Mayling Soong

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Erika Lee: We’re going to fast forward a bit now and take you to the 1940s, February 18th, 1943 to be exact. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president and the United States is at war with Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, in the halls of Congress, one woman is about to deliver a historic address.

Karen Leong: When she began speaking, what was most striking to most people listening on the radio and to the law makers themselves was her elocution.

Erika Lee: This is Karen Leong talking about Mayling Soong or Madame Chiang Kai-Shek as she was known to many Americans. She was the wife of China’s nationalist leader.

Karen Leong: And she had this really crisp elocution and she also had this slight Southern accent.

Mayling Soong: And say, that devotion to common principles eliminates differences in race, and that identity of ideals is the strongest possible [inaudible 00:16:53] of racial dissimilarities.

Karen Leong: In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt even reported that she even said to some of the lawmakers after her speech in the house that she said, “I am a southerner,” and she had this slight Georgia twain to her voice

Erika Lee: Mayling Soong address to Congress was unprecedented. She was the first private citizen and only the second woman to address both houses. It was all a part of Soong’s goodwill tour throughout the US in the winter and spring of 1943. It was a tour that would change the way many Americans viewed China and what the future could look like for Chinese Americans. But this 1943 trip, it wasn’t Soong’s first time in the United States.

Karen Leong: Mayling Soong was born to Charlie Soong and his wife, and Charlie Soong himself, her father had lived in North Carolina for a bit. He came to United States, some people say as a stowaway, other people say as apprentice. And he eventually ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina where he became part of the Methodist church and was educated eventually at Vanderbilt university.

Karen Leong: He returned to China where he was married. And his whole upbringing, and influence by the United States was apparent in how he raised his family. All of six of his children went to elite United States universities. So this influence that her father had having lived in the United States, his work with American missionaries all very much meant that Mayling Soong was exposed to many forms of US culture even before she herself went to the United States.

Erika Lee: And see went to Wellesley, correct?

Karen Leong: Yes. She attended Wellesley. Her two older sisters went to Wesleyan. And so her first arrival, her first destination in the United States was Macon, Georgia.

Erika Lee: And of course, this is a time when most Chinese immigrants were banned from the United States, only students, teachers, diplomats, travelers, and visitors could enter the US. How did this policy impact Mayling Soong and her family?

Karen Leong: So what’s really interesting is that even though Mayling Soong’s family was quite wealthy and at the time the exclusion had some leeway for the families of merchants and wealthy Chinese, her older sister, when she first came to the United States and tried to enter the United States to attend Wesleyan was stopped and detained for two weeks. She was not allowed to leave and enter the United States because they didn’t believe she was actually a student, even though she had all the proper paperwork. So, they held her and her father had to, through his connections, purchase a Portuguese student visa in order for Ai-Ling to enter.

Karen Leong: So that had to have affected Mayling’s own experience when she and her other sister Ching-Ling entered sometime later. But having that experience and understanding the humiliation that China faced from the United States being singled out for this restrictive immigration really had a bearing on how she experienced the United States and even her later visit.

Erika Lee: After graduation Mayling Soong returned to China where she married general Chiang Kai-Shek. This put her in a powerful position to help shape American attitudes towards China and Chinese people.

Karen Leong: It’s important to think about the fact that when people think about modernity in relation to China, many of the stereotypes of Chinese woman was that they had their foot bound, that they didn’t have a lot of freedom, that they suffered under great patriarchy. So to have this woman who was married to the leader of China being able to travel about, she was wearing pants even before … When she came to the United States and visited her alma mater, Wellesley, she was the first woman on campus to be wearing pants and that was really this marker of the modernization of China and she became, yeah, this very potent symbol, not only of Americanization and modernity, but also the influence of Christianity.

Erika Lee: This image was a radical departure from what had come before. As you just heard, Nancy Davis explain, many 19th century Americans saw China as an exotic but primitive place and those stereotypes, they served a particular purpose when it came to immigration.

