The Last Empress Read online

  When Charlie announced he wanted to study medicine before going home to China, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, Bishop Holland N. McTyeire, who was also head of the Southern Methodist Mission in China, vetoed the idea, even though Carr had offered to pay for Charlie’s further education. Claiming that there were “too many” medical missionaries in China already, McTyeire was clearly moved by other factors in rejecting Charlie’s request. A little over a month after the young man’s graduation, McTyeire sent the following letter to Dr. Allen in Shanghai:

  My Dear Doctor Allen:

  We expect to send Soon out to you this fall.… I trust you will put him, at once, to circuit work, walking if not riding. Soon wished to stay a year or two longer to study medicine to be equipped for higher usefulness, etc. And his generous patron, Mr. Julian Carr, was not unwilling to continue helping. But we thought better that the Chinaman that is in him should not all be worked out before he labors among the Chinese. Already he has “felt the easy chair”—and is not averse to the comforts of higher civilization. No fault of his. Let our young man, on whom we have bestowed labor, begin to labor. Throw him into the ranks: no side place. His desire to study medicine was met by the information that we have already as many doctors as the Mission needed, and one more. I have good hope that, with your judicious handling, our Soon may do well. It will greatly encourage similar work here if he does. The destinies of many are bound up in his case…

  Yr. Bro. In Christ,

  H. N. McTyeire

  Meanwhile, Charlie continued to make and sell his hammocks. He also began to preach and hold revival meetings—an experience that improved his English. On May 28, 1885, he graduated from Vanderbilt, and seven months later joined Dr. W. H. Park, a medical missionary, on a transcontinental train bound for San Francisco, where they boarded a steamship for Yokohama and Shanghai. Charlie Soon, who had left China when he was nine and turned twenty the year he sailed back, had never before seen the Chinese mainland when his ship docked in Shanghai in January 1886.

  ON HIS ARRIVAL, Charlie called on Dr. Allen, director of the activities of the six missionaries who composed the Southern Methodist Mission in China. An elitist, Allen had no use for oral evangelism among the Chinese peasants, who were often illiterate. To put it in his own words, Dr. Allen served God and the Methodist Church as missionary to “an empire ruled by an aristocracy of intelligence, to whom the sole appeal is through the printed page.” The insignia on his home in the international section of Shanghai announced that his was an official residence, and except for members of the government, special scholars, and his servants, whom he dressed in immaculate white, no Chinese was ever invited to enter.

  In a letter written just before Charlie’s arrival, Allen had complained to his board about the new missionary and his salary: “He will be here in two days now and I have no information as to how the Board expects to treat him.… The boys and young men in our Anglo-Chinese College are far his superiors in that they are—the advanced ones—both English and Chinese scholars.… And Soon never will become a Chinese scholar, at best will only be a denationalized Chinaman, discontented and unhappy unless he is located and paid far beyond his deserts—and the consequence is I find none of our brotherin willing to take him.”

  The one who was not willing to take him on was Dr. Allen, who immediately packed Charlie off to live with his traveling companion, Dr. Park. He was there only a few weeks before being ordered to move in with an ignorant native preacher in order to learn the local Shanghai dialect. Before being given his first assignment, Charlie asked Dr. Allen if he might go to Hainan to visit his parents, whom he had not seen for ten years. Allen refused, saying he must wait over six months until the Chinese New Year, when the other missionaries would take their vacations. The refusal itself was not unreasonable, but the spirit in which it was delivered wounded Charlie’s ego. Allen was not the only one who looked askance at the young Chinese convert. His countrymen regarded him as a “denationalized Chinaman,” a native who did not speak their dialect and shared none of their customs. There was only one group in the mission that practiced the kind of populist evangelism Charlie had learned in America, and, like Charlie, resented Dr. Allen’s dominion over their lives. The members of this group opened a mission in Japan not long after Charlie’s arrival, but Charlie’s application for a transfer was turned down. Instead, he was sent to a village outside Shanghai, where he was told to preach to a congregation of Chinese who had already been converted to Christianity and to teach their children—twelve unruly little peasant boys with not much interest in learning.

