24 In the Face of a Changed Time
May-ling's last years in New York coincided with the transformation of mainland China after the death of Mao in 1976. Deng Xiao-ping, the post-Mao supreme leader, opened the doors of the country and embraced capitalism. Beijing gained international appeal. When America established full diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, Taiwan seemed to be in trouble. May-ling, worried, was disappointed with her adopted country. During Taiwan's negotiations with Washington to define a future relationship, she told Ching-kuo that he must insist that America have no contact with the mainland. It was such an unachievable goal that Taiwan did not put it on the table. May-ling berated Ching-kuo. Feeling frustrated and helpless, she came up with the idea of donating large sums of money to anti-Communist lobbies in Washington and sent a secret messenger to Ching-kuo to deliver her plan. But nothing could reverse the tide.
To May-ling, post-Mao China was no different from what it had been in Mao's time. She referred to Deng Xiao-ping as ‘Deng the Bandit', continuing the old-style language used by her late husband. She was in despair that the world seemed to be taken in by Communist China.
In 1981, when Ching-ling was dying, Beijing invited May-ling to pay her sister a final visit; she did not reply. After Red Sister died, she was again invited, to the funeral; again she ignored the invitation. May-ling felt sad that she could not have a last meeting with her sister. Once she sat up all night talking to an aide about Red Sister, reminiscing about the time when Ching-ling had brought her, a child, to America. But she was determined not to lend the Communists any propaganda ammunition.
At this time, a leading Chinese-language newspaper in America published a letter allegedly written by Ching-ling to the Central Committee of the CCP, sharply criticising it. The letter, which was in fact a fake, made May-ling ecstatic. She wrote to Ching-kuo that the pain inside her for thirty years over the fact that her sister had chosen to stay and collaborate with the Reds was now eased. Her sister had seen through them after all, and had spoken up! ‘She became disillusioned with the Communists – I am so relieved.' She started to imagine that if she or Big Sister had been in Shanghai at the time of the Communist takeover, they might have been able to persuade Ching-ling to leave. For many days, she lived in exhilaration and urged her stepson to announce the news to the next Nationalist congress. Ching-kuo seems to have known that the letter was not genuine and refrained from making the announcement. Not wishing to disappoint his stepmother, he told her that he had to protect the identity of the source, a Nationalist agent working underground on the mainland.
The following year, Beijing made another overture to Taiwan by having the veteran official Liao Cheng-zhi, son of Zhong-kai, who knew the Generalissimo well, send a lengthy telegram to Ching-kuo. The leader of Taiwan refused to respond. He sent it on to May-ling – and she offered to reply, to his delight. May-ling wrote a fiery open letter, which was carried in all the newspapers in Taiwan. It was the kind of writing that Red Sister used to do against Chiang Kai-shek, when Little Sister had remained rather detached. Now, it seems that, in their old ages, Ching-ling's moral outrage had faded and May-ling's righteous passion had grown intense. Reminding Liao the junior that he had just ‘barely escaped the mouth of the tiger' through surviving the horrendous Cultural Revolution, in which untold millions had suffered appallingly, May-ling asked him whether he was out of his mind to expect Taiwan to submit to such a regime.
It was in rage and frustration that May-ling lashed out at a book called The Soong Dynasty by the writer Sterling Seagrave, which was published in 1985 and became a bestseller in America. The book portrayed the Soong family in a highly unfavourable light. This was no new experience for May-ling: she had seen worse accusations. But at this point she resented more than ever the fact that her family was singled out for blame for the misfortune of China while the Communists seemed to get off scot-free. Claiming that the author was a ‘tool of the Communist bandits', May-ling reacted in an unprecedented militant manner. She told Ching-kuo to send over his smart son Hsiao-yung to be given instructions on how to deal with the book. She presided over a ‘strategy', which included taking out full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post with the headline: ‘A Solemn Statement Refuting Distortions of Modern Chinese History in THE SOONG DYNASTY'. Although written in the name of a host of historians in Taiwan, the advertisements were obviously the handiwork of the regime. They only excited public interest in the book and boosted its sales enormously. Much ridicule was brought onto Taiwan. But May-ling was adamant. She called what she was doing ‘a general offensive against the bandits', and asserted that this would ‘without doubt thwart the burgeoning sales of the book'. When Seagrave told a television interviewer that he was hiding on a boat for fear of being bumped off, she scoffed.
