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Alling (literally: "Friendly Life") Soong had married Dr. H. H. Kung, longtime Minister of Finance. In China Mme. Kung was known for her wealth. She was grave, efficient, strongwilled. Ching-ling ("Happy Life") was the idealist, the incarnation of the spirit of her late husband, Sun Yatsen. She was in ways the most beautiful, but she was incredibly shy. Mei-Ling ("Beautiful Life") was certainly the personality of the three. At the end of their Hong Kong reunion, all three went to Chungking and much was made of the United Soong Front.
Trips to the Future. China was encircled first by disasters and then by the Japanese. In an effort to salvage all they could from the political turmoil that went with military setbacks, the Generalissimo and Madame flew to India. There they talked with Gandhi and Nehru and they urged the Indians not to let their fight against what they considered one evil invite the way to another.
Last summer Madame took another trip, of which the details and the importance have not yet filtered through China's strict censorship. It was to China's great northwest, where she apparently worked hard to restore Chinese influence in areas which for some time had been gravitating toward Russia.
Memories of the Past. All these things were in her mind as she lay sick last .month, her will sapped by nervous exhaustion, in the Harkness Pavilion of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. China and all these struggles weighed on her mind. But gradually she drew strength from a hope—that she would be able to give the U.S. something it had lacked, a clear look into the eyes and at the face of China.
She arranged to make speeches, not only to the Government, but around the land. She knew that what she said might not have great effect on strategies already determined. But it could have—and in her first appearance it certainly did have —more effect than anything which has yet happened, in giving one great people the kind of understanding of another great people that is the first need of a shrinking, hopeful world.