WHILE THE CITIZENS of Nanking were undergoing these horrors, May-ling and Chiang were in Hankow, where they had fled just two days before the arrival of the Japanese army. Japanese planes tried to shoot them down, and they were saved only because the American plane in which they flew outdistanced its pursuers.
From December 1937 until October 1938, Chiang ruled China from the city of Hankow. Of all the foreign concessions that had once existed in the old treaty port, only the French Concession was left, although other consulates, warehouses, offices, and banks with their European facades still rose along the north shore of the reddish brown Yangtze, and spectators often gathered around the gates of the British Consulate to watch the consul general in his garden practicing his putting. Along with what Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden called “a good lending-library,” there remained an American drugstore, a YMCA, and a red-light street in the temporary capital. According to the English visitors, the clothing stores, cafés, and restaurants were all run by White Russian immigrants—“a fat, defeated tribe who lead a melancholy indoor life of gossip, mah-jongg, drink, and bridge.… Their clocks,” according to Auden, “stopped in 1917. It has been tea-time ever since.”
The Chiangs lived across the river in the Chinese city of Wuchang in an old military headquarters with a stone gateway and a large dugout in the front yard. Auden and Isherwood were taken by Donald to have tea there with the generalissimo’s wife. “She is a small, round-faced lady,” Isherwood later wrote,
exquisitely dressed, vivacious rather than pretty, and possessed of an almost terrifying charm and poise. Obviously she knows just how to deal with any conceivable type of visitor. She can become at will the cultivated, westernized woman with a knowledge of literature and art; the technical expert, discussing aeroplane-engines and machine-guns; the inspector of hospitals; the president of a mothers’ union; or the simple, affectionate, clinging Chinese wife. She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless.… Strangely enough, I have never heard anybody comment on her perfume. It is the most delicious either of us has ever smelt.
After the interview, Isherwood concluded that “Madame… for all her artificiality, is certainly a great heroic figure.”
Although they accepted May-ling’s artifice, Isherwood and Auden, like most foreign writers and reporters, were disgusted with the daily briefings held in the offices of Hollington Tong, Chiang’s chief of publicity. “Every Japanese advance is a Chinese strategic withdrawal,” Isherwood complained. “Towns pass into Japanese hands in the most tactful manner possible— they simply cease to be mentioned.”* The news was read aloud by Mr. Li, a gentleman who, according to Isherwood, bore a strong resemblance to “the most optimistic of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs.”
IN JANUARY 1937, Emma Mills received a formal Christmas card from the Chiangs—a typical head of state greeting with a photograph of one of their homes. “My last letter from May-ling had been nearly ten years ago,” Emma recalled ruefully, “and several of mine since had gone unanswered.” Nonetheless, urged to get a group of Wellesley women together to hear about the situation in China, Emma invited a dozen or so of her classmates to a luncheon, at which they helped compose a letter to May-ling. The following month, Emma got a letter back to be circulated to the ladies, thanking them for the message and outlining China’s position:
Our national existence is at stake.… The rest of the world is slowly realizing that China is fighting not only her own battle but their battle as well.… The [boycott] movement is spreading in all parts of the world, and the more people adhere to it and refuse to buy, sell, and transport Japanese goods, the more chance there will be for this bloody war to terminate at an early date.… Pray for us—yes, but, at the same time, do what you can to carry on the boycott movement. I shall not tell you about the horrible atrocities we have been witnessing in our country for the past three months.… I have seen them with my own eyes, those terribly mangled bodies. I have heard the children call their dead parents, after the bombing of hundreds of refugees at the South Station at Shanghai. My shoes were blood-smeared when I walked through there.… Help us stop this war.
