Visiting the mother of modern China
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Children prepare to sing "I Love My Country" at Soong Ching Ling's former residence. Photo: Hao Ying |
As Children's Day approaches, publicity activities are gearing up at Soong Ching Ling's Former Residence, a monument to the woman who holds the same relationship to the People's Republic of China as Jackie Onasis to modern America, or Mary to the Catholic Church.
The widow of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, Soong broke in the late 1920s with Chiang Kai-shek, who had married her younger sister. She passed the tremendous prestige of Sun's revolutionary cause to the Communists, who have lionized her.
On Sunday, dozens of children dressed in pink from the No. 1 Primary School of Zhanian Street sang songs such as "I Love My Country" in the palatial former prince's residence on the shore of Houhai, where Zhou Enlai installed her in 1963 until her death in 1981.
The children's principal, Zhang Xinhua, told the Global Times, "The performance is aimed at strengthening the student's ideological and moral construction."
Soong spent much of her life supporting women and children's causes. But she had no children herself, an irony, because had she remarried, her prestige and authority would have been diminished: Chinese culture did not approve of widows remarrying.
Her devotion to carrying on her husband's legacy and helping emancipate the women of China required her to live a life of solitude imposed by the very restrictions that Soong, an American-educated Protestant, was fighting against.
Soong was so concerned about maintaining her spotless image that she had a nervous breakdown and was confined to bed for three weeks in 1927 when she learned that the American media had implied she was considering marrying another man, according to American journalist Helen Foster Snow, who knew Soong personally.
Soong's mementos on display at the museum offer a touching look at her life as a young woman. There is a Saks Fifth Ave. cardigan, a gift from her mother before she went to Wesleyan College. A yearbook photo identifies her as "Literary editor of the Wesleyan, 1912-1913." A small pistol her husband fittingly gave her as a wedding gift is displayed near an oil painting depicting the night she barely escaped an assassination attempt on her husband after a long gunfight that killed many of her bodyguards.
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