November 10, 2003
Journal
Mike Steely
Report on "A Singular Woman: Madame Chiang Kai-shek won the West but lost the battle for control of China," by Pico Iyer; and "Revelation: She wanted to Rule the World," by Jonathan Fenby, both articles appearing on 3 November at Time/Asia: www.time.com/time/asia/magazine.
Sometime in 1983, I moved out of the city basin of Taipei, and back up to the mountain retreat of Yang Ming Shan, where I rented a room in a hostel by the name of "Ease." Perched on a mountainside on Yang De Da Dao, the main road connecting the mountain town with Chung Shan Road in the heart of Taipei, the hostel was the typical KMT bureaucrat 50s grand style. It had seen its days as a retreat for KMT's cadres, and for me it was an escape from the congestion of the city, where I could suck in some normal air and soak in a hot-spring bath in the hot-bath facility out in the rear of the hostel. Who cared if it was a 30-minute commute on a motobike at 7 A.M. to the bushiban downtown?
One day, in a conversation with the hostel manager, he grabbed some keys from behind the desk, and asked me to follow him, as if he had a secret to reveal. He led me to the "other" wing of the complex, the one "off limits." The manager's secret was, as it turned out, the Generalissimo's retreat, the boudoir of his mountain spa. It was like a walk back in the 50s Taiwan of Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling. The room's furnishings seemed to have been untouched since the day Chiang died in 1975. The all-too-common musty odor of Taiwan, the faded curtains, the photos that remained on the bedstand and walls, and the bed the old general had shared...
And the death of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, at 106, in New York two weeks ago brings to a close the Chiang era of Taiwan. In "A Singular Woman," Iyer depicts the remarkable life of Soong Mei-ling. Her story began and ended in the US, but the pages in between were filled with her mark in the narrative of American and Chinese history. In another article, this one by Jonathan Fenby, Fenby reports of an anecdotal revelation from the memoirs of Gardner Cowles, who, in 1942, as publisher of "Look" magazine, was sharing a house in Chongqing (the wartime capital of Chiang's Nationalist army and the Republic of China) with Wendell Willkie, who had lost the presidential race to F. D. Roosevelt in 1940. The story goes that Willkie had had an all-nighter with the beguiling Soong Mei-ling, who, at the time had already been married to the Generalissimo for 15 years. A year later, Cowles wrote that at a dinner with the Madame, she asked that Cowles do whatever he could to get Willkie re-elected as the Republican presidential candidate, that whatever it would cost could be covered by Nationalist money in the New York banks (which was, Fenby says, "presumably from U.S. loans"). Mei-ling was reported to have said that Willkie would rule the Western world, while she would rule the Orient.
