2 Soong Charlie: A Methodist Preacher and a Secret Revolutionary

Charlie, father of the three Soong sisters, was one of Sun Yat-sen's earliest supporters. Born in 1861, he was Sun's contemporary and came from a similarly humble origin. A peasant lad from Hainan Island off China's southern coast, he, like Sun, left home to seek a better life overseas at the age of fourteen with his elder brother. His first stop was Java, where he could pass as a native, with dark skin, big and sunken eyes, and thick, out-turned (un-Chinese-looking) lips. An uncle adopted him and took him to America when he was seventeen. In Boston's cramped Chinatown, the uncle owned a tiny silk and tea store where the teenager was put to work as a dogsbody. Charlie had never learned to read and write; he wanted to go to school, but his uncle refused to let him. The adoption seemed to have been only a means to gain a free labourer. This was not the life Charlie had in mind and within months he ran away. One day in January 1879, he went down to the harbour and boarded the US Revenue cutter Albert Gallatin, asking for a job. Captain Gabrielson took a liking to him and made him a cabin boy. The captain, it seems, thought that Charlie was about fourteen year old: he was little more than five feet tall and looked several years younger than his real age. Charlie did not straighten out this little misunderstanding. Being thought of as a child made it much easier for people to show him kindness and affection.

Charlie had a knack of endearing himself to others. He was deferential, cheerful and easy-going. He worked diligently. Captain Gabrielson treated him as a protégé and often invited him to stay in his home in Edgartown, Massachusetts. The captain's wife was the niece of the town's squire, Judge Pease, and they lived in a stately house. For the first time Charlie experienced comfort and luxury, as well as a carefree family life. The Gabrielsons were devout Methodists, and Charlie went to church with them on Sundays whenever he stayed. His religious conviction grew along with his attachment to the captain. When a year later the captain was transferred to another cutter – Schuyler Colfax, based in Wilmington, North Carolina – Charlie requested a discharge and joined him. In this city that took pride in its multitudes of churches, the captain introduced him to the Rev. Thomas Ricaud, who christened him in November 1880. Charlie was "probably the first Celestial that has ever submitted to the ordinance of baptism in North Carolina", a local paper enthused, noticing that Charlie had "elicited a very profound interest in the religious community". People found him "exceedingly impressive' as he went round shaking hands after the service, telling them how he had found the Saviour and how he longed to return to China and preach the gospel to his people.

Charlie's Christianity enhanced his appeal tremendously. At the time Protestant churches were rapidly expanding in China and the Methodists were among the most zealous "Christian soldiers". Charlie became famous in the tight-knit community of the Southern Methodists. Captain Gabrielson now faded out of his life, and Julian Carr, a tobacco magnate and philanthropist, assumed the role of his sponsor. Trinity College (Duke University today) in nearby Durham enrolled him in April 1881 as a special student to study the English language and the Bible. The president of the college, Braxton Craven, together with Mrs Craven, tutored him in English. After Trinity, Charlie went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, the headquarters of the Southern Methodists, to train to be a missionary. Altogether, he was among the Methodists for seven years – an experience that would determine his future and that of his three daughters.

In his first – and only – letter to his father, written soon after he settled at Trinity, he expressed appreciation for his patrons, along with much religious fervour*:

Dear Father,

I will write this letter and let you know where I am. I left Brother in East India in 1878 and came to the United States and finely [finally] I had found Christ our Saviour … now the Durham Sunday School and Trinity are helping me and I am [in] a great hurry to be educated so I can go back to China and tell you about the kindness of the friends in Durham and the grace of God … I remember when I was a little boy you took me to a great temple to worshipped the wooden gods … . but now I had found a Saviour he is comforted me where ever I go to … I put my trust in God and hope to see you again in this earth by the will of God. Now we have vacation and I stay in Mr J. S. Carr house at Durham. Soon as you get my letter please answer me and I will be very glad to hear from you. Give my loves to mother Brother and Sisters please and also to yourself … Mr and Mrs Carr they are good Christian family and they had been kind to me.

