Chiang May-ling Soong - The Soong Sisters

EMILY HAHN

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Emily Hahn

Apology

Attempt was made at the beginning of this books writing to follow the Wade system of spelling for Chinese names, but when upon completion of the work the author submitted it to several savants in succession, requesting them to correct her Wade, the most dire results obtained. Each expert leaped at the chance; each expert disagreed violently with everything that had been decided by someone else, and at the end the spelling was in a worse muddle than ever. The writer has done her best but knows it is not good enough, and meekly bends her head before the inevitable storm.

Acknowledgment

This book should be dedicated to the Japanese, since without their aid and assistance it would never have been written or would have been done better, which is as good an excuse as any for a dedication. Twice the notes and several chapters were lost when my room was bombed, and the working manuscript was carried into and out of dugouts so often that it became indecipherable. Early photographs of the Soong sisters and of the rest of the family are scarce because of the fact that the Kung ancestral home in Shansi, where many of these mementoes were stored, has been looted by Japanese soldiers. The Soong house in Shanghai, also because of the Japanese, cannot be used as a source of material.

Thanks are due Zau Sinmay for searching out and translating for me the Chinese sources I have used, and to Mr P. C. Kuo (Kuo Ping-chia) for correcting many of my mistakes in historical fact and for finding such necessaries as paper and typewriter ribbon in Chungking when these commodities were scarcer even than peace and quiet. Thanks are due Miss Corin Bernfeld for her constant attention to this work in progress: between air raids, huddled over a charcoal burner, she read it assiduously, criticized it severely, and kept me at work. Thanks are due Mrs Tilman Durdin and Mrs Jack Young, who typed the script and sent it back to me across country by sampan, pony, sedan chair or coolie. Thanks are due the Press Hostel for lending me what books they still had. Thanks are due my very good friends, the Reverend and Mrs J. G. Endicott, who let me use their house and children for relaxation, their attic for work, and their long experience in China for purposes of argument and inspiration.

I wish to thank Dr Richard L. Pearse of Durham for the valuable material he collected for me in America. I thank Billie Lee of Tien Hsia for all the help she gave me in Hongkong. I owe very much to Mr Randall Gould of the Shanghai Evening Post, from whose writings I have not only borrowed but taken outright, and from whose time I extracted large amounts whenever I wanted something looked up at long distance.

Thanks are due especially to Messrs Edward Gammell and A. Gidley Baird of the Asiatic Petroleum Company. When every available living place in Chungking had been bombed, they took in myself as well as a large number of other refugees, and in the safety zone of the South Bank the book was at last completed, in full view of the burning, shattered, unconquered city. The kindness of Messrs Gammell and Baird, who put themselves at great inconvenience for many months, almost caused me to remove whatever adverse comments I have made anent western imperialism in the Far East. Almost, but not quite.

E. H.

Hongkong, October 30, 1940.

The author and the publishers are indebted to the following for permission to include quotations from their work:

Harper & Brothers, for two quotations from This Is Our China, by Mme Chiang Kai-shek.

Henriette Herz, for a quotation from an article by Edgar Snow.

Fulton Oursler, for a quotation from his interview with Mme Chiang Kai-shek, reprinted from Liberty Magazine.

Penguin Books, Inc., for a quotation from China Struggles for Unity, by John Martin Douglas Pringle and Marthe Rajchman.

The Nation, for an extract from Madame Sun Keeps Faith, by Randall Gould.

Current History and Forum for a quotation from China Unconquerable, by Mme Sun Yat-sen, and for a quotation from an article by Mme Chiang Kai-shek.

Carol Hill, for an extract from Personal History, by Vincent Sheean, published by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.

Introduction

The Soong sisters early accepted the simplest American fashion of spelling their names Eling, Chingling and Mayling. Strict sinologues, according to the complicated Wade system (which has borrowed rules from most of the dead and living languages of the world), spell the same names Ai-ling, Ching-ling and Mei-ling. There are various ways of translating the syllables; it is an interesting subject and worth a little attention here.

Family or clan names in China, although they are simple characters, i.e., Chinese words, are a little specialized by virtue of the fact that they have been used as appellations for a long time. Thus, although a man may be Mr Chang, those who know him or read his name in the paper will not automatically think of him as Mr Open any more than we conceive a mental picture of a blacksmith working at his forge as soon as we hear the name of Smith. To us Mr Smith is simply Mr Smith, and he is nothing more. But the personal Christian name of a Chinese, usually made up of two Chinese words, is not quite so ordinary; each man has a name especially composed of some significant combination, selected at will by his people. Whether he retains the label chosen by his parents or uses another of his own choice Chinese are much more in the habit of changing their names than we are the syllables are picked out with an eye to the meaning of the words. A popular girls name, for example, is Pei-yu, which means Hanging Jade. Now we Occidentals are not accustomed to this fashion of nomenclature, and when we first hear such a name translated into our own language we are pleasurably impressed. Even when we become used to it, we still feel a little thrill at using the pretty phrase; such a name enhances the owners attraction in our ears. Just so might a Chinese or a Japanese be pleased to know that Theodora means Gift of God: once he knows this he will probably think Gift of God subconsciously whenever he pronounces the name Theodora. The word will mean more to him, actually, than it does to us, for we have long since ceased to appreciate the syllables as anything more than a convenient name for a certain girl. On his own side he is so used to names like Hanging Jade and Plum Blossom Under the Moon that they have lost their significance for him even though they have been composed originally with an eye to esthetic effect.