One of the worst places to work was a silk factory, or filature. “In the silk factories,” May-ling reported, “the women’s hands were purplish-red and often blistered by having to work with hot vapor issuing forth from open vats.” Since the slightest breath of air might disturb the threads, no ventilation was allowed to mitigate the putrid air that rose from the dead cocoons lying in heaps on the floor, and the odor in these factories was said to be unbearable. Whereas women actually spun the silk, children were employed to stir the cocoons in vats of boiling water in order to loosen the threads. The children’s eyes were universally red, according to one visitor, and their arms were covered with burns from scalding. “Women and children grow very skillful in keeping their hands out of the water, yet they are loose-skinned and par-boiled, for fingers must of necessity be continually dipped in,” said another visitor. “Then, too, the Chinese women overseers, passing constantly up and down the lines, occasionally punish a child’s inefficiency, or supposed laziness, by thrusting the little hand into the bubbling cauldron.”
Because of the cheap construction of the plants, fires were frequent. In one appalling calamity, a hundred women died in a fire that engulfed a silk filature because the owner had locked them in from the outside. Like others of his kind, this man kept his female employees virtual prisoners. Even when they were not kept under lock and key, the difficulty of negotiating narrow staircases, cluttered with filth and trash, turned these factories into firetraps.
IN 1917, THE year May-ling returned to Shanghai, the position of women in China, even under the best circumstances, was still an unenviable one. A poem from the Book of Odes, called “the richest and most authentic source of material for… the social life of ancient China before the 8th Century B.C.,” describes how the earliest Chinese felt about women:
When a son is born
Let him sleep in the bed,
Clothe him with fine dress,
And give him jades to play with.
How lordly his cry is!
May he grow up to wear crimson
And be the lord of the clan and the tribe!
When a daughter is born
Let her sleep on the ground,
Wrap her in common wrappings,
And give her broken tiles for her playthings.
May she have no faults, nor merits of her own;
May she well attend to food and wine,
And bring no discredit to her parents!
Even after two thousand years of civilization, the Chinese family remained a strict patriarchy, and the Chinese woman was expected to obey three generations of men—first her father, then the husband chosen for her by her family, and finally, if she survived her husband, her firstborn son. Reduced to the position of an unpaid, often mistreated servant, an intelligent woman was often worse off than her illiterate sister. “The woman with no talents,” Confucius had said, “is the one who has merit,” It should come as no surprise that Confucius’s own marriage, as well as those of his son and grandson, all ended in divorce.*
Whereas marriage gave many Western brides a taste of freedom, it made life worse for a Chinese girl, who was expected to serve her mother-in-law and her husband’s family for the rest of her life. On the eve of her marriage, one bride was given the following advice by her father: “Tomorow you will belong to the Yen [her future husband’s name] family. Fom now on, this is no longer your home and you are not to contact us without permission from your husband. Your duty will be to please him and your in-laws. Bear them many sons. Sublimate your own desires. Become the willing piss-pot and spittoon of the Yens and we will be proud of you.”
An account by another young woman who married the boy her family chose for her in 1920, three years after May-ling returned home, gives us an idea of what this sort of life was like, even under the best of circumstances. May Tan belonged to an old mandarin family with ties to the West. The bride’s father served as China’s minister to the Court of St. James’s, her uncle was the minister of justice, and her mother-in-law came from the same family as the dowager empress. But enlightenment stopped at the gates of the family compound.
“Being a bride in a large old-fashioned family was no easy task…” Ms. Tan said:
In following the established traditions, I had to present tea three times a day to my husband’s father and mother. There were many men and maid servants, but I had to do these presentations personally.… I had my meals with my sisters-in-law.… Men and women were seated separately. On Sundays or holidays when my husband had his meals at home, he would sit with the men folks. I could not eat with him at the same table, or sit in the same room. Day in and day out, I would have my sisters-in-law as my companions, and we usually played Mahjong in the afternoons to pass the time away. The evenings I spent with my mother-in-law. I could not leave her presence without first asking permission and then bowing low in obeisance…
In October I found myself pregnant. Realizing that once my condition was known I would never be allowed to go out again, I kept it entirely to myself. But, when November came I began feeling rather queer and thought I had better inform my mother-in-law.… Mother-in-law immediately… ordered the servants to remove my husband’s bed and belongings to the library in the outer compound. According to what she said, this would make the baby bright! As a result I had less chance of seeing my husband and sometimes I would not see him for the whole day….
In December everybody was busy buying Christmas and New Year presents.… I had a private rickshaw pulled by a strong coolie… [and] decided to go out shopping.… The roads were covered with snow and ice.… The coolie stepped on slippery ice and fell down.… Mother-in-law was very angry.… Miscarriage occurred.… This event further angered the mother-in-law. During the Christmas and New Year season… I… stayed in bed.… My only consolation was that after returning from the office, my husband would drop in and chat with me for a while.… In the holidays, he went out playing golf with his friends and in the evenings went dancing with his girl friends at the Grand Hotel.
One cannot imagine any of the Soong girls, particularly May-ling, submitting to this sort of life. Nor would her parents have wanted this for her. She had not been given a Western education in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table. Like her sisters, once she was out of college, May-ling had to invent herself.
