Word: lings
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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...
...charmed, glamorous destiny seemed to await Mei-ling from the moment she was born into a remarkable family. (Her sister Soong Ching-ling would marry Sun Yat-sen, modern China's founder.) Their father, C.V. "Charlie" Soong, who had been virtually adopted by a group of kindly Methodist evangelists in North Carolina, returned to China intending to be a missionary but instead became an entrepreneur. Mei-ling, at the age of 11, entered high school in Macon, Georgia. Nine years later, she returned home armed with a degree in English literature from Wellesley College, the vestiges of a Southern drawl...
...Fame in America came to Mei-ling in a more serendipitous fashion. In late 1942, a painful skin disease brought her to a New York hospital. Upon her release, she was invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, to stay at the White House for a week. Yet 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...
...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...
...Chiang's wife, she was Born Soong May-ling in 1898 on the island of Hainan - site of the spy-plane incident that marked the first foreign policy crisis of the Bush administration - Madame Chiang was raised as a Christian and educated at Wellesley College where she graduated in 1917. Her sister, Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist leader who created modern China after overthrowing the Qing imperial dynasty in 1911. May-ling married the young Kuomintang (KMT) general Chiang Kai-shek in 1926, a year after he'd taken control of the party and the year before...