The Soong Sisters
There is a saying about them that every Chinese schoolchild used to know: of the three Soong sisters, one loved money, one loved power, and one loved China. Like most famous sayings it is too neat, and like most famous sayings it survives because it is not wrong. Soong Ai-ling married H.H. Kung, a banker descended from Confucius who became the richest man in China and, for a while, its premier. Soong Mei-ling married Chiang Kai-shek and became the most famous woman in Asia, the First Lady who addressed the United States Congress and sat at Cairo with Roosevelt and Churchill. Soong Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese republic, and ended her days as the honorary President of the People’s Republic, the only one of the family who stayed. Between 1889 and 2003 the three sisters lived through, and personally embodied, nearly every turn of China’s modern century, and their father, a boy who had run away from a village on the island of Hainan with nothing, set it all in motion. Their story is the hinge between two worlds: between Qing China and the republics, between East and West, and between the China that America imagined and the America that China imagined back.
The runaway from Hainan
The patriarch was born Han Jiaozhun in 1861, in Wenchang county on Hainan, the island off China’s southern coast that the empire used as a place of exile and its people used as a point of departure. The Hainanese were sailors and migrants, and the boy went the way of Hainanese boys: to sea, to Southeast Asia, and then, in 1879, to Boston, to work in the tea and silk shop of an uncle. He lasted a year. In Boston the shop was a meeting place for the young Chinese students of the Educational Mission, and listening to them talk about colleges and examinations of a Western kind, the boy decided he wanted an education. His uncle refused. So he ran: he slipped aboard a United States revenue cutter, the Albert Gallatin, was discovered, and, in one of those small acts of decency on which history turns, the cutter’s captain, Eric Gabrielson, a Norwegian-born officer of the old school, took a liking to the stowaway and put him to work rather than putting him ashore. In 1880, in Wilmington, North Carolina, the boy was baptized a Methodist, taking the name Charles Jones Soong, and the local church, enchanted by the prospect of sending the gospel to China in the person of a Chinese, sent him to college: to Trinity College in North Carolina, the future Duke University, whose first foreign student he was, and then to Vanderbilt. In 1886 Soong returned to Shanghai as a missionary, discovered he was a poor preacher and a magnificent businessman, built a fortune printing Bibles and revolutionary pamphlets, sometimes on the same press, married Ni Kwei-tseng, a descendant of the Ming dynasty’s great Christian scholar-official Xu Guangqi, and set about raising six children in a big house in the French Concession on a simple, radical plan: every one of them, daughters included, would be educated in America.
That decision, in the China of the 1890s, when most girls of good family still had their feet bound, was the family’s founding act. Charlie Soong also had a side business: he was the financier and publisher of a young revolutionary named Sun Yat-sen, whose cause he bankrolled and whose pamphlets he printed, and in whose name his daughters would each, in turn, take a hand in the remaking of China.
Ai-ling and the art of the deal
The eldest, Ai-ling, arrived at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in 1904, a fifteen-year-old in silk, and became the first Chinese woman to take a degree there. She was formidable from the start: quick, proud, and already possessed of the family gift for seeing exactly where advantage lay. Back in Shanghai she became secretary to Sun Yat-sen, then in his years of exile and failure, and in 1914 she married, with her father’s blessing, a man who seemed to incarnate continuity and change at once: Kung Hsiang-hsi, H.H. Kung, a Shanxi banker who claimed descent from Confucius in the seventy-fifth generation, a Christian convert and Yale graduate, who would serve the Nationalist government as minister of finance and premier. Ai-ling’s reputation, carefully cultivated and probably exaggerated, was of the family’s brains and its bank vault: the sister who understood money as the raw material of power, traded on it through every crisis, and moved the family’s fortunes offshore with a timing that later generations of historians have found clairvoyant. When the end came in 1949 she was already in America. She died in New York in 1973, rich to the last, the sister about whom the hard questions cluster, of how much the Kungs took and when, but it was Ai-ling who had understood earliest that in the new China, capital, like everything else, would need to be portable.
Ching-ling and the revolution
The second sister, Ching-ling, followed her to Wesleyan, and then followed her into Sun Yat-sen’s office as his English secretary, and then, in 1915, committed the family scandal: she married him. Sun was forty-eight to her twenty-two, a married man who put aside his first wife, and Charlie Soong’s oldest comrade and debtor. Her father raged, pursued the couple to Japan, and was not reconciled; the marriage made an enduring breach, and it made Ching-ling. For ten years she was the revolution’s first lady in its years of defeat and exile, and when Sun died in 1925 she inherited his mantle deliberately and wore it for the rest of her very long life. The mantle was contested. When Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in 1927 and founded the Nanjing government, Ching-ling denounced her brother-in-law’s regime as a betrayal of her husband’s revolution and went into exile in Moscow and Berlin, becoming, for two decades, the most prestigious dissident in China: the widow of the founder, kept in her widowhood like a reproach. During the war she ran relief work and kept open a line to the communists; when they won in 1949 she stayed, and the new republic embraced her as its living link to Sun. She served it in high ceremonial office for thirty years, and in May 1981, dying, she was admitted to the Communist Party and named honorary President of the People’s Republic, an office created for her alone and abolished with her death days later. Of the three sisters she is the one the mainland claims, and her house in Shanghai and her tomb in the Soong family plot’s new Beijing counterpart remain shrines of a particular kind: the revolution’s aristocrat, serene, stubborn, and never once in half a century persuaded to say what her sisters’ side of the family wanted her to say.
Mei-ling and the world’s stage
The youngest, Mei-ling, was the most American of the three. She spent a decade in the United States from childhood, graduated from Wellesley in 1917, and liked to say that the only thing Chinese about her was her face. On 1 December 1927, in Shanghai, she married Chiang Kai-shek in a double ceremony, private and Methodist, public and lavish, that was the society wedding of the decade and a political fact of the first order: it allied the new military strongman of the Nationalist revolution with the Soong name, the Soong money, the Soong connection to Sun Yat-sen’s legacy, and, not least, with America, whose language Mei-ling spoke better than any Chinese of her generation. As First Lady she was not an ornament. She ran the New Life Movement’s campaigns with her husband; she took personal charge of China’s infant air force and hired Claire Chennault to build it; she edited, cabled, scolded and negotiated. And in 1943, at the lowest ebb of China’s lonely war, she made the tour that remains the high-water mark of Chinese public diplomacy: three months in America, a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first Chinese and only the second woman ever to address it, delivered in flawless unaccented English; a rally of thirty thousand at the Hollywood Bowl; a progress across the country that raised millions and melted, for a season, the American heart. Later that year she stood beside her husband at Cairo, interpreting between Chiang, Roosevelt and Churchill at the summit that promised the return of Taiwan. The same year, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. No one person causes such things, but it is hard to imagine them in 1943 without her.
Her legend curdled, as legends do. In wartime Chongqing the glamour grated; Washington tired of the lectures; the marriage’s bargains showed. After 1949 she was First Lady of Taiwan, a smaller stage, and after Chiang’s death in 1975 she withdrew to New York, outliving her century, her causes, and nearly everyone she had ever negotiated with. She died in Manhattan in 2003 at the age of 105. Ai-ling had died in 1973, Ching-ling in 1981. Of the three, none left children who carried the public name; the dynasty of the Soongs was a single generation, and closed with them.
Three sisters, three Chinas
What makes the sisters more than a dynastic curiosity is how precisely their lives map the century’s possibilities. Each took one of the roads that China itself was offered. Ai-ling took the road of capital: the treaty-port world of banks, firms and portability, which served the republic and survived its fall. Ching-ling took the road of revolution: the conviction that China’s wound was justice, and that her husband’s unfinished work led, in the end, to Yan’an and the rostrum of 1949. Mei-ling took the road of power: the state, the army, the alliance with America, the government that fought the war and lost the mainland and kept a province. They quarrelled, reconciled, and quarrelled again; the most moving photographs of the war years are of the three of them together in Hong Kong and Chongqing in 1940 and 1941, when the sisters briefly presented a single face to a bombing world, before the old alignments closed over them again. One family, three marriages, three Chinas, and a rivalry outlasting all their husbands.
And the quietest revolutionary in the story remains the father. Charlie Soong’s rebellion was not armed; it was educational and domestic. A Hainan runaway who had been given a chance by strangers decided that his daughters would be educated like sons, in English, in America, as Christians, and then simply let them become what they became, across three irreconcilable causes. It is hard to think of another family in which a single decision, send the girls to college, did so much. The sisters were not the century’s only remarkable Chinese women, but they were its most visible proof that the old world’s estimate of what women could do had been, like so many of the old world’s estimates, a failure of imagination. One loved money, one loved power, one loved China, says the rhyme. What all three loved, and what their father had bought for them with a berth on a revenue cutter in 1879, was the right to choose.