8
There is a Chinese saying that “bandits and soldiers are breath from the same nostrils.”… The bandit had no official position; he killed and stole and fled. The warlord had military rank; he killed and stole and stayed.
—JAMES E. SHERIDAN
ALONG WITH marital customs and good works, there was a great deal for May-ling to absorb when she returned to China after ten years in the States. Unlike America, where she had done her bit for the war effort by knitting socks for soldiers, her own country had remained determinedly neutral or, as one writer put it, “engaged in guarding and perpetuating her traditional impotency.” Although it had become apparent that China must at some point declare for one side or the other, it was not until December 1916, when President Wilson sent out an initial offer of peace, that the Chinese woke up and realized that in order to be taken seriously as a world power and gain entry to a future peace conference, they had to take sides in the conflict.
At this point, their immediate concern was the province of Shantung, where the Japanese had taken over two hundred square miles of German territory early in the war. Unaware that Japan had signed secret agreements with the European Entente to support their claim on Chinese territory when the war was over, China, believing it would be accorded equal treatment at the peace table, cast its lot with the Allies in August 1917, when the United States invited it to join other nations in breaking off diplomatic relations with the Germans to protest their submarine warfare. This declaration served another purpose as well: by severing their ties with the Germans, the Chinese could legally stop paying the indemnity they owed Germany from the Boxer Rebellion and use the money t
o fill their depleted treasury.
Unfortunately, China’s decision to enter the war came at a time of confusion within the country itself. After the death of Yuan his “well-meaning but powerless” vice president had stepped up to the presidency, restored the constitution of 1912, recalled Parliament, and dissolved Yuan’s North Chinese Army. But without a strong leader in Peking, Yuan’s generals, who had been occupying various provinces around the country, began to use these areas as personal bases, guarded by their own armies.
China was now entering the Warlord Era, a period of a dozen or so years during which provincial strongmen were able to defy or ignore the central government while battling with one another. Thus, China was divided up during the late teens and twenties by these warlords (tuchuns), who fought over territory, preferably lands with a large populace from which to collect taxes (opium was the most remunerative crop), and a seaport to receive shipments of arms. A typical warlord not only fought against but bargained with other warlords, whom he might then support against the central government. Warlords were sometimes financed by foreign nations, who played them off against each other in the hope of finding one strong enough to take over the country and lease out its rich, untapped resources. Unlike other nations, Japan always supported more than one warlord, since the Japanese wanted to keep China divided and ripe for conquest.
The warlords themselves were quite a colorful bunch. Perhaps the most famous was the “Christian General,” Feng Yu-hsiang, who became a soldier at eleven and rose to be a brigade commander in the North China Army. Six feet, four inches tall, 240 pounds, “shaped like a pyramid, with a melonsized head” Feng dressed like an oversize coolie with a huge straw hat tied under his chin. Converted to Christianity in 1913, he married a secretary from the YMCA and from then on baptized his troops with a hose and marched them into battle singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” His soldiers were noticably neater and cleaner than those of other warlords. (After examining their rifles, he often checked their fingernails.) They were not only trained in practical matters like road building, tree planting, and carpentry but given instruction in reading and writing and required to learn two new Chinese characters before being given their dinner. As Feng gained power, however, he discovered that he needed a constant supply of money to support his army, and he quickly learned the art of looting the countryside. He also betrayed (his choice of word) his superior, Marshal Wu Pei-fu, and by 1924 had conquered Peking, which he held on to for two years—until Wu and another warlord joined forces and threw him out.
This was pretty typical of the warlords, who took great pleasure in double-crossing each other. One of the most interesting, known as the Old Marshal, was Chang Tso-lin, a small tyrant with delicate hands, a paunch, and a large mustache grown to hide a harelip that had been badly sewn together. Thought by some to be “the greatest warlord of them all,” Chang had started out as the uneducated leader of a band of Manchurian brigands, then joined the Chinese army. In 1913, he was named military governor of one of the Manchurian provinces; five years later, he controlled all of Manchuria. Chang was the man who had joined Feng for the purpose of conquering Peking. Chang wore a black satin skullcap that sported a gigantic pearl— reputedly the biggest in the world—and harbored imperial ambitions. Once established in the capital, he began to hold court on a thronelike chair with a stuffed tiger on either side, worship in the sections of the Forbidden City set aside for the emperor, and insist that streets be closed and shop windows shuttered when he went out into the city. He even started making his own imperial porcelain. He had five wives, loved gambling, and was fond of opium. Manchuria was the part of China where the Japanese were strongest, and Old Marshal Chang considered himself an honest man, since he bargained with other warlords over territory but refused to deal with the Japanese. Because of this, he eventually lost his life.