But Charlie's letter could not be delivered. He had sent it to Dr Young J. Allen, doyen of the Southern Methodist Mission in Shanghai, asking him to help forward it. But when Dr Allen wrote back and asked for Charlie's father's name and address in Chinese, Charlie could not provide them. He was completely illiterate in his mother tongue – because his family had been too poor to send him to school and because written Chinese was so difficult. He only copied out a few place names – Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hainan Island – from a map for missionaries and marked them on a simple sketch, indicating the approximate location of his village. His father's name was the transliteration of its sounds in the local dialect. As there were hundreds, if not thousands, of families in that region who had sons overseas, it was impossible for Dr Allen to proceed. Charlie had to abandon the attempt to contact his family.

He was lonely. One morning at Vanderbilt, he joined a group of boys for a meeting in a chapel where they sang and prayed and exchanged their religious experience. A classmate of his, the Rev. John C. Orr, recalled that Charlie "got up and stood awhile before he said anything. Then his lips trembled and he said: "I feel so little. I get so lonesome. So far from my people. So long among strangers. I feel just like I was a little chip floating down the Mississippi River." Orr wrote: "The tears were running down his cheeks, and before he could say anything more a dozen of the boys were around him, with their arms about him, and assuring him that they loved him as a brother."

Indeed wherever he went, Charlie was treated with kindness and decency. People regarded him "with the greatest respect, and admired [him] for being ambitious and working his way through college". Still, a fellow student at Trinity, Jerome Dowd, noticed that "boys were disposed to tease him and play all sorts of pranks upon him". At Vanderbilt the chancellor, Bishop McTyeire, was sometimes unpleasant. At the end of his studies, Charlie asked to receive further training in medicine. The bishop refused. As he wrote to Dr Allen, in a haughty tone, "Soon[g] wished to stay a year or two longer to study medicine to be equipped for higher usefulness, etc. And his generous patron, Mr Julian Carr, was not unwilling to continue helping. But we thought better that the Chinaman that is in him should not all be worked out before he labours among the Chinese. Already he has "felt the easy chair" – and is not averse to the comforts of higher civilization. No fault of his … '

Charlie was good at putting things in perspective and refused to take offence easily. Unfailingly he showed "beautiful manners", and was "very, very polite". He remained "full of life and fun", and when taunted was "always ready to respond in a playful spirit", thus defusing the tension. People remembered his "exceptional sprightliness" and "a most genial and friendly nature". He had a good sense of humour. When he was baptised, his surname was spelt as "Soon", an approximation of the pronunciation of his name in his local dialect. One Vanderbilt classmate, James C. Fink, remembered that "on introducing him to some of the boys, he smilingly remarked, 'I'd radder be soon den too late.'"

This appearance of geniality was partly the result of a determined and sometimes painful effort to suppress his emotions. Charlie loved women – as this letter to a schoolmate at Trinity in 1882 shows:

[B]oth of Misses Field are here yet they will go home next friday morning. I tell you they are very pleasant young Ladies I like them ever so much … Trinity is very pleasant now, but I don't know what it will be after the [girls] go off … Miss Bidgood is here … She looks as pretty as ever. I went to see her and Miss Cassie sometime since. She talk right lively … I been had good times with the [girls] all day long. never looked at the books hardly … Miss Mamie and two other [girls] gone to visiting last night we did had big time … Fortisty and I went to called on Ella Carr and we had the best time you ever heard of.

But the young man could not develop any further relationship. Ella Carr, mentioned in this letter, was the niece of his benefactor Julian, and daughter of a professor at the college. Five decades later she told the local paper, the Greenboro Daily News, that Charlie had often come to her house to listen to her play the piano – until one day her mother "told him to stop coming around the house so much". He stayed away, saying goodbye with a photo of himself looking "dapper and impeccably dressed".

He was particularly close to a Miss Annie Southgate, daughter of an influential figure in Durham. In one letter to her in which he hinted at his feelings, he first apologised for losing someone's address and then wrote, "Why don't and couldn't I make a mistake in reference to your address, I wonder There isn't any danger of my falling in love with one of Uncle R[ichard]'s daughters; Miss Jennie is engaging to a young fellow, he is only seven feet and 9 inches in height, and Miss Ross is too young, for she is only 15 and has gone to her sister's to spend summer. So you see there's no chance for me to fall in love, if I want to." (Later he would name one of his daughters, the future Mme Sun Yat-sen, Rosamonde, after Miss Ross.)

