50th Issue: The Soong Sisters

Hi! Today I am going to tell you about the Soong sisters. They’re pretty famous so you may already know about them, but I didn’t, so I am going to assume that some of you probably have not either. Please forgive me if I mess up on any of the Chinese history/politics part of this, I’m not super well-versed, but am trying to learn more. I’m just going to try to focus on the sisters’ lives.

 

 

 Let me start with Charles Jones Soong, also known as Soong Yao-ju, who lived from 1863 to 1918. He was born in Hainan province, and as a teen he sailed to Boston and worked for his uncle in Chinatown. While he was on the ship, he was a cabin boy and one of the passengers, Charles Jones, admired him. He decided to pay for him to go to school and college. This may be the origin of Charles’ English name. Charles joined the Coast Guard, converted to Christianity, and began training to be a missionary. He learned the English language at Trinity University (now Duke) and got a degree in theology from Vanderbilt University. He then was sent to Shanghai to be a missionary there.

 

 

Charlie got sick of being a missionary after a while and instead started a printing shop. He joined the anti-Manchu resistance movement, called the Red Gang. He still went to church, but didn’t preach anymore. In 1894, he met Sun Yat-Sen (the first president of the Republic of China and known as the “Father of the Nation”. He is honored both by the Chinese and Taiwanese, and formed a tense alliance with the communists before passing away) at church, and they became good friends right away. Both were educated in the West, were Christian, and wanted to change China. They were also both part of anti-Manchu groups. Charlie, who by now had some money, began to help fund Sun Yat-Sen’s campaigns. However, in 1895 the attempt at an uprising failed, and Sun Yat-Sen fled China. Charlie stayed in Shanghai, and kept sending Sun Yat-Sen money. Charlie married a woman named Ni Kwei-Tseng, and had three daughters: Soong Aai-ling, Soong Ching-ling, a son named T.V. Soong, and Soong Mei ling, followed by two brothers T. L. Soong and T. A. Soong.

Due to a clandestine relationship between Ching-ling and Sun Yat-Sen, Charlie Soong ended up disowning his daughter, and when he died in 1918, there was no public mourning due to the breaking of his friendship with Sun Yat-Sen.

Now to talk about Charlie’s three daughters. His eldest daughter, as mentioned earlier, was named Soong Ai-ling. She went to the United States in 1904 at the age of fourteen, and went by the name of Nancy at Wesleyan College. After graduating, she went back to China and worked as a secretary for Sun Yat-sen. She quit after she got married to H. H. Kung (Kung Hsiang-Hi), who was the richest man in China at the time. Soong Ai-ling had four children, and moved back to the United States in the 1940s, living the rest of her life there until she died in 1973. One of her children, Kung Ling-chie, who became known as Louis C. Kung, became an American oil executive in Houston, Texas, marrying an actress and having a son.

Charlie’s second daughter, Soong Ching-ling, also had an interesting life. Like her sister, she went to Wesleyan College and spoke fluent English. She went by Rosamonde as a girl. After her sister left her position as Sun Yat-sen’s secretary, Soong Ching-ling took it over, and ended up marrying him in 1911. He was the leader of the Chinese Revolution, and founder of the Nationalist Party. After he died in 1925, she was elected to the Central Executive Committee, however she left China for Moscow in 1927. Soong Ching-ling returned to China in 1931, where she stayed in Shanghai. However, when war broke out with Japan, she moved to Hong Kong, then Chongqing. She raised money for the Chinese Communists by founding the China Defense League, later renamed to the China Welfare fund.

 

 

Basically, Soong Ching-Ling broke from the rest of her family and became a full on communist. She was honorary chairwoman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang, she attended the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and she went to a ceremony in Tiananmen Square for the birth of the new People’s Republic of China. She was held up by the ruling Communists as a link between their movement and Sun Yat-sen’s movement. She was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize and in 1950 she was chairwoman of the Chinese People’s Relief Administration. She wrote a book as well, called Struggle for New China. Anyway, she did a bunch of stuff, travelling as a representative of the Chinese Communist government, and I’m skipping all that part because I don’t care very much but if you want to read about it her Wikipedia page has a ton of details. During the Cultural Revolution, she was criticized by the Red Guard, and her parents’ grave was toppled, but Mao Zedong put her on a list of people who should be protected. She was Vice President of China for a little while too, but even when she left her post, her health began to suffer, yet she wrote articles a lot, mostly on children’s welfare. She passed away in 1981 and was buried next to her parents’ grave (which was restored). The cemetery was renamed the Soong Ching-ling Memorial Park.

 

 

The third Soong sister, Soong Mei-ling, also known as Soong May-ling, also married a very important man. She was born in Shanghai and went to Wesleyan along with her sisters, but she was only an eighth grader so she was too long. She went to Piedmont College instead, staying with Ai-ling’s friend Blanche Moss. Then in 1909 she finally got permission to go to Wesleyan, with the help of tutors. In 1912 she became a full student at the age of fifteen. Then, later on, her sisters graduated and went back to Shanghai, so she transferred to Wellesley so she could live near her brother, who was studying at Harvard. She graduated in 1917, and spoke English fluently with a Georgian accent. You can watch a video of her here to see what she sounded like. She starts talking at the 8 minute mark. 

 

 

Soong Mei-ling met Chiang Kai-shek (a lieutenant of Sun Yat-Sen, he wanted to reunify China and began fighting with the Communists before losing and fleeing to Taiwan) in 1920. He was already married and a Buddhist, so Mei-ling’s mom wasn’t into the match. But then Chiang Kai-shek got divorced and promised he’d convert to Christianity, so they got married in 1927. They were married for nearly fifty years, and had no children. Soong Mei-ling, known after her marriage as Madame Chiang, was very involved in Chinese politics, like her sister. She acted as her husband’s translator, secretary and advisor. She wanted her husband’s legacy to be similar to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Since she could move between both worlds, she was popular in China and in the West as well. Her pet project was to establish schools for orphans of Chinese soldiers. She built one school for boys and one for girls, calling them her ‘warphans’, and became personally involved, even going so far as to choose the teachers herself. She also established the Chinese Women’s National Relief Society.

 

 

Madame Chiang went to the United States several time to raise money for her husband and the war effort. She drew huge crowds and was on the cover of Time magazine several times. The United States Women’s Army Corps during World War II even recruited a unit of Chinese-American women, calling them the “Madame Chiang Kai-Shek Air WAC Unit”. Madame Chiang was the first Chinese national and the second woman to  address both houses of the US Congress in 1943.

When her husband’s government was defeated in 1949, Madame Chiang and her husband moved to Taiwan. Her sister, Soong Ching-ling, as mentioned above, stayed in China with the communists. Madame Chiang was still an important international figure. She was a patron of the International Red Cross Committee, and the honorary chair of the British United Aid to China Fund, for example. She spent the rest of her life back and forth between Taiwan and her apartment in New York City, passing away at the age of 105 in 2003. Her body is buried in New York, and her husband is buried in Taiwan. Both would like their remains to be moved and buried in mainland China someday.

There was a movie about the Soong sisters starring  Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh and Vivian Wu, but I haven’t seen it so I have no idea if it’s any good. If you have watched it, let me know!