A few months before, a Taiwanese author and biographer of Ching-kuo, Henry Liu, had been gunned down in San Francisco by gangsters working for Nationalist intelligence. The American public had been appalled and had condemned Ching-kuo's government as a gangster-style outfit just like that of his father. Now they were further repelled. It seemed that US arms sales to Taiwan might be in jeopardy. But May-ling remained obsessed with her battle against Seagrave.
Still in this mood, she returned to Taiwan in 1986 for the upcoming centenary of her late husband's birth. The main event was held on the colossal Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Square dominated by a vast memorial hall with a gigantic statue of Chiang, befitting the tradition of the modern personality cult pioneered by the Nationalists' Father of China, Sun Yat-sen. Fifty thousand well-organised men and women gathered. Masses of colourful balloons were released, as were white doves. May-ling read out a speech in her somewhat stilted Mandarin. It was a hard Party piece, only softened by a charming smile on her face when she finished reading.
This occasion turned out to be the last vestige of the Chiang era. The Generalissimo's successor, Ching-kuo, was about to end his father's legacy of dictatorship.
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During the twelve years when he was a hostage in Stalinist Russia, Ching-kuo had been exiled to factories, a village and the gulag. Struggling at the bottom of society, he had developed an affinity with the ordinary people, and had come to like them and admire them. He made many Russian friends. One was an orphan named Krav, who was a technician in one of the factories. ‘He taught me many things … We became friends in need, sharing our pleasures, our sorrows and our hardships.' The workers liked Ching-kuo, recognised his talent and recommended him to be an assistant director. When he worked as a peasant, the mostly illiterate villagers respected him and trusted him to manage the affairs of the village. In the gulag, he did hard labour alongside people from all walks of life who had fallen foul of the regime, and again he formed a profound ‘attachment in my heart for these people' – so much so that when he was released, he was almost unwilling to leave. ‘I was so sentimental that I could hardly bid my poor companions good-bye.'
Although in the early 1950s Ching-kuo took his father's orders and carried out the ‘white terror' in order to secure the new base for the Nationalists, he nevertheless managed to gain the reputation of being ‘a man of the people' after he came to power. In contrast with his father who had had virtually no contact with the locals, Ching-kuo went out of his way to approach them. On his non-stop inspection tours, he preferred to eat in small, roadside food stalls, chatting to other customers. In appearance, he ditched his father's posture of awesomeness, or willpower, and chose to look ordinary. In substance, he reversed much of his father's policy as soon as the Generalissimo died. Chiang the senior had taken scant interest in Taiwan's economic development; Ching-kuo made it his top priority. He oversaw ‘the Taiwan Miracle', during which the island enjoyed double-digit growth, and average income tripled in the six years from 1977. A considerable degree of liberalisation followed. For the first time, citizens were able to leave the island freely as tourists. Old Nationalist soldiers who had fled the mainland were allowed to go there and visit their families. The coastline and mountains that had been sealed off were opened to the public.
The Ching-kuo government was widely reputed to be incorrupt. He and his own family accumulated no wealth. Around him he gathered a group of public-spirited talents, who prided themselves on being in office for public service and not personal gain. This absence of corruption and the spirit of performing their duty with diligence underscored Taiwan's success. While his one-party rule refused to tolerate the Communists or activists for Taiwan independence, repression under him was restrained and he was largely popular.
And he would lead Taiwan onto the road to democracy.
In 1985, Ching-kuo publicly and definitively rejected passing over power to members of his family, by announcing that none of his three sons would inherit the presidency. His own succession had not been of his choosing. It had been thrust on him and he had felt more the weight of responsibility than pleasure. His staff noticed that he was always agitated on the night before the day scheduled for top-level meetings. A man of simple tastes, he was not attracted to the perks of a dictator.
Under Ching-kuo Taiwan was changing into a very different place. Economic prosperity created a society bubbling with aspirations. Calls for reforms rose from every corner, not least from those who had been abroad for tourism and studies, which numbered 300,000 every year. Publications defying the official line were mushrooming. With this tremendous groundswell for democratisation, in 1987, Ching-kuo lifted martial law, allowing opposition parties and a free press.
This historic step was taken while May-ling was in Taiwan: she had lingered there after attending her husband's centenary celebration – to watch where the reforms would lead. She had mixed feelings. She was not against democratisation, but she was anxious that her husband should remain sacred and her own interest must be protected. For now she was not too worried. Ching-kuo was only in his seventies, and could be in charge for many more years.
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On 13 January 1988, Ching-kuo suddenly died, aged seventy-seven. Although he had been sick from diabetes and other ailments, his death was unexpected. That morning, his son Hsiao-yung had put his head round the door to say good morning and had then gone off to have lunch with May-ling. Shortly after the young man left, Ching-kuo passed away. None of his family was with him.
