24 October 2003

The Dragon Lady

The Dragon Lady was seventy-eight when Concorde first flew a commercial route in January of 1976. The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Chek, the Dragon Lady's husband, was in his grave just a year. He passed in 1975 and work on his garish blue and white mausoleum was nearly complete in downtown Taipei. When I first saw it, walking down the broad heroic steps of the National Hotel, I thought it looked a bit like part of a ceramic tea set, a gigantic sugar bowl with a blue lid. Today the Dragon Lady joins the Concorde on a last flight.

I'm sure the Dragon Lady was up on the story of the maiden flight across the pond, and I like to think that she flew on the Concorde. She liked the fly-boys, and Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers were largely her creation. To the end of her life she read the Bible and the New York Times religiously.

The Supersonic Transport will make its last flight out of New York's JFK this morning. It will head east on the three and a half hour flight into Heathrow. It will be joined by two other of its sister planes and then they will land and it will be over. And I don't know where the Dragon Lady is headed, the earthly remains of Soong Mei-ling, darling of the Kuomantang Party, the Nationalists of Doctor Sun Yat Sen. I imagine she will join the Generalissimo in the big sugar bowl in Taiwan. It would be just as appropriate to plant her on the estate on Long Island that the family bought with the money her husband looted from American Foreign Aide. It was a lot of money. Truman once grumbled that the Nationalists had stolen $750 million from the largesse we provided to fight the Long March of Mao Tse-tung.

That is three quarters of a billion real dollars. The things we spend today may come in colored ink but they are pale shadows of the real greenbacks. The Dragon Lady spent from the hoard to the end of her days, a squadron of body-guards clearing the lobby of her Co-Op building in Manhattan whenever she came or went.

The last round-trip ticket for Concorde they sold went for just over $12,000 dollars. A little steep for most of us, and you couldn't get enough frequent-flier miles to do it with any regularity. The people who flew on it were special. In his fifteen minutes of fame, club lizard Boy George used to be a regular. My Dad flew it once, going to the airshow in Paris in the mid-eighties. He and my Uncle Jim had to do it, sit in the little tube and watch the mach-meter on the front bulkhead quiver and then register the numeral "1" to show that they had broken the speed of sound. I have the program from the flight, and Dad had the Astronaut Buzz Aldren, second man on the moon, sign it for me. That is the sort of people you met on the Concorde. People of the future.

That must bug Buzz to this day, that Neil got to climb down first and got the quote and the ink. They arrived at the same time, after all.

The party's efforts to modernize China and bring progress and democracy were delayed by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and eventually the struggle against the Japanese and the Communists made the struggle to remain in power the end in itself.

Her appearance before Congress during the War was striking. She wore a dark tight sheath dress of traditional close cut and her English, tinged with the hint of a southern accent, brought down the house. When she had completed her education in Macon, Georgia, and at Wellesley and returned to Shanghai, they said her English was better than her Chinese. She looked as pretty and exotic as a character out of Terry and the Pirates, which remains for me the greatest action comic ever inked..

"One loved money, one loved power, one loved China," goes the Chinese ditty about the three daughters of Charlie Soong. The song refers to Ai-ling (directed the family finances with her husband H.H.Kung, scion of the great banking family), Mei-ling (and the Generalissimo) and Qing-ling.

Qing-ling married Dr. Sun Yat Sen when the George Washington of modern China was fifty. He had been ejected from power as effectively as when he had toppled the Last Emperor in 1911. He moved to a modest house near the Foreign Quarter in Shanghai, and I tried to find it when I was in Shanghai a couple years ago. Shanghai is everything you can imagine, a lovely concubine of a city who was taken by Mao but whose nature could not be changed by him. Today the old colonial quarter has been preserved. Walking through the old French quarter I saw the similarity of the French empire style buildings to Hamnoi, and had one of those epiphanies. It was all French, not Asian. It wasn't Hanoi or Shanghai, it was metoroploitan France left behind. Very disorienting.

The buildings along the revierfront Bund still have British Lions and towering white Athenian pillars. But across the river rise the science fiction towers of the future of China, dwarfing the works of the Imperialists whose boots held China down.

If things had gone a little differently, if the Empire of the Sun had not invaded and put everything off course, it is possible that the British and the French would still be there and the Concorde would have hurtled arrow-like through the skies. Hong Kong would never have become what it is today, since it was only the money and talent fleeing from Shanghai that made it great. But it didn't. This is how it played out.

The Generalissimo put down a demonstration in Shaghai in 1927 and on his orders perhaps 5,000 fellow Nationalists were murdered. That was the rupture between Qing-ling and her sister the Dragon Lady. Qing-ling held onto the mantle of Sun Yat Sen and stayed behind when the money and the Imperial Museum and the remains of the Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan in 1949. The Nationalist Tenth Kuomantang Army crossed over into Northern Burma, where its descendents remain today, trading opium poppies. They have stopped saying they will return soon. On her ninetieth birthday she was named the ceremonial Chairman of the People's Republic.

The museum the Generalissimo took with him into exile is stunning. The collection is housed in a bomb-proof series of vaults tunneled into the mountains outside the Taipei. It is a pretty good cab ride to get there, and the tunneling was extensive enough only to safeguard all the works, not display it. They rotate the stock in the public rooms, since there is only enough room to show about a third of it at any given time. The People's Republic would like to get it back, of course, and that is one of the sticky little issues about One China. The Nationalists continued to elect delegates to their Taiwanese legislature from districts long captured by the Communists well into my manhood, the doddering old men still gesturing that they would return to the Mainland someday soon.

You could say it was the beauty of the Dragon Lady (and her accent) that solidified American support behind the Nationalist Government on the Island. We were ready to go to war over the little islands of Queomoy and Matsu, and if you look where they are, it is incredible that the Nationalists held on to them. We were as firmly committed to The Republic of China as we are committed to our other controversial ally in the Middle East. For a long time the two states were linked with a third Pariah, Apartied South Africa. The three outlaw states did business in selling off the American technology that they derived from the military hardware we sold them to keep them safe. But they lived in rough neighborhoods, and they shared a scrappy independent streak and a special relationship with America. South Africa did the right thing, in the end, and Taiwan has mellowed a bit. I don't know what will happen to the third.

The links on Taiwan still remain, like the Officer's Club of the U.S. Navy base that we closed when Dick Nixon recognized the People's Republic as the one legitimate government of China. We changed the name of our Embassy in Taiwan to sound like a commercial enterprise, The American Institute on Taiwan. It had a military post office in when I last visited, and the China Fleet Club was still in business. But time changes all things. I think the Romans said that. Or someone says they did.

And so today the Concorde booms its way across the Atlantic one last time, and the Dragon Lady who charmed the old men of seventy years ago returns to dust.

The dust of One China.