21 Taiwan Days
For Ching-ling's sisters, the last three decades had been very different. As the Communists took China in 1949, and as Red Sister became Mao's vice chairman, Ei-ling and May-ling were thrown out of the mainland together with the rest of their family and Chiang Kai-shek's regime. At the beginning of 1950, May-ling joined her husband in Taiwan.
As soon as she arrived, Little Sister plunged into a flurry of activity to boost the morale of the Nationalists who had retreated to the island. She travelled from the north to the south, visiting the wounded and the sick and cheering up the troops. She presided over a housing project to accommodate the new arrivals, and started a Women's Anti-Communist League to oversee the production of hundreds of thousands of garments for the army and their families. She paid personal attention to those garments, checking carefully whether they were properly sewn.
When she was alone, she contemplated questions such as: ‘Why had the Communists prevailed?' ‘Wherein have I personally failed? Could I have done more?' Her conclusion was: ‘I had not been working directly for God, under God, and with God.' She formed a prayer group, which began with six earnest Christians. Eventually, she believed, the nation would pray together, which would solve all the problems.
On 25 June that year, the North Korean army under Kim Il-sung invaded the South, with the backing of Stalin and Mao. The Korean War started. Two days later, US president Truman reversed the policy of ‘non-intervention' towards Taiwan and committed to defending the island. This commitment secured the future of Taiwan. American aid began to arrive and Chiang's crisis passed. May-ling was elated. In spite of the weather (‘horrible, terrifically hot and muggy'), and her skin trouble (‘I have been breaking out in prickly heat and humidity rashes'), she was cheerful: ‘My head is busy with ideas of enlarging the work, with new projects.' ‘I have faith that before the end of the year [1951], we shall be back on the mainland.'
In an optimistic frame of mind, May-ling started to learn to paint in the Chinese style. In her fifties (long past what was conventionally seen as the age to begin learning), she found that the ink and brush came to her surprisingly easily: ‘it is no effort to me at all to paint'. She fell in love with her new hobby. ‘Painting is the most absorbing occupation I have known in my life. When I am at work, I forget everything in the world, and I wish that I could spend all my time in doing nothing but painting and painting.' Five months later, she boasted to Emma, ‘all the artists and connoisseurs of Chinese painting say that I have the possibilities of a great artist. Some even say, perhaps the greatest living artist.' Taking their compliments at face value, she went on, ‘It seems that my brushwork is extraordinary … I myself believe that what the Chinese authorities tell me is true.'
She sent photos of her paintings to Ei-ling in New York to get the opinion of foreign experts. The appraisal was encouraging but not quite so ecstatic. Three experts agreed that the painter had ‘real ability', but the paintings seemed to be ‘copies of other paintings'; they recommended that ‘the artist do more original work'.
Outside her peaceful studio and her prayer group, a ‘white terror' enveloped the island. Chiang Kai-shek, his defeated army and administration, together with their families, totalling some 2 million people, had come to a destination that did not welcome them. There had been a massacre two years before, when the Nationalists took over the island after the Japanese were gone. Much of the population had initially welcomed the return to Chinese rule. But enthusiasm quickly turned to outrage. The same ‘calamity of victory' that had turned people on the mainland against the Chiang regime similarly repelled the Taiwanese, who had lived on the island for generations. Rampant corruption, incompetent administration (particularly compared to the highly efficient Japanese), and the newcomers' unconcealed contempt for the local people – these and many other ills that accompanied the Nationalist takeover led to a riot starting on 28 February 1947. Brutal military suppression caused the deaths of thousands.
Chiang's problems were not limited to the locals. He had reason to believe that large numbers of Red agents had infiltrated the exodus, and would in time act as a Trojan horse. To secure his haven, he imposed martial law that lasted for the rest of his life, with his son, Ching-kuo, heading his security apparatus. This secret police had a blank cheque to arrest and execute real or imagined Red spies. People lived in fear.
The island was guarded like a fortress. The entire coastline over 1,500 kilometres was off limits to the average islander. It was impossible to have a swim in the sea. Hiking in the mountains was equally out of the question: they were sealed off as well, to deprive any would-be guerrillas of hiding places.
Chiang made sure there was now less corruption. Unlike on the mainland, he quickly endorsed land reforms, including the reduction of land rent (which was much easier to introduce here as the owners of the land were local Taiwanese and the enforcers had no vested interest). Still, the Generalissimo showed scant interest in economic development on the island, and there was little improvement in people's lives during his rule.