The above crossed a letter May-ling received from Emma, offering to keep the generalissimo’s wife up to date on American public opinion as it related to China. It was a letter that had obviously been hard for Emma to write—she confided to her diary that she had spent “all evening” doing it— and, given the care with which the words were chosen, it is clear that she still felt estranged from her old friend. “You should remember me well enough to be assured of my personal loyalty to and deep felt sympathy with you,” Emma wrote May-ling. “What you may not realize, is that my interest in China has continued and even grown with the years.… American sympathy is entirely with China,” she wrote but then was forced to add, “Americans are by no means ready yet for any large scale boycott. Rightly or wrongly, the majority seem to feel that it would be a first step inevitably leading to war.” Informing May-ling that she had started a campaign among members of their old Wellesley class to raise funds for civilian relief, Emma finished by saying “If there is anything at all that I can do for you, or that you think I might do for China’s cause, surely you know you can count on me.”
Once May-ling gave her the go-ahead, Emma’s efforts to raise interest in and money for China became a full-time job. By this point in her life Emma had finished everything she needed except a thesis for a M.A. in Chinese studies. She was unmarried; her social life, she said, was “very sketchy,” since she lived with her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother and, as she put it, “one can’t do much in her house.” As to May-ling, her letters and requests seesawed between an occasional exchange of confidences that recalled their former intimacy and the sort of formalized political writing that the wife of a head of state might direct to someone whom she knew she could trust to understand her country’s needs. May-ling now used the salutation “Dear Emma” in place of “Dear” or “Dearest Dada,” and her sign-offs vary from “With love, Mayling Soong Chiang” to the oddly formal “Yours very sincerely, Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”*
CHRISTMAS OF 1937 brought the Chiangs a visit from the German ambassador with overtures of peace from Japan. Giving the note to May-ling, the ambassador said, “I am instructed to hand you this without comment.” “I should think so,” she answered, changing the subject immediately. According to Donald, who was present, nothing further was said about the so-called peace terms, which, the Japanese admitted, “were those of a victor.” The Italians then tried to make a peace deal with T.V. by suggesting that he overturn the Chinese government. “That, of course,” said Donald, “was laughed at.”
During the winter of 1937–1938, the Chinese reached a new low point. One of China’s most enthusiastic and idealistic boosters admitted that Hankow was “filled with men and women who take no apparent interest in the war,” while the American ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, was even more blunt. According to Johnson, the general attitude of the current inhabitants of Hankow was “Let us fight to the last drop of coolie blood” while “in the midst of it all the Soong family carries on its intrigues which sometimes disgust me completely.”
In that regard, Barbara Tuchman told a story about May-ling, who invited a group of journalists, who had just returned from a visit to the Communists in Yenan, to tea. When the reporters spoke enthusiastically about the integrity and sense of sacrifice of the members of the Chinese Communist Party, Madame walked over to a window, saying that she could not believe what they were telling her. After a few minutes of silence, she turned back to the group. “If what you tell me about them is true,” she said, “then I can only say they have never known real power.”
The Australian journalist Rhodes Farmer gave a different picture of May-ling as she paid an incognito visit to the city of Hsuchow,* which the Japanese were bombing regularly twice a day. Described by the matron as “a beautifully dressed Chinese woman [who] had asked to see the hospital
… [she] talked cheerfully with every wounded soldier and civilian but did not reveal her identity. As she was leaving,” Farmer later wrote, “the puzzled missionary asked for the name of her visitor.”
“I am Madame Chiang Kai-shek; I am visiting the front with my husband .. .”
“You know,” the matron told the journalist, “my hair just about stood on end with surprise. I could scarcely believe Madame Chiang would come to such a dangerous spot. I told her she was foolish to make such trips, but she just smiled back at me and said she felt far safer when she was sharing her husband’s perils. That was my first glimpse of her. I think she must be a very fine woman.”
