Growing up in Mao’s China, Jung Chang heard repeated accounts of the three Soong sisters who helped shape her country’s republican revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. “One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country,” ran the party line, reducing the lives of Ei-ling (the sharp financial operator), May-ling (first “First Lady” of Republican China) and Ching-ling (Mao’s vice president) Soong to fairy-tale simplicity.
Her breathtaking new triple biography restores these “tiger-willed” women to their extraordinarily complex humanity. I was constantly reminded of the Mitford sisters as I read of their witty, affectionate sibling bonds, glamorous lives, fiercely opposed political ideologies and privileged detachment from the street-level impact of those beliefs.
As in her bestselling 1991 memoir Wild Swans, Chang uses a gripping and emotional personal story to draw Western readers into the history of China, a country in which her books are still banned and which she is only permitted to visit for 15 days a year, following the publication of her damning 2005 Mao biography (co-written with her husband Jon Halliday).
The Soong sisters were the daughters of the remarkable Charlie Soong. Born in 1861, he was raised as a peasant on Hainan Island, off China’s southern coast, and left home at 14 to seek his fortune overseas. Arriving in America, aged 17, the bright, cheerful and deferential lad immediately endeared himself to his American employers and quickly converted to Christianity. He took his faith – both in Jesus and in the American way of life – back to Shanghai with him. There he built a hugely successful business importing machinery and married Miss Ni, the devout daughter of a Protestant missionary.
Miss Ni was an “unyieldingly independent” character who had rebelled against her parents’ attempts to bind her feet (as they had done with her siblings) and developed a serenespirituality. May-ling recalled that one of her strongest childhood memories was “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.”
Their eldest child, Ei-ling, was born in 1889. Five more would follow: Ching-ling, May-ling and three brothers known by the initials TV, TL and TA. A doting father, Charlie Soong was determined his daughters would be the first Chinese women to enjoy an American education. Serious, clever, self-disciplined Ei-ling was sent, alone, across the ocean aged 14. “Dreamy, pretty” Ching-ling followed at the same age, accompanied by the lively, chubby, impulsive May-ling, aged justnine.
The girls did not know that their father had been secretly funding revolutionary Sun Yat-sen’s shambolic plans to overthrow the Qing dynasty. But when they returned to Shanghai in 1909 the sisters adhered to his cause and both Ei-ling and Ching-ling were courted by the man who became China’s first interim president and “Father of the Republic” in 1912.
Ei-ling became Sun’s secretary but rejected his romantic overtures to marry a businessman, H H Kung. Ching-ling, then 20, was more easily seduced. The loving Charlie Soong, seeing how appallingly his former hero treated his first wife and concubines, tried to prevent his daughter from marrying this 48-year-old narcissist constantly stalked by assassins. Chang tells us that Sun did not let his Korean concubines leave the house, expected their feet to be bound and employed two wet nurses to meet his thirst for human breast milk, which they squeezed into a bowl for him. But Ching-ling – modelling herself on “heroines with a cause” like Joan of Arc – ran away and married him.
Sun failed to cherish her devotion and bravery and used her as a pawn in the period’s complex political game, once leaving her as “bait” for opposing military forces while he fled. She miscarried during her terrifying escape from this siege and was unable to have children afterwards. Sun died of liver cancer in 1925, hoping to be immortalised in a glass-topped casket like Lenin. The reader is allowed a dry chuckle when his vanity is thwarted by the Chinese climate, which makes such an “immortalisation” impossible.
May-ling preferred the gossip and glamour of Shanghai social life to politics or business, but Ei-ling convinced her to marry Chiang Kai-shek, the dour Generalissimo. In 1928, Chiang became president of the right-wing military regime, with Ei-ling’s husband serving as a government minister. In 1942, charming, English-speaking May-ling was instrumental in winning international support for her husband Chiang’s nationalist government, although flight from his enemies also caused her to miscarry. Meanwhile Ei-ling and her husband profited from “colossally corrupt” sales to the regime both before and during the Second World War, eventually causing President Truman to denounce them as “thieves”.
After the war, “Red Sister” Ching-ling found herself on the other side of the political divide from her siblings. Chiang had her lover executed and she did her best to support Mao Zedong’s uprising against him. Yet through it all, Red Sister was sending delicacies like freshwater prawns to May-ling, the Generalissimo’s wife, who sent back ginger cake and cheese biscuits.
After Mao seized power in 1949, Ching-ling became his vice president and received the “royal treatment”. He gave her a European-style villa with a large garden with a lush lawn, surrounded by exotic flowers. This detail must strike a painful chord in Chang, who still recalls being a schoolgirl when Mao proclaimed the cultivation of grass and flowers as a “bourgeois habit”, turning playing fields and parks into wastelands.
Ching-ling died in China in 1981. Both Ei-ling and May-ling died in New York (in 1973 and 2003). Ei-ling was the only one to have children and Chang ends her action-packed (if occasionally overwhelming) book with the odd tale of Ei-ling’s son, Louis Kung, who married the Hollywood film star Debra Paget after she had turned down a proposal from Elvis Presley (her co-star in Love Me Tender). Louis built his family a “fortress” in Texas with one of the world’s largest private nuclear bunkers underneath it, a “fantasy cavern” now worth $400-500 million (£310-388 million). It’s currently for lease, advertised as offering some of the world’s most secure data storage facilities.
Despite China’s current difficulties, Chang has been telling interviewers that she feels “hopeful” about her birth-country’s future. Her book is certainly a reminder that China has experienced democracy before, between 1913 and 1928. The people took to it surprisingly easily. She believes they have the capacity to do so again.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is published by Jonathan Cape at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