Marshal Wu, the man whom Feng betrayed, was the very opposite of Feng, a highly learned scholar-soldier, fine-boned and thin with an aquiline nose that gave him the appearance of a mandarin. Like Feng, Wu had only one wife. Red-headed with pale brown eyes, his coloring was strangely un-Chinese, but he was, in fact, a Chinese gentleman from his cultivated speech to his Confucian core. He was said to have fought a battle in the rain, which was not considered a proper thing to do; when the battle was over, he contacted the general of the beaten force and offered to give up his gains and fight the battle a second time when the sun came out. Unlike many other warlords, Wu paid his soldiers their entire salary on a regular basis, a practice that earned their loyalty and the gratitude of the local peasants, from whom they were not forced to steal their food. He was a modest man and cared little for money, indulging himself in only two areas: he had a custom-made bulletproof French touring car upholstered in brown leather, and he kept on his payroll a private spittoon bearer, who followed him wherever he went. Another warlord, Sun Chuan-fang, was less aggressive than his peers. He issued a Three Love Principle in 1926: love of country, love of the people, and love of the enemy. When Sun lost his territory to the KMT, he retired from war and took up Buddhism. He was killed in the middle of a Buddhist ceremony by the daughter of a man who had been executed by Sun’s soldiers two years earlier.
Then there was General Yen Hsi-shan, the so-called “model governor” of Shansi province, the inland province that was home to the Kungs. According to historian John Gunther, Yen was so suspicious that when he was getting a shave, he had one of his soldiers hold a gun to the head of the barber, just in case someone had bribed the man to cut his throat. Yen also built his railroads on another gauge from other warlords’ to stop would-be invaders. There was also Chang Tsung-chang, who was said to have “the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger.” He was called “Three Things Not Known”—how much money he had, how many soldiers, and how many concubines.* Another name was “Old Eighty-six,” since it was said that it would take a pile of eighty-six silver dollars to make up the length of his penis (nine inches in repose).
The warlords moved their armies on the rivers, railways, and roads of China, plundering the countryside as they traveled. “Pockmarked, syphilitic soldiers, often wolfish with hunger, often looting for sustenance, marched back and forth over the map of China, establishing chaos as the normal state of civil affairs” was journalist Theodore White’s description of the Warlord Era. On their way to battle, the soldiers were followed by coolies bearing coffins—visible reassurance that if killed, their bodies would be properly buried and not just left to rot on the battlefield.
During the Warlord Era, Fairbank tells us that the Chinese suffered mainly from the deterioration of the infrastructure, as there was no one to see to the irrigation and drainage that fed an agricultural economy, no one responsible for repairing the dikes, the roads, or the rolling stock. Except in a few isolated cases, the warlords were too busy fighting and extending their territory to pay attention to the floods and famines that inevitably resulted from this lack of repairs, while their inferiors, officials who received no salaries beyond what they could squeeze out of the peasants, had even less reason to keep things up.
AMONG THOSE WHO had wanted to retain China’s neutrality during World War I was May-ling’s new brother-in-law, Sun Yat-sen, who had returned to China from Japan in April of 1916. It was not a comfortable homecoming. “We stayed in disguise in Shanghai, in the garret of a French newspaperman’s house,” said Ching-ling. “We never went out in the daytime, only by night, and even then, we were heavily disguised.” Throughout this period of political turmoil, Sun continued to look for support wherever he could get it. “He spoke conservatively to those whose help he needed,” Ching-ling told Edgar Snow, “and his books were edited so as not to divide his followers. ‘We have to be very careful how we go at things,’ he was always warning me. ‘Do it the Chinese way—roundabout—never directly at the goal.’ “
The Suns moved to Canton in the summer of 1916 so that he could establish his government in south China. Althou
gh no foreign power would recognize the new government, the appearance of the recently married couple caused quite a stir. According to one of her biographers, Ching-ling was the first Chinese woman to appear in public with her husband and was often the only woman present at political gatherings. Reserved by nature and training, she now had to learn to deal with people she did not know. “You know how I dread publicity,” she wrote a friend in America. “But since my marriage I have had to participate in many affairs which I’d otherwise escape.”
Ching-ling’s life in the limelight did not last long, as her husband’s tenure, first as generalissimo, and then as president of the South China government, was brief. In April 1918, Sun was demoted by more blatantly ambitious men from head of the government to one of a directorate of eight. Disgusted with the party he had brought to power, he left Canton in May and traveled to Japan, once again in search of money. But the Japanese would not even allow him to enter Tokyo. At the end of May, Sun and Ching-ling retired to their home at 29 Rue Molière in the French Concession in Shanghai.
A tranquil setting for a life of the mind, their gray stone house, purchased with funds from overseas Chinese, had a covered porch looking out over a lovely garden with large stones* and a two-story birdhouse. It is here that Sun was able to devote himself to writing and compiling books out of his earlier articles, with which Ching-ling helped him. Clearly the home of a reader and thinker, it was simply furnished, notable primarily for the wooden bookcases lining the walls, not only in Sun’s study but in the halls as well. It was said that there were more than five thousand volumes in all, including many on history—everything from the Monroe Doctrine to a book by Theodore Roosevelt on World War I. Elegant but simple, the home served its owner—who mortgaged it a number of times—as a peaceful retreat. According to Sun’s bodyguard, the “most important member of the staff was Mme. Sun herself. She never interfered during his office hours, but it was she alone who made his life possible by keeping him cheerful and happy no matter what went on.”
The Last Empress Page 11
