There were probably other reasons for her departure. It was said that Madame Chiang and her supporters thought that she should be named president of the Kuomintang after the death of her husband but the idea was vetoed by the old men of the party. Then she tried to put David Kung into a top position. When that was rejected as well, the G-mo’s widow realized that she was politically superfluous and left the island. Chiang Ching-kuo saw her off and supported her as she walked to the airplane.
In October she invited Emma out to the Kung estate—now owned by the Kung children—on Long Island. “May-ling looks much the same,” Emma wrote in her journal, “but has help on steps. Right arm pains her from the breast removal as does her left leg, due to whip-lash [from the auto accident in 1969]. Has two Secret Service men, and brought over two of her own, a trained nurse, amah, cook, etc.” Shortly after this, May-ling became ill—“very sick for three and a half months. Skin and nerve condition.”
In spite of the fact that May-ling reported that she was suffering from shingles, she returned to Taiwan in April 1976 for the first anniversary of her husband’s death. In June, she wrote Emma that she was “still having pains.… Inflamed nerve roots have still not healed; they have been so badly damaged. Portions of the skin on the outside are well, but there are still angry-looking red patches and inflamed nerve ends that are causing me intense pain—after six long months.” It was almost a year later when she wrote Walter Judd that she was “gradually recovering from the prolonged affliction” of herpes zoster (shingles) in which “the “pains and sufferings were indeed excruciating and almost unbearable at times.” When she left the island at the end of four months, she claimed that she was now suffering from an ulcer and muscular pains from her old injury, and she apparently checked into Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore before returning to Long Island.
Although May-ling and Wedemeyer seem to have been out of touch during this period, the general corresponded with her nephew and owner (or co-owner) of her New York apartment, David Kung. As they exchanged gifts and greetings, it became clear that David did not like being addressed as David Kung. “All those of my generation, viz. 76th generation,* all have their middle name ending with Ling,” he informed Wedemeyer. “So a Chinese scholar would know which generation I belong to. All my father’s generation end with Hsiang.… I am very proud of my Chinese name and ancestry. I need not embellish it with the name of a Jewish King. Besides, I do not think I am able to be as adulterous as he was and be contrite and repentant so many times! It would be too tiring although a lot more fun!”
A year later, a telegraphed invitation from Wedemeyer evoked this reponse from Madame’s nephew: “I note it was addressed ‘Care David L. K. K’ung.’ For reasons I already explained to you in my letter of February 11, 1978, I am very proud of my Chinese name, K’ung Ling Kai or L. K. K’ung, and of my Chinese ancestry. I shall appreciate it if you will instruct your secretary to have the correction made in your address book.… I wish I had gone into the Army or Navy so that I could sign myself, as you have, with an appropriate title such as Colonel, General, Rear Admiral or Admiral, whatever.”
May-ling lived with the Kungs in the United States—either in David’s apartment in Manhattan or the Kung house in Lattingtown, Locust Valley, Long Island. Neighbors in the country claimed they never saw her, only the limousines going by, and, according to the mayor of Lattingtown, “She lived here for 30 years and nobody knew she was here until she left.” Although she had her hair washed in the local beauty parlor, this was done on Sundays or holidays, when the village shopping center was closed. She was seen arriving in a “two-car entourage,” and while she was inside, two Chinese bodyguards were observed to “pace nervously outside.” There was a plain-clothesman stationed at the door of the house, and her bodyguards continued to be supplied by the U.S. government. “I see her damn limousines go by every once in a while,” said the editor of the local paper. “She must be going out of her mind, now that the United States has taken some sense and decided to recognize that there are 900 million people over there in China.… Personally, I don’t care what she thinks. The only thing I want to write about her is her obituary. I think she’s caused the world a lot of grief.”
The apartment in the city was a duplex at 10 Gracie Square, one of the most elegant buildings in New York, looking out over the East River. Its eighteen rooms—seven family bedrooms and many servants’ rooms—were furnished in the style of another era with wall-to-wall carpeting and lots of brocade. Red was the predominant color, and May-ling’s bedroom, which featured a portrait of her, was decorated in red silk. There were beautiful jades and ivories, lovely paintings and Chinese cabinets in the public rooms, but the Western furniture that shared these large spaces was overgilded, over-carved, and overdone.