Chiang promoted his own personality cult, on a scale he had not quite managed on the mainland. His statues were erected everywhere, along with the statues of Sun Yat-sen, still called the Father of China. The Generalissimo was trumpeted as the model of the nation. So schoolteachers who wanted the children to shave their heads (probably to prevent lice) told them that the shaven – or bald – head had a desirable name: the ‘Chiang-style head' (zhong-zheng-tou). The Generalissimo had little hair and was thought of as being bald. When he learned this from his grandson, he was not pleased.
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Once Taiwan was safe, May-ling itched to leave. In summer 1952 she was in New York again. The earlier pattern was repeated: her husband implored her to come home; she pleaded health problems. She was away for eight months and would have stayed on had there not been a crisis in Taiwan. The civilian governor, Dr K.C. Wu, found himself unable to work with the Generalissimo and was determined to resign. Wu, a liberal, was favoured by the Americans and his resignation would damage Chiang in the eyes of Washington. A key issue was that Dr Wu was appalled by the summary arrests and executions. He tendered his resignation in 1953. Chiang refused to let him go.
May-ling was anxious to keep Wu on in his job and returned to Taiwan to persuade him to stay. When Wu came to see her to explain his decision, she took his arm and walked him to the end of the verandah, telling him that there were surveillance bugs everywhere else, as Chiang wanted to know what visitors were talking about. Wu told her about his aversion to the secret police under Ching-kuo, and named one particular case which involved a businessman who had been arrested and sentenced to death on the charge of being a Communist spy. Wu felt that the charge was unfounded, and May-ling was upset. Wu and his wife had been invited to lunch. When Chiang entered the dining room, May-ling said to him furiously, ‘Look! Look at what your son is doing!' Then, taking the Wus by the hand, she said, ‘Let's go!' and the three of them walked out of the lunch.
Chiang did not give in to his wife. And Wu insisted on resigning. Things reached an impasse on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, the Wus left for their country house in the hills. Just before they got into the hills, they stopped for lunch, deviating from their habit of having sandwiches for lunch in the car. During the break, the driver checked the car because he felt it had been behaving oddly. He found that the wheel nuts for both the front wheels were missing. If this had not been discovered, the wheels could well have come off on the bumpy roads, causing a fatal accident. The car had been serviced the night before, so the chance that this was the result of negligence was minuscule. Wu was certain that the car had been tampered with. He suspected Chiang, and tried several ways to find out whether Chiang was involved. Everything he learned convinced him that Chiang at least knew about the plot beforehand.
Wu did not breathe a word of his suspicions, as he knew he might never be able to leave Taiwan if the murder attempt leaked out. But he was even more determined to decamp. By coincidence, his alma mater, Grinnell College in America, was awarding him an honorary doctorate and had invited him to the ceremony. There were various other standing invitations to speak in the States. Citing these invitations, he applied for passports for himself and his family. There was no reply. Eventually, Wu wrote to May-ling that if he was refused passports, he would let people who had invited him know the reason. He got the passports – except the one for his thirteen-year-old son. The Generalissimo was keeping the boy as a hostage.
From America, Wu repeatedly wrote to request the passport for his son. In order to get the child out, he kept silent about his dispute with Chiang – and about the ‘car accident'.
Wu wrote three letters to May-ling asking for help. She replied, but said that there was nothing she could do. During this period, she immersed herself in ‘painting, painting', as she told Emma, after saying, ‘you know how much I dislike politics'.
To pre-empt Wu, Chiang started a smear campaign, accusing him of fleeing with stolen public funds. This backfired: Wu went public with allegations against Chiang – although still saying nothing about the ‘accident'. His revelations made the front page of the New York Times. With the media in hot pursuit for more stories, Wu wrote to Chiang with an ultimatum: let my son have his passport within thirty days, or there would be more unpalatable details. The ‘blackmail' worked. Exactly thirty days later, an official appeared at the home of Mrs Wu's sister with whom the boy was staying, and handed him his passport.
By now, the child had been kept as a hostage for a year. He had been repeatedly taken to the Nationalist Youth League, and told to condemn his father in public. This was the same treatment to which Ching-kuo himself had been subject when he had been a teenage hostage in Russia some twenty years before. Now the method was passed on to his underlings.