In words as explicit as possible, wistful, even poignant, Charlie expressed his love to Miss Annie: "I suppose you are in some where, where ever you may be I hope you are having nice time. Miss Annie, I must confess that I love you better and more than any girls at Durham. Don't you believe I do?" This was as far as Charlie could go. He was falling in love, but held back from taking the plunge. There was no hope; he was a "Chinaman".

Charlie found controlling his emotions so necessary that he would later require his children to do so from a very young age. May-ling, the youngest of the three Soong sisters, remembered that when she was a child, her father often told his children "not to show emotion, and to abhor sentimentality". Once she "sobbed and wailed" when her elder brother was leaving home for the first time to go to boarding school. She choked down her tears when she caught her father "suddenly turning stern and seemingly unapproachable". From then on, she rarely cried. "I can count the times I have wept since I have grown up."

In spite of the frustrations he experienced in America, Charlie adored the country. It later became his top priority to give his six children an American education. This motivated him to make money – and once he made it, his children's education would take a major portion of it. His three daughters all studied in America, with May-ling only nine when she went there and remained for a whole decade. Most extraordinarily, the girls lived there on their own, with no adult family members to look after them. Such was the total, unreserved trust and faith Charlie had developed for the Methodist community and the American society.

As he had always appeared "very social, very talkative, and very playful", some of Charlie's fellow American students had thought him frivolous and found it hard to imagine "that anything serious was going on in his mind". But a most serious resolve had already formed: Charlie was determined to help make his native land more like America – mei-guo – the "beautiful country". At the end of 1885, he left his beloved America for Shanghai.

—

Shanghai was then already one of the most spectacular and cosmopolitan cities in the world. Situated near the place where the Yangtze, the longest river in China, flows into the sea, it had been marshland only a few decades previously, before the Manchu government allowed Westerners in to develop it. Now solid European-style buildings rubbed shoulders with fragile bamboo houses, paved broad streets meshed with wheelbarrow-trodden mud alleys, and parkland jutted into rice paddies. Outside the Bund, the waterfront, under the still gaze of the skyscrapers, numerous sampans rocked with the waves, offering a stirring sight of the city's vitality.

Dr Allen, head of the Southern Methodist Mission, made the city his home and devoted his life to introducing Western culture to China. It was he who pioneered modern education in the ancient empire. A solemn man with a long, bushy beard, Allen was a distinguished scholar in Chinese as well as Western culture and was greatly respected by intellectuals and the Manchu throne alike. He had just founded the trailblazing Anglo-Chinese College for men before Charlie's arrival, and Charlie had hoped to teach there.

Allen thought Charlie's ambition was presumptuous and even preposterous, because Charlie was illiterate in Chinese. Writing to Bishop McTyeire, Allen did not bother to conceal his contempt: "The boys and young men in our Anglo-Chinese College are far his superiors in that they are – the advanced ones – both English and Chinese scholars … And Soon[g] never will become a Chinese scholar, at best will only be a denationalized Chinaman, discontented and unhappy unless he is located and paid far beyond his deserts – and the consequence is I find none of our brethren willing to take him."

Allen waved Charlie out of Shanghai to a small town, Kunshan, and classified him as a "native preacher", which meant Charlie was paid much less than foreign missionaries. This hurt Charlie deeply. But he confined his anger to writing to Miss Annie and suppressed his urge to challenge Allen.

The mission head seemed bent on punishing Charlie in other ways. He refused to give him leave so he could go and see his family straightaway. Charlie was incensed and fought his corner this time. Still, he protested in such a way that it did not lead to an open conflict – as he assured Miss Annie. It was not until autumn 1896 that he returned to his home village. His parents had trouble recognising him. Once they realised this was the boy they thought they had lost forever, there were many happy tears. After the brief reunion, he was back in Kunshan, 1,700 kilometres away.

