Word: soong
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Having grown up tracking his father's venality, Jasper has little use for the man. But two other observers provide a less sinister account. Snow Soong, daughter of the biggest Chinese tin magnate in the valley, is a willowy beauty whom Johnny woos and weds through guile and determination. Barely a year later Snow dies giving birth to Jasper, but not before producing a diary that forms the second narrative. It depicts Johnny as a clueless bumpkin whom she can't wait to ditch, probably for a suave, handsome Japanese professor named Kunichika who has befriended her parents...
...Soong Dynasty is a raffish account of how the East was conquered, it is no less a tale of how the West was won. The Soongs, Seagrave contends, knew exactly how to beguile America, one day with images of the mysterious East, the next with snapshots of God-fearing, Westernized democrats battling the Red Menace. While Harvard-educated T.V. wheedled millions out of his poker buddies in Washington, Wellesley Graduate May-ling wooed Congress with her slit skirt and florid rhetoric. In the process, the Soongs also hypnotized such powerful cheerleaders as Henry Luce and Columnist Joseph Alsop...
...unhappy families may be dissimilar, but the Soongs were more dissimilar than others. "Revolutionary," "Concubine," "Speculator," "Dallas Oil Man" and "Shanghai Debutante" are just some of the labels that adhere to the descendants of Charlie Soong, a Chinese stow-away reared by North Carolina Methodists. Of the founding father's six children, four gate-crashed their way into history: Eldest Son T.V. (for Tse-ven) parlayed his career as a financial administrator into a fortune that made him, by some accounts, the richest man in the world; Eldest Daughter Ai-ling came to power behind the scenes by marrying...
...contention of Sterling Seagrave's compelling new book that the Soongs were, pre-eminently, a family in the Mario Puzo sense. Invoking the Borgias, the author portrays the clan as a gang of thieves most at home in the Wild East, a hugger-mugger underworld where dishes were routinely poisoned, enemies buried alive and coffins left on doorsteps. The Soong Dynasty is a guided (and sometimes misguided) tour through this blood-soaked landscape. En route, a rush of striking images flash past: the uprooted Charlie living off the kindness of Southern strangers and being fed, on antebellum verandas, heavy doses...
Below all, Seagrave's bright irreverence in portraying Sun Yat-sen as a character from opera bouffe and Chiang as an "ill-tempered bravo" almost contradicts the charges of Machiavellian villainy he wishes to press. The Soong Dynasty brings much pungent material to light; in the end, however, it works less well as an argument with history than as a crackling, made-for-TV story unraveled with fluency and flair. --By Pico Iyer