The observer has to feel somewhat sorry for Madame Chiang at this point in her life. Not only had she grown old and superfluous, but she had suddenly come face-to-face with demonstrations on her home territory against her husband’s legacy. She must have been appalled by electoral campaign banners reading “Oppose the Chiang Family” and “Oppose All Tyranny,” to say nothing of cartoons of her stepson in the guise of a pig and written references labeling him “Piggy.” The election of 1986, labeled by Taylor “the end of the imperial presidency on Taiwan,” featured a bomb thrown into the courtyard of Kuomintang headquarters and a public burning of the KMT flag. Although Ching-kuo was urged to retaliate to these events by arresting key members of the new Democratic Progressive Party, which demanded self-determination for the Taiwanese, he simply ordered the release from jail of thirteen more political prisoners.*
As if this open rejection of everything she had fought for were not enough, May-ling’s friend Emma Mills died while she was in Taiwan. Emma had broken her hip in 1984 in her apartment and had been unable to call for help. By the time her neighbors began to worry about her, it was too late. Suffering from days of dehydration resulting in severe senility, she was confined in a nursing home. May-ling had gone to Connecticut to see her before leaving for Taiwan, but Emma had been unresponsive.
Madame’s stepson was also in bad physical condition. Nearly blind in his left eye and with very limited vision in his right, Ching-kuo tried to speed up reforms in the three areas he had targeted earlier. By the end of 1987, the Legislative Yuan had passed a new National Security Law: it lifted the emergency martial law that Chiang Kai-shek had put into effect nearly a half century before, and designated January 1, 1988, as the day for submitting applications to register new political parties. But, according to Taylor, “of all the changes on Taiwan itself that year, the most dramatic was the opening of legal travel to the mainland”—the removal of a thirty-eight-year-old ban that allowed tens of thousands of Taiwan’s residents to apply for permits to visit their relatives.
The G-mo’s widow gave Christmas Eve dinner for the family that year for the first time in more than a decade. During the evening Ching-kuo told a doctor friend that he was not feeling well. But the next day when the doctor called with a date for Ching-kuo’s admission to the hospital, the president put off the appointment in order to appear at the December 25 Constitution Day Ceremony. Since the government had moved to Taiwan, it had become traditional for the president to deliver a major policy speech to the National Assembly at this event, although Chiang Kai-shek had not been able to make an appearance during the two years preceding his death. Ching-kuo was wheeled onstage, but someone else had to read the remarks he had prepared for the occasion. Undeterred by the poignancy of the situation, members of the Democratic Progressive Party in the audience waved placards calling for new parliamentary elections, while outside the hall hundreds of citizens chanted slogans demanding democracy.
On January 12, 1988, in the last of Ching-kuo’s previously targeted reforms, the old men representing mainland constituencies were finally retired from parliament. But that morning Ching-kuo complained about not feeling well, and early in the afternoon he had a severe hemorrhage, went into shock, and died. Observing the usual outward forms, the Chinese Communist Party sent a wire of “deepest condolences” and “sincerest sympathy,” declaring itself “shocked to learn that Kuomintang chairman Chiang Ching-kuo has passed away.”
The following day, a group of four leaders of the KMT named Taiwanese Vice President Lee Teng-hui interim head of both the party and the government in spite of a letter objecting to the choice from Madame Chiang. “For Mei-ling and the Chiang Kai-shek old guard, the notion that a native Taiwanese would become both president and leader of the Party seemed the death-knell of the KMT’s historic role,” Taylor explained. According to the papers, Premier Yu and his assistants stayed up all night trying to figure out how to say that they could not comply with Madame’s wishes without causing her to lose face. Two days later, Yu received a 3:00 A.M. phone call from one of Ching-kuo’s sons, reiterating his stepmother’s objection to the appointment. Nevertheless, on January 27, the Standing Committee voted unanimously to appoint Lee.
On January 29, 1988, Ching-kuo was buried in a “temporary resting place” near his father, awaiting the day when their remains could be sent to the mainland. Although May-ling remained in Taiwan, she rarely appeared in public after her failed attempts to reroute the Taiwanese government. Two weeks after Ching-kuo’s death, the Young Marshal, now age ninety, was finally released from house arrest; he eventually moved to Hawaii and died at the age of one hundred.
WHILE ON THE island, Madame received another visitor: the great opera star Beverly Sills. Ms. Sills had been approached by Ching-kuo’s daughter-in-law Nancy, who had asked her to bring the opera—singers, musicians, stage-hands, and all—to Taiwan for the opening of their Performing Arts Center. Asked if she would like to meet Madame Chiang while she was there, Ms. Sills said that of course she would but assumed from the fact that Madame was eighty-nine, ailing, and seldom saw outsiders, she never would. Nevertheless, while she was helping the opera crew unload equipment on the docks, Ms. Sills’s translator came over and told her that “Madame Chiang Kai-shek is prepared to receive you.” Since she had dressed for the work in old slacks and sweater with a scarf on her head, Sills responded that she would like very much to go but had to go back to her hotel and change her clothes. “No, I don’t think so,” the interpreter replied.
“I got into a Cadillac limousine with a driver,” Sills said, “and my sergeant major [the military man assigned to her while she was on the island], who sat up front, and my translator. We drove about twenty minutes and came to a huge enclosure; it looked like a steel wall and was covered with a jungle [of foliage]. I was taken out of this limousine and put into another one. Electric gates opened. We drove through the electric gates, which closed, drove another five minutes, and I was taken out of this limousine, put into another one, and finally brought up to a house which was so covered by leaves and foliage that I couldn’t tell the size of it. But the doors were huge. Everybody was very polite, although nobody spoke English. When I asked the translator what was going on, she said, “When it’s important, I’ll start to translate.”
Ushered into a room, Sills was “impressed by two things. Virtually everything in the entire room was done in lavender jade; every piece of jade in the room was lavender.… I also had the strange feeling that I was being watched… that they [the watchers] were behind the paintings on the walls. Finally a general or a colonel or some man with lots of decorations and a uniform took me down a long corridor. Sliding panels opened, and I was taken into a room that had to be a hundred feet long. It had all Chinese furniture, lots of books on one wall, and a huge fireplace—it was warm, but the fire was roaring—and in front of it sat the most exquisite creature I had ever seen. She was dressed top to bottom in black with a huge pearl [on her hand]. I couldn’t take my eyes off her… she was less than five feet tall and was seated on one of those high chairs like the ones they use in doctors’ offices. She had a cane and very white makeup. She had tiny hands, and the reason I noticed the pearl is because it was like a football on her. She was beautifully made up, she spoke wonderful English. I didn’t notice any accent at all.… There was a tea set in front of her with a silver teapot with three-dimensional silver butterflies and little silver ferns all over it. ‘I am so pleased you could come,’ Madame Chiang said. ‘Would you like some tea?’ ” There was a woman standing next to her who poured. When Sills commented on the teapot, Madame answered, “You should see the treasures that are still in China.”
They discussed Ms. Sills’s book Bubbles, and the Madame offered to show Sills her paintings. They got into a little cage elevator and went up to the library. “There were four watercolors on this wall, and she said to me, ‘I painted these for the general.’ I said, ‘They’re lovely’ and asked what they represented, and she said
, ‘They are the four seasons.’ ” When Sills asked what the Chinese characters said, Madame replied, “ ‘Remember they were for the general,’ then answered, ‘I divided them up, and they say, ‘Without you there would be no seasons.’ At which point I said, ‘They’re lovely, and I think I have tired you out.’ She answered, ‘I’ve enjoyed it so much, and will you sign your book?’ “ Sills’s book was on the table with a pen. “God knows what I wrote,” said Sills. “I was so flustered. I was standing there in those dirty black pants. [She had taken off the scarf.] I didn’t know if I should shake her hand, I really didn’t know what the protocol was, so I looked at her and said, ‘It has been such a great honor,’ and she said ‘You must never tell anybody about this visit. It must not be in the newspapers,’ and I said, ‘I would never do that.’ Then I asked, ‘May I shake your hand?’ and she said, ‘Please do,’ and I shook this teeny, tiny hand and went out. The general was waiting at the bottom of the elevator. We got into the limo, and we only changed once… and I’ve never talked about it before, this little weird moment in time.”
Nor, so far as we know, did Madame Chiang, who stayed in Taiwan until the fall of 1991, attending the Thirteenth Party Congress of the KMT in 1988. According to Susan Chira of The New York Times, “the former President’s widow and symbol of the party’s past emerged from seclusion to praise the party’s ‘glorious history’ and recount her memories of the first national congress in 1924.” She “sat straight in her chair as a party official read her speech” and “left to a standing ovation, waving a white handkerchief” at the 1,200 delegates. At the congress, John Chiang, one of Ching-kuo’s illegitimate twin sons, was elected to the post of deputy foreign minister.
Before leaving the island, Madame had her personal physician flown in from the States to remove an ovarian tumor, but she herself refused to leave, saying that she did not want to travel in a wheelchair and that she could not get the government to give her a private plane or her traveling expenses. She was still there to comment on the killings in Tiananmen Square of 1989, issuing a statement condemning “the bloody and satanic carnage of innocent human lives” and attacking the “dastardly communist poltroons” responsible for it at a ceremony in which she was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by Boston University.
By the time Madame Chiang decided to return to the States, the political trend in Taiwan had turned against her, so much so that there were demonstrations outside her residence. When she and her entourage finally flew back to New York in September of 1991, she was ninety-four years old. According to reports of the day, she left with more than ninety suitcases and boxes filled with books, clothes, paintings, delicate wood furniture, and antiques.
May-ling returned to the island only one more time, in 1994, to visit her niece Jeanette Kung, who was dying of cancer. She stayed for three or four days, and a week or so later, Jeanette died.