  Among Charlie’s charges was a boy named Hu Shih, who eventually graduated from Cornell University, became one of China’s important philosophers, and served as China’s ambassador to the United States. According to Dr. Hu, the boys in his class took special pleasure in taunting their English teachers. “One day,” Hu recalled, “a short, stocky man, rather ugly, appeared on the teacher’s platform. They immediately began to laugh at him and created such hullabaloo that I thought the teacher would leave the room for shame. Instead, Charles Soon waited for the hubbub to subside, then he opened his books and began to talk.” Although Dr. Hu could no longer remember what Charlie said, he recalled that all the boys had grown quiet, realizing that they had someone who understood them because he had once been one of them. He said that Charlie Soon became the most popular teacher in the school, which, because of him, began to attract more students.

  During the Chinese New Year, Charlie took a steamer to Hainan, arriving at the home of his parents without previous notice. Not too surprisingly, they did not recognize the man whom his father had left as a nine-year-old apprentice in Indonesia. During the family reunion Charlie learned that Dr. Allen had never bothered to forward the letter he had written his father from America.

  Charlie Soon’s second assignment was as a circuit preacher in Kunshan, an old walled city of about 300,000 inhabitants, where he lived in a little house by himself. Although he replaced his Western dress with native clothing, he was still shunned by the locals. One day, on a trip to Shanghai, he ran into New, his old friend from Boston. New thought that Charlie’s lonely life would be helped by a wife. He suggested his eighteen-year-old sister-in-law, Ni Kwei-tseng, as an ideal mate for a Chinese man who had been educated in the West. Not only was she related to New, but she was also related to Wen, because the two friends had married the two older sisters in the Ni family.

  The Nis were descendants of a famous scholar and government minister of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) who had converted to Christianity. Like upper-class Chinese girls, Kwei-tseng’s feet had been bound when she was a toddler. Foot binding, which had existed for a thousand years among the upper classes, was the procedure by which the feet of female children were wrapped tightly in bandages in order to bend the toes into the sole and bring the sole and heel as close together as possible. The resulting tiny (as small as three inches), deformed appendages, termed “golden lilies” or “orchid hooks,” were believed to increase a woman’s attractiveness by forcing her to sway her hips in an erotic way, deter her from running away, and provide particular sexual delights to her husband. Chinese erotica and descriptions of famous courtesans always included detailed descriptions of these deformed feet. But Kwei-tseng had run a high fever each time the bindings were tightened. Deciding that marriage was not so important for their third daughter, the Nis had loosened the bindings and allowed Kwei-tseng’s feet to grow normally into what upper-class Chinese referred to disdainfully as “big feet.”

  Kwei-tseng had also shown signs of high intelligence and curiosity, which encouraged her father to provide her with a tutor, who had taught her Chinese characters and classics from the age of five. At nine, she had been enrolled at a missionary school. From there she had gone on to high school, where she had developed a passion for religion, discovered mathematics, and learned to play the piano. Lacking the looks and graces of the traditional Chinese female, she was regarded as the inevitable sp
inster of the Ni family.

  New and Wen arranged to take Charlie to church, where he could observe Miss Ni singing in the choir. She was small like Charlie, not particularly pretty but lively. Most of the traits that rendered Ni Kwei-tseng unmarriageable in Shanghai society made her attractive to Charlie Soon, but he still had to get the permission of her mother, who took her duties as a descendant of one of China’s fine families very seriously. One of these was making sure that her children’s marriages were arranged by a matchmaker. New offered himself, shuttling between the two parties, extolling their virtues and glossing over their failings. Although he was rather common-looking, Charlie Soon was deemed acceptable, and the two young people were married by a Southern Methodist missionary in the summer of 1887. It was a small wedding, but the reception was attended by important businessmen, military leaders, and people with connections at court. Kwei-tseng brought Charlie not only a substantial dowry but a bridge into a world he had never known. After the wedding, the young couple returned to Kunshan.