Another journalist, Freda Utley, interviewed Madame Chiang about this time. Raised as an atheist in an intellectual English family, Utley had joined the Communist Party, married a Russian who had been purged, and then fled the Soviet Union. Two years later, she spoke with the generalissimo’s wife:
After an hour’s talk… the alarm sounded. She [Madame Chiang] continued to talk as if nothing had happened.… When the bombs seemed to be falling close she took me down to their dug-out, and there in the tense atmosphere of an airraid I had a more intimate and revealing talk with her than in any other interview. She is a very lovely woman and can be as simple and unaffected and friendly as an American. Her wide dark eyes become particularly beautiful when she is under some emotional stress.… Although I was to see her again in the role of gracious queen receiving those favoured to enter her presence, I never forgot the two and a half hours I had spent with her that morning when she became an intelligent Western educated woman tackling a sea of troubles with patience and understanding and without illusions.… When I said that the general impression was that the Communists were the least corrupt and best element in China, she exclaimed: ‘Incorrupt, yes; but that’s because they haven’t got power yet.’ There is certainly much truth in this remark, and Madame Chiang is obviously, unlike her sister Madame Sun Yat-sen, a political realist. Nevertheless, in conversation with her one felt an emotional bitterness… towards the Communists and an unwillingness to recognize their merits. Her hatred of those who not only fought against Chiang Kai-shek so long, but who to-day still challenge her own religious and social concepts, obscures her political judgement, which in other respects is so penetrating. On the other hand, her Christian beliefs, which are most sincerely held, blind her to the shortcomings of those who share them, or appear to share them.
In her first letter to Emma of 1938, May-ling wrote about the Japanese slaughter of refugees and complained that “the democratic powers were so afraid of Japan” that they had even stopped supplies on their way to China: “America turned airplanes off a ship at San Diego, which we bought and paid for before hostilities broke out.… America is virtually assisting Japan to defeat China.” A few months later, she changed her tune, writing that the Chinese understood the situation in the United States and “the motives which prompt the Government to refrain from antagonizing Japan. We know they fear Japan, and that they fear war just as much.” But, she added, it was hard for the Chinese to understand why the Allies did not try to penalize Japan for “inhumanities which would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of the barbaric tribes who disgraced even the Dark Ages. What they knew about inhumanities was nothing in comparison to the refined methods of slaughter, robbery, and torture, displayed by the Japanese.”
At the end of April, the G-mo’s wife wrote Emma that she had just returned from the front.
I visited just as many base hospitals as I had time at each stop, and also managed to arrange the placing of two thousand war orphans with four Catholic missions. Those kids will be well looked after, as the Sisters pour out all their love onto their charges. Do I hear you say, “vicarious motherhood”? Perhaps. Anyway I inspected some of their institutions incog and saw enough to convince myself that I am doing a wise thing by having some of the children at least under the sisters.… We are also placing as many as possible in other mission institutions.… The money that you promise to send me shall be used for the children’s work. You would like that, won’t you? Later I shall send you pictures of all of your orphans and they will know that you and your friends are taking care of them.
Meanwhile, Madame Chiang sent Chinese cups and saucers, packages of green tea, and silver spoons (“to show that a spoon may be licked but China can’t”) to her Wellesley class and the class of 1938, which had made her an honorary member. “You are doing so many things for me that you might as well do some more,” she wrote, asking Emma to distribute the gifts.
“I’ve sometimes said that I knew Mayling Soong well, but don’t know Mme. Chiang at all,” Emma wrote back in an obvious reference to May-ling’s previous stiffness, “but after reading the second letter, I guess maybe they’re the same person, after all. Yes, of course I’ll look after all the gifts.… You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for us, with so much else on your mind.” In distributing May-ling’s gifts, Emma said that she herself had “shone a good deal by reflected glory, which had its amusing aspects,” among them being invited to have dinner with Mildred McAfee, the president of Wellesley College. McAfee, who was criticized for favoring China over Japan in the current conflict, was reported to have countered, “After all we can’t help it if we have no Japanese alumna of similar prominence!”