There were other problems confronting Charlie. China did not feel like home. He told Miss Annie, "I am walking once more on the land that gave me birth, but it is far from a homelike place for me. I feel more homelike in America than I do in China." He had to have a crash course to learn written Chinese, and then had to learn the Kunshan dialect. "The language of this people is entirely different from that of my mother tongue; hence I am just as much a stranger to these natives as I have been in America or Europe." The locals ridiculed him. Peasant boys would sneer and shout at him "Little dwarf!" (At just over five feet tall, he was shorter than the average local man.)

Charlie gritted his teeth and struggled on. Eventually he was able to preach in the local dialect, somewhat haltingly. He confided the misery he endured to Miss Annie. Although his yearning for her was itself another source of agony, the tone of his letters was always measured and upbeat. When Miss Annie died in 1887, he was in "great sorrow", as he wrote to her father.

—

Later that year, Charlie's life was changed: he married the eighteen-year-old Miss Ni Kwei-tseng. Miss Ni was a member of China's most illustrious Christian clan, Xu Guang-qi (after whom a district of Shanghai is named). Xu had been a high official in the Ming dynasty, and had been converted by the Jesuits at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He had collaborated with Matteo Ricci in introducing Western sciences into China. The Catholic lineage stopped when Miss Ni's mother married a Protestant missionary and converted to Protestantism, which caused quite a stir.

Like her illustrious ancestors Miss Ni was a singularly devout Christian. Her daughter May-ling later recalled, "I knew my mother lived very close to God … one of my strongest childhood impressions is of Mother going to a room she kept for the purpose on the third floor to pray. She spent hours in prayer, often beginning before dawn. When we asked her advice about anything, she would say, "I must ask God first." And we could not hurry her. Asking God was not a matter of spending five minutes to ask Him to bless her child and grant the request. It meant waiting upon God until she felt His leading."

Indeed, people commented that in her face, "there was a strength of character and a spiritual serenity that added to her beauty of features". She had a commanding presence. All her daughters and their husbands, however celebrated or powerful, sought her approval, which she did not grant easily.

She had begun her life as an unyieldingly independent child. When her mother tried to bind her feet, as she had done with her other daughters, Miss Ni reacted violently and developed frighteningly high fevers. Her parents had to abandon the effort and resigned themselves to the prospect that with her "large feet", she might not find a husband.

Then Charlie the preacher entered her life. A relative of hers had introduced them. They were soulmates and were happy together. He sent a joyful and characteristically jokey notice to North Carolina about his wedding. It announced that he would be married "at Shanghai, China on the 4th day of the Chinese 9th moon. Those who can figure out when that is are cordially invited to be present."

Bill Burke, a friend from Charlie's Vanderbilt days, paid the newly-weds a visit in Kunshan. They lived in the mission parsonage, a small house down a narrow and winding alley from the ferry landing that doubled as a teahouse. Burke's abiding memory was the bride's natural feet: "Her firm, full steps were graceful as any American woman's." He could tell that Charlie was "in love with his wife". Charlie had at last found his life's companion, with whom he would discuss all his affairs and make all his decisions. They impressed people as "a very congenial couple".

Their first child, a daughter, Ei-ling, was born on 15 July 1889. Five more children would follow – two more daughters, Ching-ling and May-ling, and three sons: Tse-ven, Tse-liang, and Tse-an, born in 1894, 1899 and 1906. The boys were referred to by their initials: T.V., T.L. and T.A.

Expecting a big family and planning to give his children an American education, Charlie resigned his job as a preacher in 1892. Among the missionaries there was a rumour that he "had gone back to the heathen custom of worshipping idols". Charlie wrote an open letter to his friends in North Carolina: "My reason for leaving the Mission was it did not give me sufficient to live upon. I could not support myself, wife and children, with about fifteen dollars of United States money per month." He vowed to be "an independent worker of our Methodist Mission", and was as good as his word.

Charlie went into business and, with his Americanised background and his outgoing character, not to mention industry and talent, success came quickly. He imported machinery for flour and cotton mills, and founded a publishing house to print the Bible – at a time when the American Bible Society, with which Charlie was affiliated, gave a Bible to everyone and anyone who wished to take one.

