In The Marxist and the Methodist, Murray Sayle reviews Jonathan Fenby’s Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost — and shares some amusing tidbits in the process:
Even in his glory days Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, durable president of the Republic of China, had his critics. American liberals derided him as “Cash-my-cheque” in acknowledgment of the monstrous corruption of his in-laws, although not of the abstemious Gimo, as his grandiose rank was usually abbreviated, himself. General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American chief of staff forced on him by President Roosevelt, referred to him as “The Peanut” because of his short stature and shiny bald head, and described him to a journalist as “an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son-of-a-bitch”. No respecter of persons, Vinegar Joe in the privacy of his diary called Chiang’s great rival Mouse Tongue (Patrick Hurley, boozy US ambassador to China, made it Moose Dung) and here lies the reason for the Gimo’s relative eclipse. History worships winners, and the Gimo had the bad luck to come up against Mao Tse-tung (in the old spelling), military/political commander of genius and the cruellest ruler China has ever had, at least since Emperor Chin Shi-Huang-Ti built the Great Wall (“a human life for every stone”), ordered the burning of the books and gave the country its western name.
Here’s an interesting cast of characters — and an interesting way of introducing them:
When China’s Doctor Zhivago is filmed they will provide a rich cast of tragi-comedians. The Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, who kidnapped recruits from the countryside and baptised them with a fire hose. The Dog Meat General, Zhang Zongchang, named after his preferred summer dish, who was described as having “the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger”, a type not uncommon in military history. Zhang was reputed to have a penis as long as a pile of 86 silver dollars and to have given his concubines numbers as he could not remember their names. In Manchuria an illiterate bandit, Zhang Zuolin, promoted himself Marshal and ruled an area as large as France and Germany. When his son Zhang Xueliang took the family rank Zhang became the Old Marshal and his boy the Young Marshal. Others included the Philosopher General and the Model Governor. Flavourful character parts included Dr Sun’s portly, cigar-smoking bodyguard, the London arms dealer Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, Big-Eared Du, boss of the Shanghai underworld, the communist International agents Hendricus Sneevliet and Borodin, otherwise General Vasilii Konstantinovich Blyukher, symbols of Moscow’s catastrophic meddling in Chiang’s China.
More good “dirt”:
But Fenby has dug up new dirt on the Gimo. He already had a wife, and knew Shanghai rather better than he let on. Earlier in the 1920s he had married Cheih-ju (“pure and unblemished”) Chen, known as Jennie, a statuesque middle-class girl 19 years his junior he had courted strenuously since she was 13. A few weeks after the wedding Jennie was diagnosed as having gonorrhoea that her husband admitted having picked up in his days as a fashionable young man-about-Shanghai when he may, says Fenby, have joined Big-Eared Du’s gang. The disease, Jennie recounted in a long-lost autobiography, left them both sterile. Certainly neither she nor Meiling had children; Chiang’s only son, Chiang Ching-kuo, future president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, was born of an even earlier marriage arranged by the Chiang family. The Gimo dumped faithful Jennie and, despite his connections there gave Shanghai a wide berth and fixed his capital at Nanking, 200 miles up the Yangtze River from the raffish City by the Sea.
An amusing language bit:
Had Japan been able to add China’s resources to the Axis I might well be writing this in another language, mit some difficulty.
(That reminds me of the Hollywood screenwriting abbreviation for silence: M.O.S. — mitout sound, a term used by a powerful German-speaking producer in the early days.)
And here’s a factoid I already knew:
Gung Ho, “work together”, was the slogan of a Chinese farmers’ co-op picked up by US Marines.
Gung ho, in English, isn’t so much about teamwork as about a can-do attitude. Merriam-Webster defines it as:
Main Entry: gung ho
Pronunciation: ‘g&[ng]-’hO
Function: adjective
Etymology: Gung ho!, motto (interpreted as meaning “work together”) adopted by certain U.S. marines, from Chinese (Beijing) g?nghé, short for Zh?ngguó G?ngyè Hézuò Shè Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society
Date: 1942
: extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic