The Herald - The Herald Magazine
‘Corruption and deception were their hallmarks’
A new biography of the wealthy Soong sisters also examines the tortured post-imperial history of China
BIG SISTER, LITTLE SISTER, RED SISTER: THREE WOMEN AT THE HEART OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA Jung Chang Jonathan Cape, £25
IN the late 1980s, I taught English for a while in China and then Taiwan, where I first heard of the Soong sisters. Soong May-ling, the youngest of the three sisters, married Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic of China from 1928 until his death in 1975. By then, she was a sort of dowager empress in-exile, living in New York.
The American writer Sterling Seagrave had published a book called The Soong Dynasty, which lifted the lid on her family. It was banned in Taiwan, and my Taiwanese friend Grace asked me to smuggle her in a copy from Hong Kong. This I did. Grace received the book as a captured Christian missionary might a copy of the Bible, taking it in both hands and stroking its cover. In the coming days, she excitedly shared its many revelations about the man who had led China’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) to catastrophic defeat in the civil war with Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and then fled to Taiwan with two million troops and civilians in 1949.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China, Jung Chang’s new biography of Chiang Kai-shek’s wife and sisters-in-law, ends (more or less) with the publication of that book, which became a bestseller in the US. May-ling raged against it, claiming Seagrave was “a tool of the Communist bandits”.
“At this point she resented more than ever the fact that her family was singled out for blame for the misfortune of China while the Communists seemed to get off scotfree,” writes Chang.
It was yet another twist in the tortured history of post-imperial China, which is so intimately intertwined with the Soong family. People like Grace, who came from a Taiwanese family – that is to say, a family descended from the first Han Chinese settlers who arrived on the island in the 17th century – saw things differently from May-ling. They were at the sharp end when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, “flooding,” as Chang observes, “an island with only 6 million inhabitants”.
As Chiang Kai-shek turned Taiwan into a fortress, blocking the coastline and hills, and engaged in a decadeslong pretence that his regime was China, the Taiwanese became secondclass citizens in their own backyard. This is to say nothing of the island’s Aboriginal inhabitants (Chang says nothing about them either), who, like all ethnic minority groups on territory deemed to be Chinese, became a persecuted footnote in the political machinations of Han China.
History, of course, was on Grace’s side. By the time she was reading The Soong Dynasty, president Nixon had long since recognised the People’s Republic of China (PRC), quashing the fiction that the Republic of China, as Taiwan still styles itself, was the true China. Chiang Kai-shek’s son, who succeeded him as president and ended one-party rule, was dead, and a man of Taiwanese heritage, Lee Teng-hui, would become president.
Things were changing in the PRC too. Mao died in 1976. The pragmatic Deng Xiao-ping took over in 1978 and introduced reforms – though the limits of his reforming zeal became brutally apparent in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Running like a silver thread – or a streak of piss, depending on your viewpoint – through events from the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to that point of change, are the lives of the three Soong sisters, who were born between 1889 and 1898. Ei-ling, the eldest, married businessman HH Kung and became one of the richest people in China; Ching-ling, the middle sister, married Sun Yat-sen, the so-called “Father of China”, and sided with Reds in the civil war; May-ling – Mme Chiang Kai-shek – did not expire until 2003, by which time she had seen three centuries.
Chang’s new book is both a biography of the wealthy, glamorous, US-educated Soong sisters and a history of twentieth-century China. It’s not the first time that Chang, who was born in Sichuan province in China in 1952 and came to the UK in 1978, has constructed an historical narrative around three protagonists. Her bestknown book, the bestseller Wild Swans, tells the story of her grandmother, her mother and herself, and is a powerful evocation of a changing China. That trick works less well here. As the Soong sisters had parallel (though very different) lives, the storytelling drive in Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is less powerful than in Wild Swans. In places, the narrative feels repetitive and it is sometimes bitty. Considering this is a book about the sisters, there is also a little too much of the ghastly male relatives.
The first chapter is about the sisters’ father, Charlie Soong – a far better man, it must be conceded, than the future husbands – while the second is about Sun Yat-sen. In fact, Chang’s original idea was to write a biography of Dr Sun (the future revolutionary was a qualified medical doctor). We must rejoice that she retreated from that enterprise.
Having died before the civil war began, Sun is unique in being revered in both China and Taiwan. No one could be less deserving of such an honour than the man described in these pages. Leaving a trail of abandoned wives, concubines and children in his wake, he pursued his goal of becoming the first president of China with murderous vigour.
With one foot in the West, Chang is particularly well-placed to understand the sisters
It’s no wonder Charlie Soong did not want him to marry his daughter Chingling, who was 27 years his junior. And with time even doting Red Sister saw through the husband who set her up as a decoy in their Canton home while he was safe on a gunboat in the bay. Escaping their besieged palace, she suffered a miscarriage that would leave her unable to bear children.
Sun paid lip service to Communism to advance his personal goals, and Ching-ling did not join the CCP until she was on her death bed, but this was the beginning of Mme Sun Yat-sen, who would rise to be Mao’s vicechairman. This path set Ching-ling against her family, but she marked the new title in typical Soong fashion: by asking a friend in the US to order her calling cards from Tiffany’s.
Chang’s biography of the sisters is at its best when it reveals their inner lives. She draws on “copious correspondence” and new sources, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s diary, to illuminate the feelings and motivations of these three women who were both emblematic of twentiethcentury China and utterly different from the average Chinese woman.
Born in Shanghai and brought up as
Christians by their missionary father, the sisters studied at Wesleyan College in Georgia and spoke better English than Mandarin. Although May-ling and Ching-ling were both personally brave during the civil war, they did not experience the privations of ordinary Chinese. Travelling through the countryside, May-ling was as horrified by the dirt and squalor as visitors from the West; while Red Guards raged outside her Beijing mansion during the Cultural Revolution, Ching-ling was chucking “beautiful handbags, shoes and textiles” in the stove, fearing torture for possessing these “bourgeois” items.
Chang is particularly well placed to understand the sisters. Now a British citizen, she has a foot in the East and the West, just as they did. She is no apologist for Communism, and so it’s a tribute to her even-handedness that Red Sister emerges from this account as the most simpatico.
That’s not saying much. Corruption, abuse of privilege and double-crossing were the sisters’ hallmarks. Perhaps they were victims of their time and circumstances, but it’s hard to disagree with president Truman’s assessment of the family: “They’re all thieves, every damn one of them.”