A Singular Woman

Her

temperament and the times were well matched. It was 1942: Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Republic of China was struggling to resist the invading forces of imperial Japan. Soong Mei-ling, then 45 and the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, happened to be in the U.S. for medical reasons. Seizing the opportunity to champion her country's cause, she summoned all her energy and flashing-eyed eloquence to the task of urging the U.S. to side with her embattled land. For seven months, Madame Chiang, as she was best known in the West, seemed to be everywhere: speaking at Madison Square Garden, traveling to San Francisco, talking on the radio. In an address to Congress, she was what one commentator called "the personification of free China." Slim and graceful, clad in a black cheongsam, she wooed, wowed and chastised her spellbound listeners with a blend of compliments, barbs and pungent assertions. "We in China are convinced that it is the better half of wisdom not to accept failure ignominiously but to risk it gloriously," she said. After she sat down, a Congressman confessed, "I never saw anything like it. Madame Chiang had me on the verge of bursting into tears." At the age of 106, Soong Mei-ling died last week in New York City.

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A charmed, glamorous destiny seemed to await Mei-ling from the moment she was born into a remarkable family. (Her sister Soong Ching-ling would marry Sun Yat-sen, modern China's founder.) Their father, C.V. "Charlie" Soong, who had been virtually adopted by a group of kindly Methodist evangelists in North Carolina, returned to China intending to be a missionary but instead became an entrepreneur. Mei-ling, at the age of 11, entered high school in Macon, Georgia. Nine years later, she returned home armed with a degree in English literature from Wellesley College, the vestiges of a Southern drawl and so little Chinese that she had to be re-educated in her native tongue by a tutor. ("The only thing Oriental about me," she once wrote, "is my face.") In the early 1920s, she was a flower of Shanghai's intellectual community when she caught the eye of Chiang Kai-shek. He was then chairman of the Supreme National Defense Council. Neither minded that he already had a childhood bride and a son tucked away in the provinces. In 1927, Mei-ling and Chiang were married in Shanghai by a YMCA functionary, and in the years that followed, Madame Chiang became her husband's interpreter, confidante and chief propagandist. Not only did she try to save his soul (by converting him from paganism to Christianity), she also helped save his life. In 1936, on an inspection tour in Xi'an, Chiang was detained by troops of disaffected warlord Zhang Xueliang. Mei-ling flew to the rescue and challenged Zhang so eloquently that he released his captive and agreed to return to Nanjing as a prisoner of the Chiangs. Mei-ling then devoted her energies to tidying up her disheveled country.

In 1934, she joined her husband in launching their most famed drive: the New Life Movement, which directed the Chinese to be dutiful, disciplined, loyal and clean. Toward the grander end of curbing the spread of communism, men were told not to wipe their noses in public, soldiers not to spit, pedestrians not to urinate in the street. Everyone was required to forswear opium.

Fame in America came to Mei-ling in a more serendipitous fashion. In late 1942, a painful skin disease brought her to a New York hospital. Upon her release, she was invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, to stay at the White House for a week. Yet even as his guest was enthralling his nation, Roosevelt was wary of Mei-ling's formidable charm. One night at dinner, the President asked in passing how she would deal with a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Without missing a beat, Madame Chiang passed her hand across her throat. Eleanor Roosevelt later said: "Those delicate, little petal-like fingers—you could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung."

At home, Mei-ling preserved the same balance, sometimes scrambling over the ruins of heavily bombed Chongqing—China's wartime capital—to tend the wounded, sometimes burnishing Chiang's image with her social poise. It was Mei-ling's great and abiding gift to remain equally at home with the silvery pleasantries of the social world and with the adamantine realities of the political. That powerful combination, fired by an implacable distrust of communism, enabled her to remain a central figure in Chiang's government even after the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan when the Communists triumphed in 1949. Upon the 1975 death of her husband, who in 1978 was succeeded as President by her stepson Chiang Ching-kuo, Mei-ling returned to the U.S. She twice served as Taiwan's unofficial spokeswoman in rebuffing China's reunification overtures and spent her final years in a Manhattan apartment at Gracie Square. It seems only right that she died in the land where she had enjoyed her greatest moments and won her most fervent admirers.