正文
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04garner.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Books of The Times
Wartime China’s Elegant Enigma
THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time, no woman in the world was more powerful.
Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.
The story of Mme. Chiang’s life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal, however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion (Methodist).
Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong Mei-ling’s two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10, studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College.
When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could lay on a “Scarlett O’Hara accent” she’d picked up in Georgia. (“Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She was also, Ms. Pakula writes, “short, chubby, round-faced and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks.”
By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about Soong Mei-ling. “She had not been given a Western education,” Ms. Pakula observes, “in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.”
The Soong sisters married well. One, Soong Qing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, China’s first president after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911. In a lavish ceremony in 1927, Soong Mei-ling married one of Sun’s former military aides, Chiang Kai-shek, a man who would become the head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and later its leader while in exile in Taiwan.
He was a hardened soldier who “dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals,” Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, “a near-hypnotic effect on men.”
Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly in the early ’40s. She appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1958. She was Chiang’s closest adviser and she constantly buffed his — and the country’s — rough edges.
The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang’s fame arrived in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause against Japan.
During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Chiang Kai-shek’s government, increasingly besieged by China’s Communist Party as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, “The manners of the Kuomintang” — the Nationalist Party — “in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.”
Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang’s own dark side when Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. “She never said a word,” Ms. Roosevelt wrote, “but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.”
The Book Review on ‘The Last Empress’ (November 29, 2009)Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula writes, and was probably sterile.
“The Last Empress” bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of China’s political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang’s own story often recedes far into the background. But Ms. Pakula’s book comes alive in its pepperings of telling detail about Mme. Chiang’s chaotic life.
Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words (“indehiscence,” “ochlocracy”) in her speeches in English, sending reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman, tired of Mme. Chiang’s appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as “Cash My-check.”
She details Mme. Chiang’s final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her 18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.
Ms. Pakula is also the author of “The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania” (1985) and “An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm” (1997). She views Mme. Chiang’s life with interest and occasionally, when warranted, with sympathy. She is clearly in agreement with Eleanor Roosevelt, who summed up Mme. Chiang’s striding performance on the world stage by remarking that while she could “talk beautifully about democracy,” she did “not know how to live democracy.”
在中國曆史上，宋美齡堪稱是位傳奇女性。近日，美國知名女性傳記作家海納帕庫拉完成了最新的傳記作品《最後的女皇》，以787頁的篇幅及大量生動的細節，詳盡描述了宋美齡漫長、傳奇而又豐富的一生。
讓羅斯福夫人見識黑暗一麵
“一雙美麗、小巧的手輕輕劃過自己的喉嚨。”
宋美齡出生於1897年的上海，在6個兄弟姐妹中排行第4。1920年，蔣介石與宋美齡在上海初次見麵，他立刻展開了熱烈的追求。帕庫拉描述蔣介石“總是喜歡穿著樸實的棉質製服，而且既不抽煙，也不喝酒”。1927年12月1日，蔣宋兩人於上海舉行婚禮。
1943年2月，為取得美國對中國抗戰的更多支持和同情，宋美齡作為蔣介石的特使訪問美國。她成為美國匏垢Ｗ芡澈頭蛉說墓蟊觶?詘墜?×?1天。她的風度和言談，贏得了羅斯福夫婦的敬佩。同時，羅斯福夫人在和宋美齡交往期間，也見識了她的黑暗一麵，當她詢問宋美齡如何搞定難對付的工人領袖時，“她沒有說話”，羅斯福夫人記錄道，“一雙美麗、小巧的手輕輕劃過自己的喉嚨。”
在這一係列曆史事件中，盡管宋美齡都是重要的親曆者，但關於她個人的故事常常退為背景。帕庫拉的新作則暴露了宋美齡很多無關大局的私密細節。
帕庫拉還認為宋美齡在美國期間曾與溫德爾威爾基、在1940年的總統選舉中輸給了羅斯福的共和黨候選人，持續了一段曖昧關係。
在曼哈頓的最後歲月
家裏有滿滿一櫃子的金條
1948年底，國民政府在國共內戰一路失守潰敗，蔣介石為了爭取美國的再次支持，將宋美齡再次遣派至美國，然而卻被當時的美國總統杜魯門冷凍處理，計劃失敗。帕庫拉認為杜魯門總統覺得宋美齡愛財，因為他把蔣介石稱為“提款機”。同時，帕庫拉女士寫道：“國民黨在表麵看上去是非常完美的組織，而唯一的錯誤就在於腐敗的領導層，他們承諾謊言，榨幹了老百姓們的血汗錢。”
1975年蔣介石病逝於台北，隔年宋美齡離開台灣，遠走美國，在那裏度過晚年，2003年去世，享年106歲。宋美齡膝下無子，她的丈夫在婚前就染有性病，帕庫拉女士寫道，因而他很可能不能生育。
帕庫拉詳述了宋美齡在瑰喜廣場10號的最後歲月。在曼哈頓上東城一所雅致的房子裏，她養了3條狗，雇了24個用人。曾有鄰居抱怨從她的18個房間的公寓裏傳出飯菜的異味，另外宋美齡家裏有滿滿一櫃子的金條。
帕庫拉此前曾為羅馬尼亞的瑪麗皇後和德國的腓特烈皇後寫過傳記。在這本新作《最後的女皇》裏，帕庫拉通過對政治曆史的研究，抓取宋美齡生活中的細小點滴，以講故事的口吻，生動地敘說了宋美齡的一生。
Books of The Times
Wartime China’s Elegant Enigma
THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time, no woman in the world was more powerful.
Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.
The story of Mme. Chiang’s life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal, however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion (Methodist).
Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong Mei-ling’s two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10, studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College.
When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could lay on a “Scarlett O’Hara accent” she’d picked up in Georgia. (“Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She was also, Ms. Pakula writes, “short, chubby, round-faced and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks.”
By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about Soong Mei-ling. “She had not been given a Western education,” Ms. Pakula observes, “in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.”
The Soong sisters married well. One, Soong Qing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, China’s first president after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911. In a lavish ceremony in 1927, Soong Mei-ling married one of Sun’s former military aides, Chiang Kai-shek, a man who would become the head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and later its leader while in exile in Taiwan.
He was a hardened soldier who “dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals,” Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, “a near-hypnotic effect on men.”
Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly in the early ’40s. She appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1958. She was Chiang’s closest adviser and she constantly buffed his — and the country’s — rough edges.
The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang’s fame arrived in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause against Japan.
During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Chiang Kai-shek’s government, increasingly besieged by China’s Communist Party as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, “The manners of the Kuomintang” — the Nationalist Party — “in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.”
Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang’s own dark side when Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. “She never said a word,” Ms. Roosevelt wrote, “but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.”
The Book Review on ‘The Last Empress’ (November 29, 2009)Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula writes, and was probably sterile.
“The Last Empress” bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of China’s political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang’s own story often recedes far into the background. But Ms. Pakula’s book comes alive in its pepperings of telling detail about Mme. Chiang’s chaotic life.
Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words (“indehiscence,” “ochlocracy”) in her speeches in English, sending reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman, tired of Mme. Chiang’s appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as “Cash My-check.”
She details Mme. Chiang’s final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her 18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.
Ms. Pakula is also the author of “The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania” (1985) and “An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm” (1997). She views Mme. Chiang’s life with interest and occasionally, when warranted, with sympathy. She is clearly in agreement with Eleanor Roosevelt, who summed up Mme. Chiang’s striding performance on the world stage by remarking that while she could “talk beautifully about democracy,” she did “not know how to live democracy.”
在中國曆史上，宋美齡堪稱是位傳奇女性。近日，美國知名女性傳記作家海納帕庫拉完成了最新的傳記作品《最後的女皇》，以787頁的篇幅及大量生動的細節，詳盡描述了宋美齡漫長、傳奇而又豐富的一生。
讓羅斯福夫人見識黑暗一麵
“一雙美麗、小巧的手輕輕劃過自己的喉嚨。”
宋美齡出生於1897年的上海，在6個兄弟姐妹中排行第4。1920年，蔣介石與宋美齡在上海初次見麵，他立刻展開了熱烈的追求。帕庫拉描述蔣介石“總是喜歡穿著樸實的棉質製服，而且既不抽煙，也不喝酒”。1927年12月1日，蔣宋兩人於上海舉行婚禮。
1943年2月，為取得美國對中國抗戰的更多支持和同情，宋美齡作為蔣介石的特使訪問美國。她成為美國匏垢Ｗ芡澈頭蛉說墓蟊觶?詘墜?×?1天。她的風度和言談，贏得了羅斯福夫婦的敬佩。同時，羅斯福夫人在和宋美齡交往期間，也見識了她的黑暗一麵，當她詢問宋美齡如何搞定難對付的工人領袖時，“她沒有說話”，羅斯福夫人記錄道，“一雙美麗、小巧的手輕輕劃過自己的喉嚨。”
在這一係列曆史事件中，盡管宋美齡都是重要的親曆者，但關於她個人的故事常常退為背景。帕庫拉的新作則暴露了宋美齡很多無關大局的私密細節。
帕庫拉還認為宋美齡在美國期間曾與溫德爾威爾基、在1940年的總統選舉中輸給了羅斯福的共和黨候選人，持續了一段曖昧關係。
在曼哈頓的最後歲月
家裏有滿滿一櫃子的金條
1948年底，國民政府在國共內戰一路失守潰敗，蔣介石為了爭取美國的再次支持，將宋美齡再次遣派至美國，然而卻被當時的美國總統杜魯門冷凍處理，計劃失敗。帕庫拉認為杜魯門總統覺得宋美齡愛財，因為他把蔣介石稱為“提款機”。同時，帕庫拉女士寫道：“國民黨在表麵看上去是非常完美的組織，而唯一的錯誤就在於腐敗的領導層，他們承諾謊言，榨幹了老百姓們的血汗錢。”
1975年蔣介石病逝於台北，隔年宋美齡離開台灣，遠走美國，在那裏度過晚年，2003年去世，享年106歲。宋美齡膝下無子，她的丈夫在婚前就染有性病，帕庫拉女士寫道，因而他很可能不能生育。
帕庫拉詳述了宋美齡在瑰喜廣場10號的最後歲月。在曼哈頓上東城一所雅致的房子裏，她養了3條狗，雇了24個用人。曾有鄰居抱怨從她的18個房間的公寓裏傳出飯菜的異味，另外宋美齡家裏有滿滿一櫃子的金條。
帕庫拉此前曾為羅馬尼亞的瑪麗皇後和德國的腓特烈皇後寫過傳記。在這本新作《最後的女皇》裏，帕庫拉通過對政治曆史的研究，抓取宋美齡生活中的細小點滴，以講故事的口吻，生動地敘說了宋美齡的一生。
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