Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang

Author:Jung Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

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Donald had come back to escort her there. In the plane, he pointed out Xian to her. Gazing at this square walled city in the embrace of snow-covered mountains, May-ling was overwhelmed with emotions. When they approached the opening of the valley leading to the city, she handed Donald her revolver before disembarking, and made him promise that ‘if troops got out of control and seized me’, he would shoot her ‘without hesitation’.

When Chiang saw his wife walking into his room, it was his turn to be overcome with emotion. ‘You have walked into a tiger’s lair,’ he burst out, in tears. He then told his wife that he had opened the Bible that morning, and he had been drawn to these words: ‘The Lord has created a new thing on the earth: a woman protects a man.’ May-ling thought that these words conveyed a double message: that she was coming, and that ‘All is right.’ May-ling’s words came from a Robert Browning poem: ‘God’s in His heaven – / All’s right with the world’. This gave her great hope and she comforted her husband with her optimism. Seeing that he was ‘lying there injured and helpless, the shadow of his former self’, she felt ‘an uncontrollable wave of resentment against those responsible for his plight’. As he was ‘agitated and upset’, she opened the Bible and read Psalms to him until he calmed down and drifted off to sleep.

The Young Marshal did a deal with May-ling and T.V., who had come to Xian a day before her. The former warlord claimed that he had only seized Chiang on a moment of impulse, ‘we tried to do something which we thought was for the good of the country. But the Generalissimo would not discuss anything with us…I know I have done wrong, and I am not trying to justify myself or this action.’ He tried to flatter May-ling, saying: ‘You know I have always had great faith in you, and my associates all admire you. When they went through the Generalissimo’s papers after he was detained, they found two letters from you to the Generalissimo which caused them to hold you in even greater respect.’ Her words ‘moved us’, he claimed, before producing the clinching argument, ‘especially when you wrote that it was by God’s grace that more mistakes were not made than had been made, and that you felt you should pray more for divine guidance’.

With his safety promised, the Young Marshal was ready to set his prisoner free. There was just one last hurdle to cross. The Communists demanded that Chiang talk to its emissary in Xian, the later famed diplomat Zhou En-lai, who had been in the city for some days. Chiang categorically refused to see Zhou, even though the Young Marshal told him that without the meeting he could not leave. The guards and the troops around had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Reds. For the Generalissimo to see Zhou would be like, in modern-day terms, the US president meeting the representative of a notorious terrorist group.

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