This is a biography of Soong Ching Ling (Mme. Sun Yatsen). Widow of the historic revo-lutionary who led in the overthrow of the mil-lennial monarchy in 1911, she was much more.Surviving him through 56 years of perils and triumphs, associated closely with major events and personalities domestic and foreign, she died in 1981 as Honorary President of the People's Republic of China. Truly a great woman of our century. To learn about her is to learn about the times which produced her.
The aim of this first extensive biography of Soong Ching Ling in English, writes the author,"is to have the reader meet the subject. Wher-ever possible, the story is told in her own words,drawn from all available written material, in-cluding hundreds of personal letters, the testi-mony of participants and eyewitnesses and my own recollections over four decades."
Brought up in wealth, Soong Ching Ling joined the ranks of the plain and the poor. A patriotic Chinese, she was also bi-cultural, and the English-language reader can experience di-rectly, not through translation, the ringing con- viction of her public writings and the warmth and wit of her personal correspondence.
Her combination of deep commitment and unusual personal qualities prompted Zhou Enlai to call her "gem of China" and Mao Zedong to describe her as "a phoenix flown out of the Soong family nest." Other tributes came from many quarters, from her fellow students in her U.S. college days to her later acquaintances and associates in various causes -- Jawaharlal Neh-ru of lndia, novelist Romain Rolland of France, and many others -- including noted journalists like Edgar Snow and political-military figures like the U.S. General "Vinegar" Joe StilwelL Her friends were legion.
Soong Ching Ling can be said to be an epitome of a modern Chinese, relevant not only to her time but to this generation and perhaps some to come. Since China is a quarter of mankind, this is important to everyone.
Israel Epstein, born in 1915 in Poland, was brought up in China and there began his jour-nalistic work, publishing also in the United States and other countries. His first association with Soong Ching Ling was in 1938-45 in the wartime China Defense League in Hong Kong and Chongqing (Chungking). In 1951 she invit-ed him and his wife, the late Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley (1905-84), to return from the Unit-ed States, where they then lived, to help set up the magazine she founded in Beijing, "China Reconstructs" (now "China Today") of which, at Soong Ching Ling's death in 1981, Epstein was editor-in-chief, having, in the meantime, be-come a citizen of the People's Republic.
From the late 1970s, she had asked him several times to write her biography after she died. Following retirement from the magazine, he spent several years in researching and writ- ing this book which appeared on the centenary of Soong Ching Ling's birth.
Previous books by Epstein include The Peo-ple's War in China, London, Victor Gollancz,1939; The UnflnLshed Revolution in China, Bos-ton, Little Brown, 1947; From Opium War to Liberation, Beijing, New World Press, 1956 with subsequent editions in 1964 and 1980 in Bei- jing and Hong Kong (by Joint Publishing Co.);and Tibet Transformed, Beijing, New World Press, 1983.
Concerning Soong Ching Ling, he has pub-lished a number of articles and lectured at symposia in the United States and Japan.