Chiang freed Wu's son and secured Wu's silence. The whole episode was hushed up with the help of the powerful US China Lobby, who were vociferous backers of the Nationalists. When Wu began to expose the Generalissimo, key figures in the Lobby leapt into action and told Wu to shut up and issue a statement supporting Chiang. Wu declined to issue the statement, but said no more. Eventually he took a teaching job in Georgia and faded out of the public eye. Only years later did he tell his story.
May-ling, who had played her role in getting Ching-kuo home, did her best for Wu's son. As soon as the son was free, she left Taiwan for America, disregarding the imminent inauguration of her husband as the ‘elected' president on 20 May 1954. Before the ‘election' she had told Emma wryly: ‘Undoubtedly my husband will be re-elected; he has designated Chen Cheng as his Vice. Yesterday at the opening meeting [of the National Assembly], I had to be present with him, and the effort has made me very tired.'
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On 3 September that year, Mao, following his own, rather unexpected agenda, opened artillery fire on the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy (Jinmen), a few kilometres off the mainland coast.*1 As this small island was considered the most likely jumping-off point for any move on Taiwan, it appeared that Mao might try and seize the last Nationalist base. May-ling flew back in October to be at her husband's side.
Washington responded to Mao's sabre-rattling by signing a Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan. It formalised America's recognition of Chiang's regime as the legitimate and sole government of the whole of China, and Taiwan was able to retain the ‘China' seat at the UN. To sustain this position, Chiang made retaking mainland China his basic state policy. ‘Fight back to the mainland!' was the core slogan of his regime. This was both his dream and a stance he must maintain if he wanted to keep the seat in the UN. It also gave hope to the millions of army men and civilians who had fled their homes with him, and who yearned to be reunited with their loved ones.
The shelling of Quemoy brought May-ling a strong sense of ‘the menace of Communist aggression'. News from the mainland about the deaths and suffering of former Nationalist members and their families had already horrified and appalled her. One night she sobbed loudly in her dreams and, when her husband asked her what the matter was, replied that she had seen Ching-ling bidding her farewell. She was afraid Red Sister had been killed.
She came to regard her husband as a defender of Taiwan and began to sympathise with his use of an iron, if bloody, fist. The couple were now kindred spirits once again. When Chiang wrote an important book, Soviet Russia in China, she was his dedicated collaborator and editor. Their renewed intimacy and camaraderie showed in the Author's Note, in which Chiang wrote, ‘On this very day, December 1, 1956, my wife and I are quietly celebrating our [twenty-ninth] wedding anniversary.' In the quintessentially Chiang Kai-shek style of mother-worship, he dedicated the book ‘to the sacred memory of our dearly beloved mothers, the late Madame Chiang, née Wang, and the late Madame Soong, née Nie. By this token my wife and I dedicate ourselves once more, as it were, to the supreme task to which we are called and thus strive to be not unworthy of our upbringing.'
May-ling exerted a softening influence on Chiang's harsh repression. She employed a Baptist minister, Rev. Chow Lien-hwa, who had obtained a PhD at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the US, to be the chaplain to the Chiangs, and sent him to preach in prison. Rev. Chow turned out to be a big hit with the political prisoners. One who was serving ten years recalled the minister's impact. The world he and his fellow inmates inhabited was bleak and brutal, consisting of hard labour, physical and mental abuse, as well as daily gatherings to chant ‘Generalissimo Chiang is our nation's great saviour!', ‘Kill Zhu [De, Communist army chief] and Mao!' Rev. Chow brought in an air of humanity and moments of relief and relaxation. With his presence and his messages, the prisoners felt dignified and human again. The intelligence apparatus did not like the Reverend; but May-ling made sure he was untouchable.
In 1958, May-ling went back to America. This time, she travelled the country warning the Americans about the Communist threat. As if to illustrate her point, Mao, again seemingly inexplicably, lobbed tens of thousands of shells onto the same small island of Quemoy in August. The Americans responded to May-ling's speeches emotionally. And their very public support for Taiwan boosted the morale of the Nationalists. Mao's bellicosity had made Chiang's rule only more secure.