  A few months later, Charlie’s friend from Vanderbilt William Burke arrived in China to serve in the Southern Methodist mission. Welcomed enthusiastically—in sharp contrast to Charlie’s grudging reception—Bill was invited to attend the Second Annual Conference of the China Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church South in the city of Soochow, where he was greeted with great warmth by Dr. Allen. There were seven missionaries in all. One was Chinese. Bill met him as he entered the churchyard with Allen. Neither recognized the other until Allen introduced them:

  “Brother Burke, I’d like you to meet Brother Soon, our first native conference member.”

  “Well, sakes alive, Charlie,” Bill responded, grabbing hold of Charlie’s hand and pumping it enthusiastically, “it’s mighty good to see you again! It’s been over two years!”

  “I’m glad to see you too, Bill!” Charlie said. “I didn’t know you with that beard.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you in that Chinese getup of yours either.” Charlie was wearing a long Chinese gown with a black skullcap. “Makes you look considerably older, I think.”

  The conference at Soochow gave the former classmates a chance to catch up on each other’s lives. On the last day, the mission assignments were announced. Charlie was sent back to Kunshan, while Bill, a newcomer who spoke almost no Chinese, was assigned to open a new mission station in Shanghai. This was a particularly sensitive post, as during the previous year, a Presbyterian missionary who had been trying to sell religious tracts there was stoned, and a student mob had set fire to the property of the Catholic mission. The violence was China’s answer to a wave of anti-Chinese barbarism swirling through the western United States, where rampaging gangs of unskilled white workers slashed, scalped, and hung by their pigtails Chinese laborers, whose willingness to work for lesser wages threatened their jobs.* The industrial boom following the American Civil War had brought in millions of immigrants, including Chinese contract laborers, many of whom helped build the transcontinental railroads. They were said to be excellent workers, “because, as a medical book of the era claimed, their poorly developed nervous system made them immune to ordinary pain!” But with the completion of the railways, the American Congress, determining that the country no longer needed Chinese coolies to do its hard work, had passed laws to keep the Chinese out of the United States.

  A few months after his arrival, Burke visited Soon in Kunshan. It was the fourth night of the New Year, the biggest festival of the Chinese calendar. Gongs rang and firecrackers exploded in the narrow, winding streets as they walked to Charlie’s house. Soon informed Burke that this celebration was dedicated to the god of wealth, for whom there would be feasts the next day. Chinese traditionally paid their debts three times a year—on the Dragon Boat Festival, the Harvest Moon Festival, and the New Year, “the great day of reckoning.” If a man was unable to pay his debts that day, he hid himself until the following morning, which was technically a holiday when monetary transactions were forbidden. On that day no one ever used a broom, lest he sweep away his good luck, and no water was ever poured on the ground in case the year’s riches would be poured away with it. Employees invited to dinner by their boss would know they could keep their jobs for the following year. Those who did not receive invitations knew, in the Chinese way of saving face, that they were fired.

  Charlie and his wife lived in the mission parsonage, a two-story row house. “Please enter my humble dwelling,” Charlie said, mocking the typical Chinese greeting and leading Burke across a little court into a room that served the Soons as living and dining room. When Charlie’s wife came in with cups of green tea, Bill was delighted to see that she walked easily like an American, not like a Chinese woman on golden lilies. “I think my mother was really happier than my father to stop binding my feet,” Kwei-tseng told Bill when the subject came up. “She knew as much as anyone how painful it was.” Charlie then told his friend the story of how his mother-in-law had once been forced to flee for her life, hobbling on her tiny feet over a distance of six miles from her home. On the way she had been forced to abandon the family pearls, which had been passed down from an ancestor, the daughter of the commander of the Imperial Forces. The gems, which made up a pearl-encrusted ceremonial coat and headdress, a gift from the emperor, were simply too heavy for her to carry that far.

