Powerful Soong sisters witnessed China’s wild century
Acclaimed Wild Swans author and historian Jung Chang will be in New Zealand as part of a two-day speaking tour next week. Lee Kenny spoke to the writer about her latest biography – Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister.
It was not Jung Chang’s intention to write about the Soong sisters. The Chineseborn author wanted to produce a biography of Sun Yat-sen, known as the Father of Modern China for his role in overthrowing the last imperial dynasty in 1912.
Chang, herself born in China in 1952 but now living in Britain, describes him as one of the country’s most influential figures but she changed her mind when she learned more about his wife, Ching-ling.
‘‘Sun Yat-sen was very important. I had wanted to write about him but after I had done a lot of research, I thought that as a personality he was too similar to Mao [Zedong]. Both of them were single-minded in pursuing their political ambitions,’’ she says.
‘‘During the research I discovered that actually I was more drawn to his widow and her sisters.’’ Chang says that although she knew about the Soong siblings she had resisted writing about them as they were ‘‘modern China’s fairytale princesses’’.
‘‘I did not find this fairytale image interesting,’’ she says.
‘‘During the research I discovered their personalities and that is why I developed an interest in them, because before they were cliche´ s, they were fairytale stories.’’
Her book – Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister – tells the story of siblings Ei-Ling, Ching-Ling and May-Ling. They were born in Shanghai in the late 1800s and would go on to witness some of the most dramatic events in China during the 20th century.
Ei-ling became one of the wealthiest women in China; Ching-ling rose to be Chairman Mao’s vice-chair; and May-ling married Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China, and later became a politician in her own right.
The book is the culmination of years of research, with Chang scouring documents held in China, Taiwan and the United States.
‘‘A lot of the research had been done writing my previous books because their lives overlap with the lives of Mao and Empress Dowager Cixi whose biographies I wrote,’’ she says.
‘‘The sisters’ copious correspondence has been published in past years, that was also a main source. And of course I interviewed various members of the family and staff.’’
The three siblings were educated in America and Chang was also able to access archive material about them from the colleges they attended in Georgia and Massachusetts, as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries at the Hoover Institute in California.
Chang said that although details of the sisters’ lives are well known %
‘‘I feel I have now written a trilogy of the main personalities and history of modern China.’’
Jung Chang