Ching-kuo cabled May-ling about his father's delight – and his. This year marked a watershed in the relationship of the stepmother and stepson. Up to now it had been polite and formal. Ching-kuo had been addressing her as ‘Madame Chiang', or not using any form of address. Now he started to call her ‘my respected mother'. And in her communications with him she now simply referred to herself as ‘Mother'. May-ling was happy. One evening at Christmastime, she was watching the musical 42nd Street with old friends. Emma noted in her diary that ‘two or three times Mayling picked up her long Chinese gown and danced gaily around the room, imitating the steps, improvising a few wriggles & kicks of her own … It was wonderful to see her in such good spirits.'
May-ling returned to Taiwan in June 1959 without her husband having to plead with her. Chiang came as always to the airport, but this time the couple's beaming smiles in the brilliant sunshine were exceptional. Wearing sunglasses, a topee and a Sun Yat-sen suit, Chiang held up his wife's arm as she stretched out her gloved hand to shake hands with the welcome crowd. It was a picture of joy and affection. When Chiang was again ‘unanimously elected' president in 1960, May-ling acted quite differently from six years before, when she had been absent from his inauguration. This time, she busied herself in the ‘innumerable activities connected with the President's inauguration', she told Emma. ‘There have been so many functions and so many guests.' In her letters to friends she referred to her husband as ‘the President'. The harmony lasted, and Little Sister wrote to her brother T.V. in 1962 that they had just ‘spent a very happy 35th wedding anniversary'.
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May-ling really settled down in Taiwan to life with her husband. There were a lot of children around them: Ching-kuo's children, and T.A.'s two sons, who came from San Francisco for holidays. Their aunt engaged a tutor to teach them Mandarin. The boys ‘are perfect darlings, so well behaved, obedient and oh, so cute', she enthused. She cooked for them and danced with them. Everyone laughed a lot, even the Generalissimo.
Taiwan's first lady performed her official duties and charmed visiting VIPs. On discovering that polio was widespread on the island, she started a hospital for child sufferers. She went to see children of deceased soldiers often, and her knack of making the children feel loved and the teachers appreciated won her many fans. Twice she visited a hospital for lepers. Her photographer saw her going up to the patients, taking off her gloves without hesitation and shaking hands with them warmly and naturally. He was touched.
Much of the time, the Chiangs' life was one of leisure. Little Sister was rarely out of bed before eleven. She painted and played chess, saw a few women friends, and was followed round by a large pack of dogs (one was unpopular with the staff as it bit several of them). She took an interest in creating a rose garden in the presidential mansion. The Generalissimo's days consisted of reading newspapers and a few documents – or listening to other people reading them to him. He made a few inspection tours. In the early years, he had liked holding weekly meetings at which the main agenda was him delivering lengthy moralising lectures, which caused many a participant to doze off. Now, as years went by he dropped the lecturing and was content just to be glancing at the papers, napping, strolling, watching old movies and sightseeing. For someone who was apparently dedicated to retaking mainland China, he was doing remarkably little, no more than making one or two fantastical ‘plans'. Chiang was a realist and knew that the entire dream depended on the US attacking China militarily, the hope of which was slim.
The Generalissimo no longer wore uniform or struck a fighting pose. He appeared relaxed in a long flowing traditional gown, a walking stick in hand. He had a stoop, and his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth drooped. He grew into an old man in Taiwan.
He and May-ling travelled all round the gorgeous island. Since the coastline and mountains were sealed off to prevent a Communist invasion, the Chiangs had virtual monopoly of the beauty spots. Up to thirty villas dotted around were for their exclusive use, from old and elegant Japanese houses to new imitation imperial palaces. The last addition was a large nondescript complex euphemistically named the Revival Guest House. It was set deep in the hills only an hour's drive from the capital – and so suited Chiang in old age. The Generalissimo supervised the building work personally, visiting the site five days a week, and telephoning constantly when an idea struck him (‘change the colour of the walls', ‘plant more plum trees', etc.). May-ling added her touch, from the quality of the upholstery to the colour of her bathroom (it must be pink). Husband and wife had a row over where a particular window should be facing. They were united, though, in installing a chapel there, as they did in other resorts they frequented.
All the Chiang villas boasted magnificent views – those of the mountains or the ocean were for their eyes only. The lakes were slightly different. They could not be deemed off limits on the grounds of preventing a Red invasion, and the locals were not denied access. Still, if the Generalissimo liked a lake – such as Taiwan's pride, the Sun Moon Lake – a sizeable part was cordoned off. Regarding all land as his own, Chiang had a pagoda built on the islet in the middle of the lake to commemorate his mother.