Madame Chiang, according to another tenant at 10 Gracie Square, was not much of a presence in the building, except when she came and went, “so erect that she looked like a young girl, even in her nineties.” She had three small dogs—a Yorkshire terrier and two Bijons—that, in the words of one New York columnist, “were also getting old and wobbly along with their centenarian mistress.” Since some members of her staff had not been willing to move to New York, her complement of aides had been somewhat reduced. Nevertheless, she employed twenty-four servants (the author assumes that this was three shifts of eight people each), most of whom were housed in a lesser apartment building nearby. According to the same columnist, trouble arose at 10 Gracie when the Madame’s neighbors became “aware of the pungent dishes and the smoked Peking duck being prepared.” One neighbor confirmed that the duck was hung out of the kitchen window, and the stench of cooking oil lodged itself in the elevators. It was finally, however, not the odors but cockroaches that led the other occupants of the building to complain. “Exterminators were dispatched,” the columnist reported. “Then inspectors were dispatched to confirm mission accomplished. Looking into anybody’s closet or cupboard can be an edifying or a fascinating experience. Looking into those of the once-most-powerful woman in the world was even better than that.… Like one closet that was all Gold Bars. I’m talking Fort Knox, not Hershey’s.”
From her home in Manhattan, the G-mo’s widow continued to keep up with world affairs through both American and Chinese newspapers. In 1979, she sent out appeals for the “boat people,” going so far as to take out an ad in The New York Times denouncing Vietnam for expelling them and appealing to “the countries commanding expansive territory” to take them in. She also continued to exchange the occasional letter with Emma Mills, writing in April 1980 that she had not been in touch because “after I recovered from the influenza virus I suffered an attack of cystitis and am still being treated for it. What with one thing and another I haven’t been out of the apartment for over two months!”
The following year, on May 29, 1981, Ching-ling died in Beijing at the age of ninety. She had given her papers to her nephew David Kung just before he left the mainland. As he wrote a friend, “She did not want it to fall into the hands of the Communists. She even gave me a few pistols belonging to the President and said she did not want them to be used against ‘you all.’ True she did not agree with the Government, but she was not [a] Communist. I have always had the greatest respect for her integrity.”
Ching-ling had written her last article three months before her death. As an outspoken critic of the Cultural Revolution, she called on the Chinese people “to build socialism… with democracy and legality, so that such abuses will never recur.” A symbol of righteousness, she had been seated next to Mao in the Chinese delegation to the 1957 Moscow meeting of world Communist parties when he signed their declaration. It was said that Jawaharlal Nehru had photographs of two women in his room—one was Madame Nehru, the other, Sun Ching-ling.
Two weeks before her death, as her health began to fail, Sun’s widow, according to The Washington Post’s Michael Weisskopf, was “named China’s honorary head of state and given a dramatic deathbed induction into the
Communist Party.*… Capitalizing on her tremendous popularity, China’s ruling Communist Party… devoted extraordinary attention to her final days.… Leaders… lined up at her bedside. Newspapers extolled her. Medical bulletins were issued every day, a practice not even used when Chairman Mao Tse-tung was dying in 1976.”
Madame Sun was given a state funeral, and the funeral committee wired condolences to her relatives and friends in the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, offering to pay traveling expenses for any of them who wished to attend the services in the Great Hall of the People. Deng Xiao-ping gave the eulogy, in which he said that Madame Sun had harbored “deep concern for the future of Taiwan” and hoped that the two Chinese governments would hold reunification talks in the near future. Among those invited by the Communists was May-ling, who, even if she wanted to go, would not have been allowed to do so by the Taiwanese government.
Ching-ling had apparently asked to see her little sister while she was alive. According to Anna Chennault, Ching-ling had even written a letter that she gave Anna to deliver personally to May-ling. But after reading the letter, May-ling made no effort to contact her sister, merely telling Anna, “I have got the letter.” Ching-ling’s body was cremated, and she was the only one of the Soong offspring in a position to have her ashes taken to Shanghai to be buried in the family plot beside their parents.
