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.”
在中国历史上，宋美龄堪称是位传奇女性。近日，美国知名女性传记作家海纳帕库拉完成了最新的传记作品《最后的女皇》，以787页的篇幅及大量生动的细节，详尽描述了宋美龄漫长、传奇而又丰富的一生。
让罗斯福夫人见识黑暗一面
“一双美丽、小巧的手轻轻划过自己的喉咙。”
宋美龄出生于1897年的上海，在6个兄弟姐妹中排行第4。1920年，蒋介石与宋美龄在上海初次见面，他立刻展开了热烈的追求。帕库拉描述蒋介石“总是喜欢穿着朴实的棉质制服，而且既不抽烟，也不喝酒”。1927年12月1日，蒋宋两人于上海举行婚礼。
1943年2月，为取得美国对中国抗战的更多支持和同情，宋美龄作为蒋介石的特使访问美国。她成为美国匏垢Ｗ芡澈头蛉说墓蟊觯?诎坠?×?1天。她的风度和言谈，赢得了罗斯福夫妇的敬佩。同时，罗斯福夫人在和宋美龄交往期间，也见识了她的黑暗一面，当她询问宋美龄如何搞定难对付的工人领袖时，“她没有说话”，罗斯福夫人记录道，“一双美丽、小巧的手轻轻划过自己的喉咙。”
在这一系列历史事件中，尽管宋美龄都是重要的亲历者，但关于她个人的故事常常退为背景。帕库拉的新作则暴露了宋美龄很多无关大局的私密细节。
帕库拉还认为宋美龄在美国期间曾与温德尔威尔基、在1940年的总统选举中输给了罗斯福的共和党候选人，持续了一段暧昧关系。
在曼哈顿的最后岁月
家里有满满一柜子的金条
1948年底，国民政府在国共内战一路失守溃败，蒋介石为了争取美国的再次支持，将宋美龄再次遣派至美国，然而却被当时的美国总统杜鲁门冷冻处理，计划失败。帕库拉认为杜鲁门总统觉得宋美龄爱财，因为他把蒋介石称为“提款机”。同时，帕库拉女士写道：“国民党在表面看上去是非常完美的组织，而唯一的错误就在于腐败的领导层，他们承诺谎言，榨干了老百姓们的血汗钱。”
1975年蒋介石病逝于台北，隔年宋美龄离开台湾，远走美国，在那里度过晚年，2003年去世，享年106岁。宋美龄膝下无子，她的丈夫在婚前就染有性病，帕库拉女士写道，因而他很可能不能生育。
帕库拉详述了宋美龄在瑰喜广场10号的最后岁月。在曼哈顿上东城一所雅致的房子里，她养了3条狗，雇了24个用人。曾有邻居抱怨从她的18个房间的公寓里传出饭菜的异味，另外宋美龄家里有满满一柜子的金条。
帕库拉此前曾为罗马尼亚的玛丽皇后和德国的腓特烈皇后写过传记。在这本新作《最后的女皇》里，帕库拉通过对政治历史的研究，抓取宋美龄生活中的细小点滴，以讲故事的口吻，生动地叙说了宋美龄的一生。
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.”
在中国历史上，宋美龄堪称是位传奇女性。近日，美国知名女性传记作家海纳帕库拉完成了最新的传记作品《最后的女皇》，以787页的篇幅及大量生动的细节，详尽描述了宋美龄漫长、传奇而又丰富的一生。
让罗斯福夫人见识黑暗一面
“一双美丽、小巧的手轻轻划过自己的喉咙。”
宋美龄出生于1897年的上海，在6个兄弟姐妹中排行第4。1920年，蒋介石与宋美龄在上海初次见面，他立刻展开了热烈的追求。帕库拉描述蒋介石“总是喜欢穿着朴实的棉质制服，而且既不抽烟，也不喝酒”。1927年12月1日，蒋宋两人于上海举行婚礼。
1943年2月，为取得美国对中国抗战的更多支持和同情，宋美龄作为蒋介石的特使访问美国。她成为美国匏垢Ｗ芡澈头蛉说墓蟊觯?诎坠?×?1天。她的风度和言谈，赢得了罗斯福夫妇的敬佩。同时，罗斯福夫人在和宋美龄交往期间，也见识了她的黑暗一面，当她询问宋美龄如何搞定难对付的工人领袖时，“她没有说话”，罗斯福夫人记录道，“一双美丽、小巧的手轻轻划过自己的喉咙。”
在这一系列历史事件中，尽管宋美龄都是重要的亲历者，但关于她个人的故事常常退为背景。帕库拉的新作则暴露了宋美龄很多无关大局的私密细节。
帕库拉还认为宋美龄在美国期间曾与温德尔威尔基、在1940年的总统选举中输给了罗斯福的共和党候选人，持续了一段暧昧关系。
在曼哈顿的最后岁月
家里有满满一柜子的金条
1948年底，国民政府在国共内战一路失守溃败，蒋介石为了争取美国的再次支持，将宋美龄再次遣派至美国，然而却被当时的美国总统杜鲁门冷冻处理，计划失败。帕库拉认为杜鲁门总统觉得宋美龄爱财，因为他把蒋介石称为“提款机”。同时，帕库拉女士写道：“国民党在表面看上去是非常完美的组织，而唯一的错误就在于腐败的领导层，他们承诺谎言，榨干了老百姓们的血汗钱。”
1975年蒋介石病逝于台北，隔年宋美龄离开台湾，远走美国，在那里度过晚年，2003年去世，享年106岁。宋美龄膝下无子，她的丈夫在婚前就染有性病，帕库拉女士写道，因而他很可能不能生育。
帕库拉详述了宋美龄在瑰喜广场10号的最后岁月。在曼哈顿上东城一所雅致的房子里，她养了3条狗，雇了24个用人。曾有邻居抱怨从她的18个房间的公寓里传出饭菜的异味，另外宋美龄家里有满满一柜子的金条。
帕库拉此前曾为罗马尼亚的玛丽皇后和德国的腓特烈皇后写过传记。在这本新作《最后的女皇》里，帕库拉通过对政治历史的研究，抓取宋美龄生活中的细小点滴，以讲故事的口吻，生动地叙说了宋美龄的一生。
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