Contrary to the popular impression that Chiang led a spartan life, the Generalissimo cared very much about comfort. He had anticipated that many mountains and forests on the island could not be reached by cars, and had brought two sedan chairs with him from the mainland, complete with chair-bearers.
Transport acquired while he was in Taiwan included fancy planes. When the Boeing 720 was produced, Chiang immediately bought one. His former personal pilot, General I Fu-en, argued strongly against it, pointing out that the plane was too big to be useful on the island; and far too expensive for this poor place that was facing the threat of war. The advice fell on deaf ears. Huge sums were spent; the plane was little used. Chiang also bought a seaplane, just so the couple could land on the lakes. During the trial flight, it crashed on landing, the pilots barely escaping drowning. This idea had to be abandoned.
Thanks to America, and Mao's war-posturing, the Chiangs lived a fine life in peace and style for two decades. Although he lost mainland China, Chiang was actually having a much grander time in Taiwan. Here he was more of an absolute ruler and able to impose much tighter control, and his Taiwan days were the most prolonged time of pleasure in his life and in their marriage. Even the heat was no problem: there were many cool retreats in the hills, where it was unnecessary even to use electric fans. The Generalissimo preferred to have staff fan him from behind. May-ling refrained from this type of indulgence.
When the Chiangs' lifestyle was made public later, it did not seem to enrage the locals. Chiang kept Taiwan from Mao's tyranny, for which people remain grateful. As for May-ling, with her counterpart on the mainland, Mme Mao, for comparison, nobody could deny that Taiwan was lucky to have her as its first lady. It is generally recognised that she did her duty conscientiously, that she exercised benign influence on the Generalissimo – and that she was a decent and kind person.
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In 1971, when Chiang was eighty-four and May-ling seventy-three, their pleasant life was shattered. US President Richard Nixon sought a rapprochement with mainland China, and announced that he would visit Beijing early the following year. While his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was in Beijing to prepare the trip, in October, the UN passed a resolution giving the ‘China' seat to Beijing, forcing Taiwan to leave the UN. As Western politicians began beating a path to Mao's door, May-ling, in anguish, fell back on her faith. Again and again, she recited this passage from the Bible: ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.'
To Emma she wrote, ‘I am hopeful that the pendulum of good sense and decency will sooner or later swing back … What is of import is not what happens, but how we react to it.'
Her husband hated Nixon violently, calling him ‘Ni[xon] the Clown' (ni-chou). He asserted that Nixon took this step purely to settle a personal score, viz. that Chiang had declined to contribute to his campaign fund. In his diary, Chiang wrote: ‘Before Ni the Clown was elected, he visited Taipei. He was full of hope that we would supply him with funds for his election campaign.' ‘I regarded him as a loathsome politician and treated him as a man of no substance. And I did not agree to help his campaign.' ‘Ni the Clown holds a grudge against me and so tries to do damage to me.'
Besides Nixon, Chiang's wrath was directed towards Ei-ling's son David – and even May-ling: ‘The change of policy to the worse by Ni the Clown must be blamed on [David]. Yet my wife believes in him.' ‘All this is the result of my wife only listening to [David]. He is criminally responsible for landing our country in this catastrophe.'
The Generalissimo sometimes took out his fury on the staff, striking them with his walking stick when in a temper. How heavy the blows were became a measure of the old man's physical condition. One day an aide told a doctor (Chiang, sensibly, was always polite to doctors; and he did not hit women), ‘The president is well now – his knocks are quite powerful today!'
Chiang's health was deteriorating. He had a stroke, which left him with a speech impediment. One day, while taking a stroll, his legs suddenly gave way and he had to be carried back into the house. His health problems were kept strictly secret, but Chiang began preparing to hand over power to his son Ching-kuo. At the end of 1971, he made Ching-kuo the prime minister and commander-in-chief of the armed forces (Chiang himself remaining the president). These appointments would be confirmed the following spring when the rubber-stamp national congress convened.