A few years later, May-ling received a letter from Chou En-lai’s widow, Teng Ying-chao. Chou himself had died from bladder cancer less than a year after Chiang Kai-shek, and more than a million mourners had gathered to pay homage to him as his body was removed from the hospital. His efforts to mitigate some of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s absence from his memorial had set off a spontaneous demonstration in Tiananmen Square—a protest against Mao’s policies, brutally suppressed by the military. In spite of this, Chou’s widow, Teng, an old revolutionary, had written May-ling a letter urging accommodation—another attempt to bring the Taiwanese back into the Chinese fold.
Teng’s letter was never released for publication, but in February of 1984 the G-mo’s widow composed an “Open Letter” in reply. Printed in Asian Outlook, it gave May-ling an opportunity to hold forth on several of her favorite subjects, all having to do with the cruelty and dishonesty of Communists, both Chinese and Russian. “A few years ago, during the reign of terror of the ‘Gang of Four,’ ” May-ling wrote Teng, “you were put under physical pressure and mental agony that drove you to the brink of suicide.… It is distressing to ponder that even you with your long association in the innermost circle of the Communist Party came to near self-destruction.” Moving on from there, May-ling explained that when her deceased brother-in-law Sun Yat-sen had tried to get help for his fledgling republic, the Russians had responded with “a paltry supply of Czarist vintage rifles, some machine guns and ammunition” and then taken advantage of “Dr. Sun’s generosity of spirit… prevaricating and twisting the truth… [planting] Communist cells in our body politic.” As for Teng herself, May-ling wrote, “the Communist Central Committee is putting you in an embarrassing and awkward position… it is resorting to the old refrain of united front, hoping to use deceit once more to bring about ‘cooperation.’… Surely sanity demands—nay, commands—the recognition that the real China is now in Taiwan.”
BACK ON THE island, Ching-kuo had been named head of the Kuomintang in 1975 and president of the Chinese Republic in 1978. Although one of his first acts after his father’s death had been to commute the sentences of 3,600 inmates, including some 200 political prisoners, his early years in office were known more for economic advances than any significant softening of the harsh laws espoused by his father. According to Lelyveld of The New York Times, writing in 1975 at the time of Chiang’s death, Ching-kuo’s earlier attempts at reform had not yet taken hold. “University teachers say that they have to be wary of informers in their classrooms; the mail of visiting scholars is opened and read. There are political prisoners—estimates run from 1,000 to 2,000—and occasionally stories of people being taken from their homes at night for lengthy, sometimes brutal interrogations under martial-law decrees that have been in force since the Nationalists got here. Elections are still rigged, and the press closely supervised.”
On the economic front, however, Ching-kuo was highly successful in modernizing transportation and industry on the island, giving Taiwan a growth rate of 13 percent, a per capita income of $4,600, and the second largest foreign exchange reserve in the world. According to the Los Angeles Times, “by combining shrewd economic policy with shirtsleeve political tours of the countryside, where he slurps noodles with farmers and dances with aboriginal tribes, C.C.K. [Chiang Ching-kuo] has proved himself a far more popular and effective leader than his father ever was.”
At the end of 1978 President Carter announced that the United States would no longer recognize the ROC as the legitimate government of China, that it would end all official contact with the KMT, and that it would withdraw its troops from Taiwan. Carter’s declaration was so unexpected that the American ambassador had to wake Ching-kuo in the middle of the night to deliver the bad news. Along with the withdrawal of American support, Taiwan’s president was also having problems with his health. He had begun to complain that his feet and legs were bothering him. By 1983, he could barely walk but refused to use a wheelchair. Having had one operation on his eyes in 1982, he was told he needed another, and after this second operation, his health began a steeper decline.
Realizing that he did not have very long to live, Ching-kuo began to prepare Vice President Lee Teng-hui to take over the presidency after his death. Although Wei-kuo’s name came up as a possible successor—he was about to retire from the army—Ching-kuo offered him a couple of ambassadorial posts that would have kept him out of Taiwan. Wei-kuo declined, and they finally settled on secretary-general of the Taiwanese National Security Council, an appointment that gave him as much political clout as Ching-kuo thought he could handle.