The next Taiwanese election (in 2000) was a three-way race among Lien Chan, an immensely rich member of the KMT; Chen Shui-bian, a former mayor of Taipei, from the Democratic Progressive Party; and James Soong, an independent. Getting back at Soong for criticizing her during her 1988 attempt to influence the political situation, Madame took the unprecedented step of calling a press conference in New York and releasing a statement supporting Lien Chan in the election.* According to The Christian Science Monitor, the generalissimo’s widow still had “a small but fiercely loyal group of followers,” and her “endorsement could sway many party members who have defected to support Soong.” But ending a half century in office, the Kuomintang lost the election, finishing a distant third to Chen Shui-bian of the DPP and the independent candidate, Soong. Ten days later, Madame Chiang turned 103 in her New York apartment, to which she had retreated a decade earlier, old and infirm but apparently still unwilling to allow the political life of Taiwan to go on without her.
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She is considered a historic figure but no longer a saint.
–TENG TIEN-TSE, SPOKESMAN FOR THE TAIPEI CITY GOVERNMENT, 1997
ALTHOUGH SHE kept the outward appearance of remaining in control, the problems of old age affected May-ling in the same ways they affect every other old woman. While still in Taipei, her servants noticed that she had begun to have difficulty putting on makeup. As one attendant put it:
Most of the time she applied her eyebrow darkener and lipstick higher or lower than where it belonged. Her foundation would be thick on one side and thin on the other. If she stayed home, we would turn a blind eye to these flaws. When she had an appointment, guests, or a party, she would always ask us, ‘Is my makeup okay?’ and we would deal with what was wrong. For grand parties, we did her makeup ourselves.… When she was seeing close relations, she rarely put on makeup, although she wore it when Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Wei-kuo, or her grandchildren visited. Her skin remained in good condition, her cheekbones were high, and there were no freckles on her face. Fashion-wise, she was out-of date, as she spent most of her time in the residence. She knew this and always asked Mrs. Xiao [a friend of Jeanette Kung] or Madame Chiang Wei-kuo about what was in vogue.
In her nineties May-ling suffered from the typical arthritis of old age and was hard of hearing. But in the summer of 1995, when she was ninety-eight, she traveled to Washington, where, on a steamy July 26, she was the guest of honor at a reception held in the Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building, hosted by Senators Paul Simon, son of Chinese missionaries, and Robert Dole. The walls had been decorated for the occasion with photographs of Madame taken with Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and other leaders of her era. Waiters offered champagne to three hundred guests, among whom were Senators Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Alan Simpson; Caspar Weinberger and Tricia Nixon Cox were also there, along with a few veterans of the Flying Tigers. According to Francis X. Clines, writing in The New York Times, the reception had “a Norma Desmond aura of expectation about it, a celebrity from a silent era.” Dressed in a red-and-black patterned silk cheongsam, jade earrings, and a shawl, the honoree was seated in a special chair behind a cordon of red velvet rope to give her two-minute speech. Explaining that she was in Washington to attend celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, she stated in a quiet but firm voice that China had been forced to defend itself “unaided and alone” from 1937 until 1941 but followed this up by thanking the American people from the bottom of her heart for the spiritual support and material aid after Pearl Harbor. It was noted that the G-mo’s widow “came into the reception on her own two feet,” although she was helped by a young member of her family. “She was alert and she was bright,” commented Simpson. “She was clicking on all cylinders.”
Senator Simon, speaking before the event, had attempted to overcome the inevitable objections: “We’re trying to low-key the political side of this, so far with some success.… I’m not trying to rewrite history.… She is the only major figure left from World War II.” Still, it was noted that there were no officials of the Clinton administration present, since the U.S. government was in the process of trying to convince Beijing that the United States recognized only one China. According to a spokesman for Senator Dole, the event should not be taken as a statement of American policy toward China and/or Taiwan, and in a television interview, Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord* said that former President Bush and even President Reagan had not favored diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Everyone was nervous because of the uproar raised by Beijing when President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan had visited the United States during the previous month. But the reception proceeded without incident with several hundred Chinese standing outside waving the flag of the Republic of China and flowers sent by the president and premier of Taiwan on prominent display at the entrance to the Caucus Room. “Big-footed security personnel stood behind her, dour Taiwanese gentlemen with wires coming from their ears,” said one reporter, adding that when Madame was ready, they were given a signal to escort her from the room. “The procession moved alo
ng in an ungainly way, and as the old dowager left the room she kept cocking her head back toward the crowd, giving everyone the same brittle smile, waving her last goodbyes again and again.”
The following year Madame Chiang made another public appearance, this time at the preview of an exhibit of Chinese art treasures titled “Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei.” The exhibit, which was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, included some 450 pieces of art, all of which Madame Chiang managed to see during her visit. Although she toured the premises mostly by wheelchair, she did get up to walk around two of the galleries and was reported gazing “intently” at two items, one of which was a portrait of the first emperor of the Sung Dynasty (the dynasty from which Charlie Soong had taken his name) from the tenth century. At one point she turned to the photographers, who apparently found her far more interesting than the exhibition, informing them that she was “going to break your cameras.”
The Last Empress Page 86