In the middle of June 1938, the generalissimo’s wife had a series of three articles printed in The New York Times. Warning readers that “my views are unpalatable—sometimes unprintable,” she launched into a sarcastic condemnation of the other nations in the League for leaving China “frigidly alone… to fight as best we can… for the principles which the democracies espouse” and the “studied neutrality of the democracies that enables Japan… to continue killing our people, violating our women and making a wilderness of all of our territory that she has been able to penetrate.” The second article, no less judgmental than the first, referred to “a crippled and, apparently, a useless League of Nations,” while the third detailed Japan’s attempt to control the Chinese population with opium as “a surcease from their mental and physical tortures.”
Emma’s reaction to May-ling’s articles was guarded. “They are certainly frank, and any earlier would not, I think, have had a sympathetic reaction. Now we are in the mood for them.” The managing editor of the Times was not so sanguine. “I quite agree with the New York Times managing editor when he says that I am ‘writing too much,’ ” May-ling wrote Emma. “He is right.… That last set of articles for the Times was really not written for publication.… Sometime ago I had concluded that I would write no more for the newspapers, and also would refrain from writing to individuals, since so many rush the letters into print.* No one realizes better than I do how tired people can become of repetition of arguments.”
Nevertheless, during her winter in Hankow, May-ling asked Hollington Tong to copy her speeches, newpaper articles, broadcasts, and letters for Rhodes Farmer to edit into a book. Farmer, given six weeks to accomplish the job, said it was “the strangest and most difficult assignment of my varied life as a newspaperman,” since the Chinese typesetters knew no English and all the type had to be set by hand, even though there was enough for only forty pages at a time. During the process, Farmer lost his unalloyed admiration for the generalissimo’s wife: “Several times the 10,000 copies of those forty pages were completed and then Madame—She Who Must Be Obeyed— decided upon alterations.… Madame… was extremely proud of her first book. But when… she saw me she was Madame the Martinet. What about that printing error on such and such a page, and the line of her poetry that had been misplaced?”
Although she did not allow the book to be sold in the United States or Britain, May-ling sent more than three hundred autographed copies to Wellesley, saying that it would be “of interest because some of the imperfections are due to the unusual difficulties we are undergoing in Hankow owing to war conditions.” She asked Emma to distribute the books, enclosing a check for $100.00 for pack
ing and postage.
I am terrifically busy going to the country to inspect the work our war service teams are doing to mobilize the women in the rear. No joke these trips. Mud—squishy, mushy, sticky goo—over the ankles as we tramp through muddy roads to reach our destination; bumps from the springless rickshas, and standing for hours in the drizzling rain. You will be surprised to know that I have developed to be quite a stump speaker. Next you know I shall become an inveterate soap-box orator.… When this war is over I think my hair will turn white, but there is one comfort: I am working so hard I am not in danger of ever becoming a nice, fat, soft, sofa cushion or having a derriere.
27
The rest of the world is bound to catch fire from the Asiatic blaze. A great war is inevitably coming and China has only to hold out until that happens.
—T.V. SOONG, 1937
AS THE JAPANESE cut a bloody path through China, May-ling assumed the voice of the victim, crying out for help to the rest of the world. Forty years old in 1937, at the height of her beauty and confidence, the generalissimo’s wife had wisely enlisted Donald as her adviser. According to James McHugh, “There is little doubt that Donald deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the rise of the Chiangs” to their position of “international prominence… as liberal leaders.” As a former journalist, Donald knew how to present them to the international press, particularly those in the countries whose help China needed to survive. He was, McHugh said, “bound by a blind faith and devotion” to May-ling and a firm belief in her ability to bridge the gap between East and West. To accomplish what we today would call the media blitz surrounding Chiang and his wife, Donald hired a team of assistants. Their job was “to build about the tiny frame of Madame Chiang the sparkle, the words, the voice to command the compassion, the dollars and the moral support of democratic people everywhere.”
The Last Empress Page 39