Quickly he entered the circle of Shanghai's upper class, and built his growing family a large house that was more European than Chinese in style. It was equipped with American comforts, with indoor heating. Charlie felt that he "can never be Chinese enough to want to sit in a cold room with all my outdoor clothes on". (He did not like Chinese food, either.) Also installed were American-style baths and beds. In his eldest daughter Ei-ling's description, the family had bathrooms fitted with pretty Soochow tubs, with yellow dragons coiling around the outside and green glaze inside. Cold water was laid on; hot water prepared downstairs and carried up … the heating was furnished by gas radiators, a refinement that many foreigners in Shanghai did without. The beds, instead of the hard, flat, wooden structures still used by most Chinese, were good, comfortable, mattressed American couches. The neighbors would come in just to peer at those beds, to feel them with critical jabbing fingers, and to agree with each other that they were most unhealthy and dangerous for the children.

By the standards of the rich in Shanghai, this large and comfortable modern house was not luxurious (it was certainly not ostentatious). It was also "out in the wilderness" in the fields far from the city centre. People thought that the couple were eccentric; but Charlie had a practical reason: he was saving money in order to sponsor Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution.

—

Mrs Louise Roberts, an American missionary, rented a flat for her own small mission press in Charlie's compound, which housed his office as well as his home. Charlie often popped in for a chat and they became close. Through their friendship, she "gained the impression that his chief interest, after his family, was to help his country to become the great land it should be". Charlie had already dreamed of changing China when he left America, and in the decade since he had returned, the desire had grown more intense. In late spring 1894 he met Sun, and spent several sleepless nights talking with him (and their mutual friend Lu). He was impressed by the twenty-seven-year-old. After Sun left, he ruminated about their conversations. Towards the end of that year, after war with Japan had broken out and China had suffered catastrophic defeats, Charlie became totally disillusioned with the Manchu regime and convinced that the revolution proposed by Sun was the way to save the country. To him Sun was the right man; he had a Western education and liked Western ways. He was a devoted Christian – or so Charlie believed. (Sun knew Charlie's background and naturally played up his religious conviction.) So Charlie wrote to Sun, urging him to come home from Hawaii to take action. He helped fund the Canton Uprising; when that failed, with Lu executed and Sun in exile with a price on his head, Charlie never wavered and continued to support the fugitive, sending him money clandestinely over the years.

What he was doing was extremely risky. Had it been known, the Manchu government would have been after him, and Dr Allen, who was already ill disposed towards him, could have done him real damage among the religious community. Allen hated violent revolutions and in a journal he edited, in Chinese, he used the harshest language to condemn Sun Yat-sen, calling him a "vile criminal". Charlie had to hide his political persuasion, which he did well. No one suspected that this affable and wealthy businessman and pillar of Shanghai society was an underground revolutionary. And few imagined that underneath his sensible and congenial exterior, Charlie had a passionate, even impulsive, nature. On the basis of a few brief encounters, he committed himself to Sun's perilous and seemingly impossible venture. Hardly knowing the man, he became so smitten that he wrote to Sun: "I know no man among the Chinese who is more noble, more kind and patriotic than yourself."

Charlie sought nothing in return when the republican revolution succeeded. He asked for neither position nor fame, and did not present himself to Sun when Sun arrived in Shanghai and stayed there for a week at the end of 1911. He only revealed his secret, almost on impulse, to Mrs Roberts when the republicans took Shanghai in November. The morning after, he walked into her office with a spring in his step. Mrs Roberts started talking about the night before with obvious excitement. He beamed, and said, "Now I can tell you all about it." In an American radio interview years later, Mrs Roberts said, "So he told me of his long friendship with Sun Yat-sen, and how he had helped Sun in every way possible, especially with money. "Not that I ever bothered to take a receipt for the amounts I sent him," he chuckled." Charlie chuckled a lot and had "always twinkling eyes", she observed. He asked her, "Maybe you have wondered why we live so plainly here in this place." The missionary replied, "I haven't thought much about that, except that I felt you and Mrs Soong did not care for display, and I know you are very generous in your donations to church work. Also you are at a good deal of expense for the education of your children." "That is true," Charlie said, "but I have saved all that I could to help Sun's cause, because I felt that was the best way for me to help my country." He chuckled again and started talking about something else: how to persuade his sister to come to Shanghai so she would be safe from the upheaval of the revolution.

* All errors in this and other letters by Charlie are reproduced uncorrected.