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The U.S. Idiom. From her tenth year through her 19th, the most formative time of her life, Mei-ling Soong lived in the U.S. While one of her older sisters went to Wesleyan College (Macon, Ga.), she stayed with friends in nearby Piedmont, learning the idiom and the point of view. She bought gumdrops at Hunt's general store with the other girls, and went hazel-nutting with them. She was always the one who was teased, but through the teasing she learned American gags. Later the girls went north to a summer school. A history teacher asked Mei-ling to describe Sherman's march through Georgia. "Pardon me," said Meiling, "I am a Southerner, and that subject is very painful to me."
Sun Yat-sen's revolution hit China before Mei-ling hit Wellesley, and her only excitement about it was what she caught from her sister Ching-ling (who later married Dr. Sun). At Wellesley her favorite course was Arthurian Romance. She joined Tau Zeta Epsilon, spoke a languid Southern accent, and was sometimes vivacious, sometimes somber, always neat. Professor Annie K. Tuell, with whom she lived, says: "She kept up an awful thinking about everything." She used to speak eloquently of China's contributions to civilization, and regretted Western neglect of them. But she wrote a friend: "The only thing Oriental about me is my face."
The Chinese Idiom. By the time she went back to Shanghai in 1917, Mei-ling knew the U.S. as few Americans do. But she hardly knew her own country. She found a Chinese teacher and learned to speak, read & write Chinese. Gradually she took on Chinese dress. As a beautiful member of the distinguished Soong family, she cavorted to feasts, rode in jodhpurs. But as a girl with a rigid conscience, she joined the Y.W.C.A. and the Child Labor Commission. She had a horror of untidiness: an English friend describes how she impatiently snatched a dustcloth from a shiftless amah one day and dusted a whole room, exclaiming against dirt.
Dr. Sun died, and the handsome young Chiang Kai-shek assumed at least the military tunic of the great revolutionist. Mei-ling Soong met him. At that time she did not actively concern herself with his politics; she heard how he broke with Moscow and she heard whispers of the way his secret societies killed off the Reds. She found herself being courted and liking it, and before long the soldier had followed Mei-ling's formidable mother to Japan to make her agree to a distasteful match (because he had been divorced and was not a Christian). On Dec. 1, 1927, the pair were married.
Dirty Houses. What followed changed her plenty. She left gay, comfortable, clean Shanghai and went to her husband's headquarters in shoddy Nanking. Chiang was engaged in unifying China, ruthlessly and singlemindedly. He was appeasing Japan, so that he might prepare China against Japan. Madame went with him on his campaigns. Their quarters were what they could find—thatched huts, railroad stations, farmhouses—a series of unclean places. She tidied them and wanted to tidy China. She founded the New Life Movement, dedicated to clean living. (Last week Chungking celebrated the ninth anniversary of the New Life Movement with tightened regulations against smoking, eating and spitting in the streets, against casting orange peels into the gutters.)