Karen Leong: This all fed in not only into images of China, but also how it contributed to the passage of Chinese exclusion and the idea that Chinese could never be assimilated in good Americans. Meaning, they couldn’t really be civilized and upright Christian standing people as many people assumed Americans should be.

Erika Lee: Although those stereotypes persisted, Karen says, Japan’s 1931 invasion into the Chinese territory of Manchuria started to change the narrative.

Karen Leong: They created a puppet state and there became this real conflict between Japan and China, and many of the missionaries to the US were part of publicizing the struggle China was having against the Japanese. But for the most part, Japan was still seen as the more modern nation, and the United States and other countries did not respond to this invasion and incursion on Chinese soil much to the chagrin of the Chinese.

Karen Leong: The Chinese also were having internal conflicts between the communists and the nationalist party. For a while, at the turn of the century, around 1911 with Sun Yat-sen, there was this real fascination that China might support woman’s equality. In the provisional Republican constitution, there was a clause about equality for all women and minorities in China, but that was not part of the ultimate constitution. But that moment really began to capture some of the curiosity about China and how could it be that they would even talk about equality when they were seen as already so uncivilized.

Erika Lee: So it’s really important that this particular figure, a Chinese woman who for so long Chinese women had for so long been representative of the most alien aspects of the backward culture that was China, that she herself represents this modernization, a figure that Americans could look up to and admire and see themselves almost in her. It’s important that it’s a Chinese woman, not just any Chinese person, but a Chinese woman because Chinese women in particular had exemplified the most alien and backward aspects of what Americans thought of as Chinese culture. Does that seem right to you?

Karen Leong: Absolutely. And you know, Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, this persona that was cultivated as this public figure for American consumption and others’ consumption around the world, she was credited with converting the general to Christianity in 1929. She was seen as this active force for modernization.

Erika Lee: So if we can get back to the 1943 visit, what was she hoping to accomplish with the visit?

Karen Leong: She was hoping to accomplish many things. First and foremost, she was trying to sway American popular opinion and then US federal policy towards China during world war II. She was trying to make the case that China deserved greater attention and investments against the war against Japan. And it was very clear at this time that China was trying to get the attention and resources they felt they needed to fight Japan and they felt that FDR and his administration was really favoring Europe and the continent in terms of the Hitler first policy.

Karen Leong: She was also trying to further establish her contribution to Chinese leadership in the nationalist government. She was asking her husband to trust her in terms of handling the United States, and she also was trying to prove a point in terms of China being equal to the United States and equal to Britain. She encountered a lot of American arrogance when she was in the United States. She remembered how her father was treated by US missionaries, and she also remembered how Imperial’s policies towards China as early as the Opium Wars had really put China in a position of international weakness vis-a-vis Japan and other nations. And she and others very much resented that.

Erika Lee: So the trip entailed a lot of traveling around, a lot of speeches. If I was in the crowd at one of her speeches, could you describe what it was like? Would there be a lot of people? Where might it have been held? Was there a lot of pageantry?

Karen Leong: So it depended on where she was in the tour. So yes, she started in Washington DC and then she took a train trip across the United States, ultimately ending up in LA. She spoke at Madison Square Garden. She spoke at Veterans Stadium in Chicago. She spoke to the Longshoremen’s Union Hall in San Francisco, which was not an expected visit and she went to Macon, Georgia and spoke there. So she went to a variety of places for different reasons. She went to the Thunderbird Training Academy in Arizona, but when she spoke in New York and when she spoke in Chicago and in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl, those were very large sold out crowds with quite a bit of pageantry the Hollywood Bowl because it wasn’t Hollywood and David O. Selznick had produced it, it was a bit over the top.

Karen Leong: It was sort of this quasi good earth chronology all the way up to modern China pageant that took place. But she very much had different speeches that she made. And her speech to Congress, for example, was all about reminding the United States about the greatness of US democracy and the racial equality. It included, she talked about seeing the different European immigrants of the United States and how they all were considered American equal. And in many ways she was trying to speak out about the promise of democracy and what those promises might mean globally to include China and other places.

