The Wild East

By Pico Iyer

THE SOONG DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave Harper & Row; 532 pages; $22.50

All unhappy families may be dissimilar, but the Soongs were more dissimilar than others. "Revolutionary," "Concubine," "Speculator," "Dallas Oil Man" and "Shanghai Debutante" are just some of the labels that adhere to the descendants of Charlie Soong, a Chinese stow-away reared by North Carolina Methodists. Of the founding father's six children, four gate-crashed their way into history: Eldest Son T.V. (for Tse-ven) parlayed his career as a financial administrator into a fortune that made him, by some accounts, the richest man in the world; Eldest Daughter Ai-ling came to power behind the scenes by marrying H.H. Kung, a fabulously rich lineal descendant of Confucius; Middle Daughter Ching-ling wed Dr. Sun Yat-sen, godfather of the Chinese Revolution, and eventually became a Vice Chairman of Mao's People's Republic; Youngest Daughter May-ling became Mme. Chiang Kaishek, First Lady of the Republic of China.

It is the contention of Sterling Seagrave's compelling new book that the Soongs were, pre-eminently, a family in the Mario Puzo sense. Invoking the Borgias, the author portrays the clan as a gang of thieves most at home in the Wild East, a hugger-mugger underworld where dishes were routinely poisoned, enemies buried alive and coffins left on doorsteps. The Soong Dynasty is a guided (and sometimes misguided) tour through this blood-soaked landscape. En route, a rush of striking images flash past: the uprooted Charlie living off the kindness of Southern strangers and being fed, on antebellum verandas, heavy doses of the Bible and the idea of America as the Promised Land; his return to the revolutionary cells of Shanghai, where his daughters drifted into circles crowded with apprentice brigands; Chiang's internecine battles with the Communists, followed by his perilous rule under the sway of swindlers and drug peddlers like "Big-Eared Tu" and "Pock-marked Huang"; and, finally, the tragic consequences of a war during which the Soongs sometimes regarded China as their private property.

If The Soong Dynasty is a raffish account of how the East was conquered, it is no less a tale of how the West was won. The Soongs, Seagrave contends, knew exactly how to beguile America, one day with images of the mysterious East, the next with snapshots of God-fearing, Westernized democrats battling the Red Menace. While Harvard-educated T.V. wheedled millions out of his poker buddies in Washington, Wellesley Graduate May-ling wooed Congress with her slit skirt and florid rhetoric. In the process, the Soongs also hypnotized such powerful cheerleaders as Henry Luce and Columnist Joseph Alsop, who saw in them the lineaments of a progressive new China, ready to enter the American Century.

Drawing upon sources as diverse as long-classified FBI records arid the Wellesley Magazine, Seagrave, a journalist who grew up on the China-Burma border, feverishly ransacks the past. He resurrects old Shanghai and recollects, in passing, such spicy background scenes as the sailors' prison in San Francisco, a "bin full of murderers, cutthroats, sodomists, and mutineers dredged from the leaky hulls that jammed the docks." He also does some riffs on Chinese secret societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce used the drug as the official standard of exchange. To his appetite for low company Seagrave adds an urbane taste for incongruity, a penchant for Edwardian epigrams ("There is a time for fools to come forth, when only bandits can be kings") and a gift for painterly description: Taiwan is a realm of "cliff-lined seascapes and misty peaks that unrolled each dawn from the scroll of night."

But all the while, Seagrave is zestfully constructing an arresting case against his subjects. If the Soongs seemed larger than life, he argues, it was because they shrouded themselves in self-created legends. In fact, he insists, the family treated national funds as play dough, milking the opium market, pocketing American loans and hatching so many wartime scams that within five months of being installed at a rate of four to $1, the gold yuan had plunged to a rate of 1 million to $1. He further repeats the familiar charge that in 1934 the Generalissimo, hell-bent on settling scores with the Chinese Communists instead of fighting the Japanese enemy, followed the advice of a Nazi strategist, creating a scorched-earth policy and a famine that left a million Chinese dead.

Often, however, Seagrave's thesis tyrannizes his judgment, and his narrative tapestry reveals too insistent a design. Chiang's anti-Communist policy was in large part an act of self-defense. Had Mao's forces won in the '30s, Chiang and his colleagues would surely have been executed. Estimates of those killed in the famine vary widely, Seagrave acknowledges, but Chiang's pro-Communist antagonist Edgar Snow places it at a million, so a million it is. Seagrave's enemies' enemies are invariably his friends: thus Ching-ling, the family's black sheep, is portrayed as a "transcendent beauty" and the Red Army is found worthy of "authentic heroism." By contrast, "Chiang at his best was pathologically devious."

Below all, Seagrave's bright irreverence in portraying Sun Yat-sen as a character from opera bouffe and Chiang as an "ill-tempered bravo" almost contradicts the charges of Machiavellian villainy he wishes to press. The Soong Dynasty brings much pungent material to light; in the end, however, it works less well as an argument with history than as a crackling, made-for-TV story unraveled with fluency and flair. --By Pico Iyer