Lee Teng-hui, the vice president and a native Taiwanese, stepped into the presidency. This alarmed May-ling. Lee had no manifest loyalty to herself or her husband. She feared, once again, that her future comfort might be under threat. Within days, her niece Jeanette had flown in from New York and aggressively taken over the Grand Hotel of Taiwan. Situated on top of a hill and looking like a traditional Chinese palace, with sweeping golden roofs and colossal bright red pillars, this landmark building was constructed in the 1950s to serve as a luxury government guest house. May-ling had been closely involved in building it, and Jeanette had managed it, in reality if not in name, treating it as if it were her family property. When Ching-kuo came to power, new rules were introduced and Jeanette was marginalised. Now she descended on the hotel, tore up the regulations, literally, in front of the manager, fired the chief accountant, and forced the chairman of the board to resign. Backed by May-ling, a Chiang crony was made the chairman, and Jeanette was in charge of the lucrative cash cow again.
To protect her interests, the ex-first lady, now ninety, sought political power. She tried to keep the chairmanship of the Nationalist party from President Lee. (Both the Chiangs had been party chairmen as well as presidents.) As the new party chairman had to be formally nominated by its leadership, May-ling asked the Nationalist leaders to delay the nomination – so that she could buy time and install a man of her choice. Her proposal met with resistance across the board, including from old Chiang devotees. They wanted Lee to take over. One midnight she telephoned an official who had been her husband's protégé, but he declined to do what she asked. It was clear that no one wanted her to interfere and all longed to move on, into a new era. The newly liberated media turned against her. May-ling had to back down. She made one last attempt at trying to tell the Nationalist party not to deviate into novel and fundamental changes. The party listened politely, but paid no attention.
May-ling, still physically tough and mentally agile, offered no further resistance. She accepted defeat and returned to New York in 1991, disassociating herself from politics in Taiwan. The island raced forward towards democracy, and in 1996 President Lee became the first democratically elected president.
Democratic Taiwan actually treated May-ling generously. Although rules introduced under Lee stipulated the allowances for retired presidents and spouses – and Ching-kuo's widow and family followed those rules strictly – an exception was made for Little Sister. Her lifestyle was by and large guaranteed. The Grand Hotel continued to serve as her private kitchen, sending chefs and waiters to America. Security guards, nurses and servants were still coming year after year. But some extravagance had to be toned down. In 1994, when she made her last trip to Taiwan to visit Jeanette who was dying of cancer (Jeanette preferred to be treated in Taiwan and not in America because there she could indulge in such privileges as having her dog to stay with her in her hospital suite), the Taiwan government booked a whole first-class cabin for the former first lady rather than dispatching a special plane. It also asked the Kungs to contribute a portion of her upkeep, which they did, even though some relatives grumbled offstage.
For a while May-ling fretted about being short of money. But on the whole, she faced the changed time with quietude. Praying and reading the Bible, the major activities of her last years, gave her peace. Near the end of a long and dramatic life, and at the top of the world at times, she hardly ever reminisced about her past and never mentioned any glories. She declined all interview requests. When people suggested naming a street after her, she vetoed it, quoting a verse from Ecclesiastes: ‘Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.' She waited for God to take her away, often muttering, ‘People of my generation and even the younger generation are gone one after another; I am still here.' ‘God has forgotten me.'
God remembered her when she was 105 and had lived to see three centuries. On 23 October 2003, May-ling died peacefully in her sleep. She left no will, except saying that she wished to be interred with her sister Ei-ling's family. The Kungs had bought two private family rooms in Ferncliff Cemetery, forty kilometres north of midtown Manhattan. These rooms were constructed of fine pale-white marble and decorated with stained-glass windows and simple altars. May-ling's funeral was arranged by her relatives and staff, and was low-key. There was even a glitch during the placing of the casket: it could not be fitted into the slot. Some demolition work had to be done on the spot to enlarge the space. All this was a far cry from the elaborately planned and executed interment of her husband. But then, Chiang Kai-shek's remains, kept in style for public display, had to endure red paint splashed over it by protesters, and constant public dispute about whether it justified taxpayers' money. May-ling, buried like an ordinary New Yorker, was left in peace, next to her beloved sister and her family. The day after the burial, Taiwan's then president, Chen Shui-bian, came to her Manhattan home to pay respects, and honoured her by presenting a flag of Taiwan to her relatives. Chen was the first Opposition leader to have been elected president, in the year 2000. May-ling had truly moved with history into the twenty-first century.