Foreign News: Wise Wives

• Share

While the strong men of China welter in anarchy (see above), and her great diplomats flounder be wildered (see below), are there not any cool-browed, wise Chinese wives who keep their own council but contrive to be more important than they seem — perhaps most important? There are many such. But only two wise wives loom from China today upon the international scene. Of these two, one is, strictly speaking, a widow. Both learned the wiles of men and nations in the U. S.

Mrs. V. K. Wellington Koo. It is unfashionable never to have met Pao-yu Tang (not long since diplomat's lady at Washington and London) moving always among the great and in the international world of fashion, now resident in Peking with Foreign Minister Dr. Welling ton Koo, whom she has groomed with her wealth and wit into China's most famed diplomat.

When her father, famed States man Tang Shao-yi, sent her to college in the U. S. she naturally chose Barnard. There, in Manhattan, the vastly rich young girl could both study and taste very nearly all the U. S. has to offer—except "scenery." (She traveled during vacations. She saw.) At an age when Smith and Wellesley girls are translucent she was as opaque and baffling to a diplomat as to a dowager.

Said a Portraitist Leonebel Jacobs: "Small . . . poised ... sophisticated . . . cosmopolitan . . . elusive." Men were speechless at first, then snared. She saw Koo. Her father saw his father. She married him. He came to Washington as Minister. Her money paid 26 servants, paid for gowns, motors, took the Koos on to the Court of St. James's, bought a private palace in London, furnished a smart apartment few knew about, left Mrs. Koo free to get whatever else she wanted in her own illogical compelling fashion.

Today, in Peking at the semibarbaric court of the great Manchurian War Lord Chang Tso-lin, Mrs. Wellington Koo is par excellence the cosmopolitan aristocrat of feminine China.

Mrs. Sun Yat Sen. There was another little Chinese girl, and she went to Wesleyan College—amid the scenery of Macon, Ga. Chung-ling Soong was her name, and her two sisters were with her. They sometimes almost romped.

Although interested in medicine, she would not allow a male doctor to attend her. When her graduating gown was delayed, and a tactless youth offered to lend her his, she almost fainted. "What? Lady graduate in man's gown?" she said, and went back to China a devout Christian.

The "Class Prophet" wrote that she would "become the great medical expert of China, and found the Chung Polyclinic. . . ." She herself confided to the class book as follows: "Highest ambition; to be my father's secretary; favorite expression : China; hobby: getting letters; favorite occupation: reading newspapers. . . ."

Curiously enough, the exemplary, mouselike little Chung-ling Soong turned out to have been getting letters and reading newspapers to some purpose. Her serious, fragile nature (and perhaps the fact that she never uses paint or powder) brought her the love of that high-souled patriotic statesman, the late Dr. Sun Yatsen, "Father of the Chinese Republic."