Her husband's health crises and Ching-kuo's impending succession gave May-ling a new, and purely personal, cause for anxiety: her presidential lifestyle might be in jeopardy. She had been living in considerable grandeur, with dozens of staff at her beck and call. While in the US, when she desired, the magnificent C-54, China–America, was dispatched for her use. Once her husband was gone, would Ching-kuo keep her in the same style? If she were to live in New York, which she wished to do, who would pay for the large staff she was used to, including round-the-clock security men, on whom her peace of mind depended? And twenty-four-hour nursing in her old age? Who would cover the salaries, living expenses and medical bills of her old faithful servants from Taiwan, whom she wanted to continue to employ? Even the fortune of the Kungs might not be sufficient. The Taiwan government had to foot most of the bill. But she was not at all sure she could count on Ching-kuo to do so. The Generalissimo's son and his own family were famous for living simply, even frugally. He might well find her extravagance unacceptable, however friendly he was with her. Ching-kuo and his family were not Soongs, and to May-ling this was very important. Once, when Ching-kuo's children were staying, together with T.A.'s sons, she tucked some gifts into her nephews' hands and whispered to them, only half in jest, not to tell the Chiang children. ‘You are my own flesh and blood,' she said.
May-ling decided that to protect her interest someone from her own family had to be in charge of Taiwan's money. She tried to persuade her husband to make nephew David the finance minister at the forthcoming congress, claiming that the fifty-six-year-old had made unrecognised contributions to the Nationalist cause.
Chiang was irritated. David, along with the Kung family, had been roundly condemned by many Nationalists for causing their party to lose the mainland. He had never worked in the Taiwan government – and had never even lived in Taiwan. On top of these obvious strikes against him, Chiang was already blaming him for Nixon's rapprochement with Beijing. As Nixon was about to go to Beijing, May-ling's demand could not have been made at a worse moment. It might seem that Little Sister had taken leave of her senses. But she was in a panic. There had never been a time under the Nationalist government when her family (which included Chiang the father, but not Chiang the son) did not hold the key to the country's coffers. The future scared her. She could not wait for a more opportune time to talk to her husband: his heart condition was such that he might die at any moment.
She kept badgering Chiang, which he found intolerable, and he shunned her company. He now only wanted to be with Ching-kuo, who would come every evening he could manage to have supper with his father. When Ching-kuo was delayed by work, Chiang would wait for him; he would not eat without his son. As soon as Ching-kuo appeared, Chiang would look happy and, after dinner, they would take a car ride together. (Chiang had no interest in his other, adopted, son Wei-go, and would send him away almost the minute he appeared.) When Ching-kuo was not with him, Chiang read his son's diary for comfort. Once Ching-kuo went to Quemoy for an inspection tour, and Chiang, having told him to take a break there for a few days, was restless until his son came back.
Eventually, Chiang relented and saw his wife. He was amicable at her seventy-fourth birthday party. May-ling grabbed the chance to promote her nephew again: the next government was about to be formed. At her instruction, David came to see his uncle to try to impress him. But his presence only got on the nerves of the Generalissimo, who became angry with his wife. In this period, Chiang described his wife implicitly as someone who if allowed to be close would behave ‘with impertinence'. ‘Never, ever let [that] woman get close,' he wrote in his diary on 12 June 1972. As for David, Chiang now regarded him as the source of all his misfortunes: ‘Shame, humiliation, hatred and rage – not for a moment is my mind free of them. The cause of my illness is [David]. The cause of my country's shame is also him.'
These words were written on 11 July. On the 20th, a car ride with May-ling left him in a state of ‘vexation and annoyance'. She may well have raised the matter of David's job again and he felt he was ‘enduring suffering'. The next day, he endorsed the final line-up of the Ching-kuo government, emphatically signalling that David was not included. This was the last entry in Chiang's diary. On the following day, the 22nd, he was hit by a massive heart attack and sank into a coma, which lasted six months.
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At the beginning of 1973, Chiang Kai-shek woke up. He lingered in this world as a very sick man for two more years and died in hospital on 5 April 1975, aged eighty-seven. He had selected his burial ground: a splendid spot next to Sun Yat-sen's grandiose mausoleum in Nanjing. As Nanjing was in Red China, Chiang gave orders for his coffin to be placed in his villa on the outstirts of Taipei, Cihu, waiting for the day when Communist rule collapsed on the mainland.
