In the research for this essay, I happened across an article about three famous women from China, the Soong sisters, Eling, Chingling and Mayling.  It seems that these women became powerful by the very virtues that they stood for.  For example Eling (also spelled Ai-ling) married H.H. Kung a financier, and Chingling married the first president of China, Sun Yat-sen, and Mayling married a member of the Nationalist Government, Chiang Kai-shek.

It seems that the women were destined to fame from the day their father and mother met.  Their father was “Charles Jones Soong, one of the first Chinese to become a Southern Methodist missionary in China” (Rule, 2008).  Their mother was none other than Ni Guizhan, a direct descendent of Xu Guangqi, the prime minster of the Ming dynasty, who later converted to Catholicism.  The devote Christian and political influences, would later prove to bring together the China that Americans wished it would be.

Author Laura Tyson Li would point out in her novel, the issue that Eling loved power. Eling was well noted to be the beautiful Methodist minister’s daughter.  While Mayling is the one that loved power and that she was the world’s most desirable woman and yet never consummated her marriage dying with her virginity intact.  The third sister Chingling was the sister that loved her country with a clear cut passion and married “Sun Yat-sen, founding father and first president of the Republic of China”(100-year-old, 1999).

At the time of this article in 1999, Madame Chiang Kai-shek the former first lady of China remains in good health both of mind and body at 100 years old and living in New York.

“Soong is the youngest and the only surviving of the three famous Soong sisters, daughters of a self-made tycoon from China’s Zhejiang Province” (100-year-old, 1999).  Soong sister Ai-ling helped play a crucial role in enlisting the help of America to join in with China in the war against Japan.

The Soong sisters may have loved power, money, and country but in the end gained the respect of two nations, United States and China.  It will be a sad day with the death of Madame Chiang Kai-shek it will also bring to close the legacy that these three women brought together, in religion, in a country, and in their presence.