Word: chiangs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...temperament and the times were well matched. It was 1942: Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Republic of China was struggling to resist the invading forces of imperial Japan. Soong Mei-ling, then 45 and the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, happened to be in the U.S. for medical reasons. Seizing the opportunity to champion her country's cause, she summoned all her energy and flashing-eyed eloquence to the task of urging the U.S. to side with her embattled land. For seven months, Madame Chiang, as she was best known in the West, seemed...
...ASIA Philippines: Elevated Threat Best Friends: Phil. and U.S. Eulogy: Mme. Chiang Kai-shek Mme. Chiang: Worldly ambitions...
...little Chinese that she had to be re-educated in her native tongue by a tutor. ("The only thing Oriental about me," she once wrote, "is my face.") In the early 1920s, she was a flower of Shanghai's intellectual community when she caught the eye of Chiang Kai-shek. He was then chairman of the Supreme National Defense Council. Neither minded that he already had a childhood bride and a son tucked away in the provinces. In 1927, Mei-ling and Chiang were married in Shanghai by a YMCA functionary, and in the years that followed, Madame Chiang became...
...even as his guest was enthralling his nation, Roosevelt was wary of Mei-ling's formidable charm. One night at dinner, the President asked in passing how she would deal with a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Without missing a beat, Madame Chiang passed her hand across her throat. Eleanor Roosevelt later said: "Those delicate, little petal-like fingers?you could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung...
...home, Mei-ling preserved the same balance, sometimes scrambling over the ruins of heavily bombed Chongqing?China's wartime capital?to tend the wounded, sometimes burnishing Chiang's image with her social poise. It was Mei-ling's great and abiding gift to remain equally at home with the silvery pleasantries of the social world and with the adamantine realities of the political. That powerful combination, fired by an implacable distrust of communism, enabled her to remain a central figure in Chiang's government even after the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan when the Communists triumphed in 1949. Upon...