Erika Lee: Okay. So after she gives this speech, it’s printed in the newspaper, it’s played on the radio. How did the American public respond to Soong’s image and message? What sorts of things were people saying about her?

Karen Leong: Many newspapers were claiming her as American. They were talking about how she was more American than Americans themselves. In fact, before her speech a few days before, some Congressman even inquired of the state department whether they could give her an honorary US citizenship. That is so important because this was in the age of Chinese exclusion when Asians were excluded from naturalized citizenship. So they were saying, is there any way we can circumvent that and give her honorary US citizenship? That was an incredible marker of how much Americans really saw her as American. And they were taking pride in their influence in the United States culture and democratic influence on her and therefore her influence on China.

Karen Leong: And in fact that very day after she gave her speech in the house, Martin Kennedy, a representative introduced a bill to repeal Chinese exclusion. And this is what he said, and this is I think very telling because this is also what other editorials around the nation were writing about her. He said, “We welcome you also as a daughter is welcomed by her foster mother to the land where you received an American education. Where you spent years far more carefree than those of late and whereby your charm, your modesty, your intellectual attainments, you won the hearts of so many. I take this auspicious occasion in your gracious presence as an indication of my unbounded admiration of a nation’s courage, which has amazed the world to introduce this day, a bill to grant the Chinese rights of entry to the United States and rights of citizenship.”

Karen Leong: So immediately in response to her speech in response to her demonstrating the influence of an American education, he introduces this law saying that the Chinese should have a right to become US citizens. She is proof embodied that the Chinese can become American. Whereas, Chinese exclusion had been based on the assumption that Chinese never could assimilate, could never be American.

Erika Lee: Turns out there was tremendous support for Kennedy’s bill in Congress. On December 27th, 1943, president Roosevelt signed the bill that repealed the Chinese exclusion laws. He said it was a pivotal moment in correcting the, “Historic mistake” of Chinese exclusion. As for Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in many ways, 1943 is just the beginning of her story.

Karen Leong: So of course, just six years after Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s visit to the United States, China undergoes a very dramatic revolution and becomes the people’s Republic of China. The nationalist government with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and her husband flee to Taiwan and establish the Republic of China.

Erika Lee: What impact did the communist revolution have on Americans perceptions of China? Just on the heels of this very triumphant and enraptured visit by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek just six years before?

Karen Leong: It really changed this view that China again, was seen with suspicion that this turn to communism in some ways confirmed popular ideas that China cannot be trusted. But I’d like to point out that this happened even sooner than the 1950 in the fall of China to the communists. They talk about it that Eleanor Roosevelt in 1944 when Madam Chiang Kai-Shek came back trying to seek assistance. She even said that Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, and this is a quote, “Although educated in the United States had quite naturally reverted to Chinese ways of thinking when she returned to China.”

Karen Leong: And this idea that the United States could be so fickle and its admiration for the celebrity persona of this Americanized Chinese woman and it could be so easily flipped into, we cannot trust this Chinese woman because she is after all, Chinese I think reflects very well this ongoing battle for legitimacy that Chinese people have fought for in the United States to be accepted as equals.

Erika Lee: And as Americans.

Karen Leong: And as Americans. If we’re talking about Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants in the United States, it very much affected again how the United States federal government viewed Chinese. They were again seen with great suspicion. There was this question of whether Chinese in the United States now Chinese Americans were actually communists and the suspicion … And again this reflects this ongoing way in which how Chinese in the United States, Chinese Americans who were born and raised in United States even are so associated with China and it’s about nationality and race combined that somehow if they are of Chinese heritage, they must automatically be Chinese in their hearts as well.

Karen Leong: And there is this idea that they cannot see that people could be born in the United States, could be loyal to the United States, could love democracy if China as a nation suddenly now was communist.

Erika Lee: Karen Leong is an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies and Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University. She’s also the author of the China Mystique, Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism.