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By Root 1575 0

in one of China’s most powerful families. Her father, Charlie Soong, was a Shanghai mogul who earned his first fortune printing Bibles for Western missionaries. A former preacher who spent part of his youth in Boston and North Carolina, Soong used his Christian contacts to send his own children to the United States for their education. Meiling Soong first studied in Macon, Georgia, where she learned to speak fluent English with a slight southern drawl, then in 1913 enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in English literature. Upon her return to China, she and her American-educated siblings forged a dynasty within the new Nationalist regime. One sister, Chingling, married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic; another sister, Ailing, wed the wealthy industrialist H. H. Kung; her Harvard-educated brother, T. V. Soong, helped Chiang Kai-shek finance his Northern Expedition to defeat the Chinese warlords, and was awarded the position of minister of finance in Chiang’s government.

After America’s entry into the war, President Roosevelt invited Meiling Soong to visit the United States. In November 1942, she arrived to rally support against Japan’s campaign of aggression. The following spring, she embarked on a one-month cross-country tour, visiting New York, Wellesley, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The tour was a triumph. The articulate Soong attracted tens of thousands of supporters, captivating American audiences with her beauty, charisma, and elegance. The darling of the American media, her image graced every major magazine and newspaper. One of her most ardent fans was Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life. The son of missionaries, Luce was delighted that the first family of China was Christian. He put Chiang Kai-shek and his wife on the cover of Time and called Chiang “the greatest man in the Far East.”

Madame Chiang Kai-shek became the first Chinese woman and second woman ever invited to address a joint session of Congress, and she earned a standing ovation. One congressman was later heard to mutter, “Goddamnit, I never saw anything like it; Madame Chiang had me on the verge of tears.” After her tour, Senator Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) introduced a bill repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act. Enjoying wide support and passed on December 17, 1943, the bill abolished exclusion, provided for an annual quota of 105 Chinese immigrants, and gave Chinese who had entered the country lawfully the right to naturalization. While the quota was extremely low, especially compared to admission rates for many European countries, the Magnuson Act was a landmark in Chinese American history: for the first time in six decades, foreign-born Chinese could become American citizens.

“To men of our generation, World War II was the most important historical event of our times,” journalist Charlie Leong noted. “For the first time, we felt we could make it in American society.” The war, he wrote, took them out of Chinatown ghettos, put them into American uniforms, and sent them overseas, where they became “part of the great patriotic United States war machine out to do battle with the enemy.”

This was a theme heard frequently among Chinese Americans. The war, in which China and the United States had a common enemy, allowed them to contribute simultaneously to the survival of China and to victory for the United States. Some worked for the government as interpreters, code-breakers, and intelligence analysts. One notable example was Colonel Won-Loy Chan, a 1936 Stanford graduate who attended the Military Intelligence Service Language School after Pearl Harbor. As part of the U.S. Army’s G2 intelligence and a member of General Joseph Stillwell’s staff, Chan served in the China-Burma-India theater and later headed the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section (PACMIRS) in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Under his direction, a team of translators, some of them Chinese American, gathered and disseminated captured documents from the Pacific battlefront.

Chinese Americans also went to the front lines. Today,