In the spring of 1986, Ching-kuo was given a pacemaker to deal with cardiac arrhythmia, but he continued to complain of shortness of breath and began to use a wheelchair in public. With his time to liberalize the government clearly drawing to a close, he appointed a committee of twenty-four people to study three major areas in need of political reform: the end of martial law, the legalization of opposition parties, and the retirement of the ancient members of the assembly who were still hanging on to their mainland constituencies. Although he could have issued emergency edicts to cover these changes, Ching-kuo believed that they must be brought about in a constitutional manner. During a meeting that year with Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, he announced that his government was planning to “propose” the end of martial law on the island. When the task force charged with changing the National Security Act suggested continuing restrictions on freedom of speech, Ching-kuo refused. “That would simply be old wine in new bottles,” he said.
AWARE OF WHAT Ching-kuo’s biographer called “the avalanche of reform that seemed about to tumble down” on the island, and sensing that authoritarianism might still have a chance, May-ling had arrived with an entourage in Taipei toward the end of October 1985. She was eighty-nine, and it was her first trip back to the island in nearly ten years, allegedly undertaken to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek’s birth* on October 31. At this point, the G-mo’s widow still held two positions in the party: chair of the People’s Central Advisory Commission and head of a special women’s group. “She is well respected by the populace in general,” said the secretary-general of the party, a close associate of Ching-kuo.
To honor the day, Chiang Kai-shek’s widow visited his tomb and delivered a speech, explaining that although she now lived outside the country, she kept up with advancements on the island and hoped that the principles for which the Kuomintang stood would “shine over the mainland once again.” In a written message released for the occasion, she blamed her physical condition for her long abse
nce. “Incapacitated as I am by a fracture of the femur [upper leg bone], I have just now returned to be with my countrymen and family members to witness the progress and prosperity of Taiwan.” It was noticed that although she sat through the proceedings in a wheelchair, she was able to stand at the podium to deliver her speech with no help.
Many Taiwanese understood that Madame’s visit was an attempt to support the ultraconservative elements in the KMT, and they were not surprised when she sidestepped all questions about her plans to return to the States and moved into the old presidential residence in suburban Taipei, entertaining officials from the government, the party, and the military. When Ching-kuo asked her to issue a statement supporting his political reforms, she said, “I am fully cognizant of a prolepsis* of malicious misreading of my thought given to you here”—a statement that even stumped the erudite editors of The Economist magazine, who commented that Madame Chiang’s “language was so arcane that it baffled interpretation.” This was followed by a speech given at a banquet of the American University Club and the American Chamber of Commerce entitled “And Shall It Be See Ye to It?” Using such words as “catenae” (connected series), “timeous” (early), “moloch” (an object of sacrifice), and “corban” (an offering to God), Madame railed at the ethics of the press, which she continued to accuse of underplaying the dangers of communism.
Once May-ling started writing, she seemed unable to stop, moving on in an article entitled “Modern China” to what she termed a “multi-layered” portrait of the United States. She defined what was good in America as the “Jeffersonian conception of democracy,” which had succeeded in producing a nation whose citizens take political freedom as “their inherent right,” and what was evil as America’s “recognition of the Red Regime in mainland China.” This led to enconiums for Eisenhower and Dulles and the information that “As I always pay attention to important publications, I get… volumes of documents of the U.S. State Department right after they are published.” She lauded her husband’s defense of Quemoy and Matsu and a secret wire from Eisenhower to Churchill warning him against trying to compel Chiang to give up the islands. She criticized the Japanese for not issuing an apology for their barbarity in World War II and advised them that their children would be better off knowing the truth. On and on she wrote, inserting the names of everyone from Karl Marx to former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and ending with a quote from William James: “The enemy of a state is not external, but comes from inside.” This article, like most of her previous writings, was written to impress; unlike them, it lacked form and discipline. Explaining that these memories and pronouncements were like the pictures of a revolving kaleidoscope flashing through her mind, she jumped from theme to theme, unreliable assumption to ill-considered conclusion.
The Last Empress Page 85