  Bill was delighted to see that Charlie appeared genuinely in love with his wife but distressed when his friend said that he thought he might “do more for my people if I were free of the mission.” No matter how hard he worked, Charlie Soon was paid only $10.00 a month, the salary of a native preacher. “But please believe me, Bill,” Charlie assured his friend. “If I do happen to leave the mission, it will never mean my giving up of preaching Christ and Him crucified. I will continue to work as much as I can for the mission always.”

  Soon thereafter, Charlie took a part-time job selling Bibles for the American Bible Society, a group that published and subsidized inexpensive editions of the Bible in many languages. Promoted to circuit preacher in the Shanghai district, he continued to work part-time as a salesman. His next appointment—as a “supply” preacher, who filled a vacancy but was not required to devote full time to his ministry—was made “at his own request,” and in 1890, he left the Southern Methodist Mission altogether, explaining to his American friends that “I could not support myself, wife and children, with about fifteen dollars of United States money per month.” What Charlie did not say then but told his family in later years was how humiliated he was by the white missionaries, who required that he stand before them to give his reports on his mission, while they all sat. Treated “more like a servant than a colleague,” he finally quit working for the mission. His daughter Madame Chiang came to agree with him in later years about the racist prejudices of Americans toward Chinese. As she told one of her husband’s American advisers, she had always felt that the subtext of the Americans was “Oh, yes, she is clever, of course, but after all she is only a Chinese.”

  Although he left the mission, Charlie continued his connection with the American Bible Society, which had been publishing Bibles for thirty years in literary “classical” Chinese, translated for the scholarly elite. It was not long before he took his knowledge of printing, gained in the United States, put it together with what he had learned at the Bible Society, and started publishing his own Bibles. Chinese labor was cheap, as were Chinese paper and cardboard bindings. But where Charlie got the capital to invest in presses is not known. One source guesses that he must have asked his old benefactor Julian Carr for backing; another assumes that the money was supplied by various Western missionary groups that needed Bibles for their converts. Wherever it came from, it was speedily repaid. Charlie’s Sino-American Press was a success from the beginning—a fact attributed to its proprietor’s acquired knowledge of Western business methods and inborn sense of baroque, Chinese courtesies.

  To conduct his business, Charlie had calling cards printed, using the last name of So
ong. It was not unusual for Chinese to change their names to reflect a new state of mind or a new life. To go with his advanced social status, Charlie chose the name of a dynasty (Song) that had ruled China from the tenth to the thirteenth century.* He added Western textbooks to his list and soon purchased an old warehouse in the French Concession for his presses. A few years later, he was approached by two brothers named Sun, descendants of one of the richest families in China, who asked him to accompany them to the United States. Charlie, who understood Western commercial practices and spoke English, helped the Suns purchase a flour mill from Allis-Chalmers, incorporate the company in Shanghai and negotiate mill rights. Appointed corporate secretary of Fou Foong Mills, Ltd., Charlie contributed to the success of the company, which grew to be one of the largest in the Orient. For this, he was given shares in Fou Foong and was well compensated for the rest of his life.

  While Charlie was moving up in business circles, Kwei-tseng was producing children. There were six in all, three girls and three boys. The first four—three girls and a boy—were all born before 1900. The eldest, a girl named Ai-ling (Loving Mood), was born in 1888; Charlie gave her the Christian name of Nancy in honor of Mrs. Julian Carr. Following Ai-ling into the nursery two years later was Ching-ling (Happy Mood); her Christian name was Rosamond, in honor of the daughter of Reverend Ricaud. Then in 1894 came the first son, Tse-ven (Hardworking Son), always referred to as T.V. And in 1897, May-ling (Beautiful Mood), the third and last girl, who became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was born; her Christian name, seldom used, was Olive. Two younger brothers, Tse-liang, known as T.L., and Tse-an, known as T.A., were born a few years later.