Pinoy Kasi -- Asia's Iron Women (October 28, 2003)

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28 October 2003

Asia's iron women

The Soong Sisters

TENACIOUS, even in the way she clung on to life. That was what I thought reading about Soong Mei-ling's death last week, at the age of 105.

Mei-ling was the last of the three Soong sisters, who have been the subject of several English and Chinese books, as well as a joint Hong Kong-US film. The interest in the Soong sisters shouldn't be surprising: their colorful lives were in a sense the original long-playing Chino-novela, complete with all the intriguing twists and turns through China's byzantine corridors of power.

The eldest Soong sister, Ai-ling, married into a wealthy banking family and mainly managed her family's huge business ventures. The second sister, Soong Qing-ling (sometimes spelled Ching-ling), was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, who led the Chinese revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911 and became China's first president. Soong Qing-ling's politics were Left-leaning and she remained in China after the communists took over, eventually becoming honorary chairperson of the People's Republic. Not surprisingly, Soong Qing-ling was estranged from her two capitalist sisters.

Soong Mei-ling was the youngest. She married Chiang Kai-shek, who was rabidly anti-communist. Chiang became president of China after Sun Yat-sen and had to deal with a nation thoroughly plundered by Western powers and by local Chinese warlords. His own government was corrupt and he was eventually defeated by the communists in 1949. Chiang fled to Taiwan, where he remained president, a virtual dictator, till his death in 1975.

As Madam Chiang, Soong Mei-ling wielded great influence, advising as well as representing her husband. In 1943 she swept through the United States raising funds for Chiang's army to fight the Japanese. A speech before a joint session of the US Congress, delivered in her Southern-accented English, was a turning point in convincing the members of Congress to extend war aid to China. After the fall of the Chiang government, she directed the Taiwan government's propaganda efforts, lobbying for continuing American support to her husband's government.

If people are intrigued by the Soong sisters, it is because they seemed to exert so much power in such a patriarchal society like China, a country where for a thousand years mothers bound their daughters' feet with cloth to keep them as tiny as three inches, effectively sequestering them to their homes and dependent on their husbands.

The Soong sisters remind us that even in Asia's male-dominated societies, you will find very powerful women in the public domain, so-called "iron ladies," if we are to borrow the description used for Britain's former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. To some extent, this ability to rise up in politics is a function of class -- the Soong sisters came from a well-to-do family that was westernized. Their father was a Methodist minister who lived 15 years in the United States and later sent his daughters back to the United States for college. Soong Mei-ling spoke English with a southern American drawl, acquired in Georgia, and later went to Boston's Wellesley College where she majored in English.

It did help, too, that the Soong sisters married very powerful men. Such marriages have been used to explain how women become powerful political leaders in Asia. All the women who have become presidents or prime ministers in Asia were either wives or daughters of male leaders.

Some, like Corazon Aquino, were swept into power on a sympathy vote after their husbands were assassinated. Others, like our own president and Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri, returned to presidential palaces formerly occupied by their fathers.

Then there were the first ladies. China had Chiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, a third-rate actress who usurped power as Mao turned senile. The Soong sisters were a different breed, aristocratic women who kept low but influential profiles, Soong Qing-ling as Sun Yat Sen's widow, and Soong Mei-ling as Madam Chiang.

Unfortunately, quite often these women's privileged class background prevented them from relating to their own people. Some, like Indonesia's president, were just too distant, sheltered in their own world. Our President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, on the other hand, tries too hard and fails, perceptions of her insincerity coming from her condescending demeanor.

The likes of Madam Chiang had no populist pretensions. She shocked Eleanor Roosevelt during a dinner at the White House when, asked how the Chinese government was going to handle a coal miners' strike, she drew her finger -- probably with a crimson, manicured, long and sharp fingernail -- across her neck.

After all's said and done, it seems our Asian iron women don't do too well as leaders, and I feel this is because they still draw their models of leadership from the male world. Our President's "strong republic" rhetoric, for example, reeks too much of Ferdinand Marcos' despotism and George W. Bush's lust for vengeful wars. She and other women leaders would gain far more respect if they could learn from the more moral and humanist women leaders. I am thinking of at least two Nobel Peace Prize laureates: the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi (herself the daughter of a nationalist politician) and Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer, judge and human rights activist.

No doubt, we will always remember, and remain intrigued by the likes of Madam Chiang, Madam Mao and Imelda Marcos. And we will try, too, not to be too harsh when talking about the daughters of Sukarno and Diosdado Macapagal. But history will ask, too, if these women might not have left a more lasting legacy if they could have transcended gender and class, their husbands and fathers, to each become a leader in her own right.