In his final years, his relationship with May-ling was tranquil. She resigned herself to reality, and showed tenderness towards the dying man. She would sit with him, chatting and keeping him company. Shortly before his death, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. About this most serious and life-threatening malady of her life, she breathed not a word to her husband – contrary to her past constant complaining about her relatively minor ailments. Before she went into hospital for surgery, she told the staff to say that she had flu and had to stay away in order not to infect him. May-ling cared about her husband. And she knew that her husband cared about her.
When Chiang died, May-ling burst into tears in private. In public, she was completely dry-eyed, making complicated arrangements with decisiveness and standing through the funeral with composure. She was a picture of dignity and restrained sorrow. In contrast, Ching-kuo wailed in public till he collapsed, and had to be supported to stand up. At one point, May-ling suggested that the doctors give him an injection to calm him down (it was not given.) This display of uncontrollable grief was most unusual. A heavy-built bear of a man, Ching-kuo was in his mid-sixties and the ruler of a dictatorial regime. He had also acquired superhuman strength to harness his feelings during his years as a hostage in Russia. And yet he seemed unable to handle his anguish this time. It was not only intense but also long-lasting. Long after his father's death, he continued to write his stepmother letters like these:
I sat alone in silence at Shilin [Chiang's official residence], in Father's bedroom, thinking about him and missing him with all my heart. In the evening, my whole family dined at Cihu to keep Father's bier company. Sadness and sorrow penetrated every fiber inside me …
Last night I went to sleep at Cihu, amidst autumn wind and autumn rain; already, a hint of chill was in the air …
Returning to Shilin, I saw that the yellow autumnal chrysanthemums in the garden were in bloom. This brought back so many memories that I missed Father with acute pain …
I just returned from Cihu where my wife and I had gone to pay respect to Father's bier. There I cut a branch of flowering osmanthus and placed it in front of the bier …
Last night I slept at Cihu. In the mountains the moon was bright, shining on the blooming flowers of camellia. I was touched by the calm and serenity of the place surrounding Father's bier. My only regret is that he is here alone and may feel isolated and sad …
It fell on May-ling to comfort him and remind him that compared to her own experience (she had hardly spent any time with her father, having left home as a child and returning when he had only months to live), Ching-kuo was lucky: his father died at a ripe old age and they were together for many decades.
The most extraordinary way Ching-kuo mourned his father could only be the outcome of something really exceptional. It may be that during one of those long private conversations in his last years, Chiang Kai-shek had divulged the secret of how he had managed to secure Ching-kuo's release from Stalin's clutches. That his father had got him out at such a high price – he lost mainland China – would have been a truly shattering thought.
Another emotional farewell was performed by a rather unlikely man – Mao, ruler of Red China, who had deposed Chiang and slaughtered millions to keep him deposed. Mao saw the Generalissimo as a worthy rival. One day bedridden at eighty-one, he sat up for hours in his enormous wooden bed. He did not eat, or speak. At his order, an eight-minute tape of stirring music was played over and over again to create a funereal atmosphere, while he beat time on his bed, wearing an emphatically solemn expression. The music had been set especially for Mao to a twelfth-century ‘poem of farewell'. Mao was bidding farewell to Chiang. He even rewrote the last two lines of the poem to emphasise the sense of a valediction. The rewritten lines read: ‘Go, let go, my honoured friend, / Do not look back.'
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May-ling left Taiwan for New York five months after her husband's death. She kept a picture of Chiang in his younger days on her bedside table. Her family and staff sometimes saw her talking to the photo, calling him ‘Honey'. Once when she was caught gazing at the photo by a nephew, she smiled to him and said, ‘He is so good-looking, isn't he?'
A sizeable retinue followed her across the ocean, including chefs, drivers, guards and nurses. Later, when she was very old, the number of her staff would reach thirty-seven. Ching-kuo, now Taiwan's leader, saw to it that she was sumptuously provided for. He had made a tearful pledge to his father before Chiang died. When they were alone together, Chiang had several times asked him to look after May-ling: ‘I can only rest in peace if you do this.' And once when they were together with May-ling, the Generalissimo had held both their hands and told Ching-kuo: ‘My son, you must love your mother as you love me.' After Chiang's death, Ching-kuo and May-ling maintained a close relationship, thrown further together by the changing future of Taiwan. May-ling never had to worry about her lifestyle as long as Ching-kuo was alive.
*1 For Mao's objectives in the shelling of Quemoy now and in 1958, see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday,?Mao, the Unknown Story, Chapters 37 and 38.