member of the Film Censorship Committee of China.” With Emma, she was honest about her qualifications for the post: “Fancy a young, pure, and unsophisticated being… censoring what should be instructive for the public. Bah!” Like many others before her, May-ling also volunteered at the YWCA, where she promoted organizations of Chinese women. But she was clearly not satisfied. “I think I wish that I were doing something real: something towards a career,” she wrote Emma after four months at home. “The life I am leading now will end in marriage only… even at college, I never worked unless I had to or thought I had to. And I am not changed in that respect now. If I had a profession I could force myself to work, and work hard.… Even now I can feel that my 2 married sisters are putting their heads together for me to make a “grande alliance.’… I object to being parceled off in this manner. But I grant that their logic is irrefutable. They say, ‘Now is the time for you to make the biggest match of the season.’… I have marriage drummed to me morning, noon and night.”
About this time, May-ling’s face began to break out—probably a new manifestation of the nervous attacks of her childhood and the neurodermatitis that would plague her throughout her life. Although she called it acne, it must have been something else, because she talked about the terrible pain caused by steaming and massage and the injections given her to cure it. Abiding by her mother’s wishes, she did not go out, except at night and only with a veil. Soon, however, she decided to go ahead with her life “as though nothing is the matter.… I have found that the closer I stick at home, the more uncertain my temper becomes,” she wrote Emma.
She also began to think in terms of politics and the country, reporting to her friend that there was “so much misery… everywhere! Sometimes when I look at the dirty, ragged swarming huma
nity in our slums, I feel the sense of utter futility in hoping for a great and a new China, and the sense of my smallness. Dada, you cannot conceive how useless one feels in such surroundings; the percentage of poor here is greater than any you could conceive of in America.” After the Peking Gazette was suppressed and the cabinet fell, she wrote, “Chinese politics are impossible, one never knows what next is going to happen, and one never knows when one’s head is going to be the next to be chopped off.”
The Shanghai Municipal Council asked her to join the Child Labor Commission, on which no Chinese had ever before served. For a girl who had lived in a refined stratum of American society for ten years, the experience of investigating working conditions in Shanghai’s factories was quite a shock. In the economic boom that followed the end of World War I, conditions in these plants were, according to one chronicler of the city, “as abysmal as any in the world.” Contractors searched the countryside for areas of drought or flood, bought all the girls in a village “for a song,” put them into rooms converted from cheap tenements into factories, and kept them at their machines for as many as fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Only one holiday, Chinese New Year, was observed.
“I… spent much time in visiting various factories in Shanghai and was repelled at the long hours… and poor working conditions of women and children in the so-called International (but mainly run by the British) Settlement of Shanghai,” May-ling said many years later. “The sanitation was appalling, and little babies were lying in the aisle as their mother worked on the machines.”
The “factories” in which these unfortunate women worked were dimly lit and stifling. Few had windows. Women and children as young as six were kept, as one writer put it, “wards of the subcontractor.” For working 364 days a year, he gave them “food which is poor, clothing which is meager, and shelter which is crowded. He charges them for these services, which must be worked off before they leave his employ.” For the average worker, a twelve-hour working day was a dream, as was the right to sit down during working hours. After a few years of unbearable working conditions and inadequate nutrition, industrial workers were often ill and unemployable. Tuberculosis was common.
The Last Empress Page 10
